Bike

“ Bike parties that make explorations lasting for days, or even for weeks, are now not unusual, and if they travel prepared to make camp wherever night overtakes them, the more healthful the sport and the more novel and independent the tour. You should know how to carry the necessary baggage on your wheel. It is customary in ordinary wheeling to strip a machine of every ounce of weight not necessary. Many riders travel without even a tool bag, pump or wrench. The additional weight of a few tools cannot be sufficient to make much difference to a rider. ”

“ In the present type the driving axle is a third, independent of the wheels, and the wheel hubs are either turned from the solid steel bar or drop-forged from steel, or formed from steel tube, the “bike metal” casting being kept very quiet in this as in other portions, or else reserved for the people who suggest that the cheapest way to procure a bicycle is to buy ready made parts and “build” one’s own. ”

“ Honesty must be a relative thing. Personally I will "swick" a railway company by travelling without a ticket on any possible occasion; yet, when a cycle agent puts a new nut on my motor-bike and charges a shilling I call him a vulgar thief. Of course he is; there is no romance in making a broken-down motor-cyclist pay through the nose, but a ten mile journey without a ticket is the only romantic experience left in a drab world. ”

“ As time ran its appointed course we got a bit used to the bikes, and, finding that you cannot ride all day and all night, we began to look at the books. Only one of them comes into this story. It was called 'The Youth's Manual of Scientific and Mechanical Recreation,' and, of course, we none of us read it till we'd read everything else, and then we found it wasn't half bad. ”

“ Boys on bicycles become extremely careless and fool-hardy. They cut in front of rapidly moving cars and weave from one side of the roadway to the other. They dart in from behind a parked car or from a side street. When moving not straight along the wheels are always likely to slip on wet spots in the pavement or catch in the flangeway of the street-car tracks.
The bicycle is in itself a very useful machine and, perhaps, the most economical vehicle built. ”

“ Look! If some one hasn’t been up here on a bicycle I miss my guess!”
“A bicycle!” exclaimed Bob. “Do you mean to say that the robbers rode a bicycle up here?”
“There are the marks of the rubber tires plain enough,” replied Jerry, pointing to them.
“That’s no bicycle track!” declared Ned.
“Why not?” the tall lad wanted to know.
“Or, if it is, the fellow rode on one wheel, or else is more expert than anyone I ever saw. See, there’s only one straight mark, and the best rider in the world turns his front wheel every now and then, making a separate track from the rear one. That’s no bicycle mark.” ”

“ For a young man or party of young men who are traveling through Britain on a summer's vacation, the bicycle affords an excellent and expeditious method of getting over the country, and offers nearly all the advantages of the motor car, provided the rider is vigorous and expert enough to do the wheeling without fatigue. The motor cycle is still better from this point of view, and many thousands of them are in use on English roads, while cyclists may be counted by the tens of thousands. ”

“ A succession of improvements followed, including pneumatic tires, free wheels, two-speed and three-speed gears, the adaptation of the bicycle to the use of ladies, and the supplementing of the bicycle by tricycles, sociables, tandems and the motor-cycle.
Cycles have been well defined as "the poor man's carriage"; but they are to-day favoured by every class of the community. Thanks, more especially, to the numerous local cycling clubs and the great touring clubs, of which the latter count their members by tens of thousands, cycles have materially developed the taste for travel ”

“ Those who were in the city and could go saw many wheels and many queer inventions in seats, pedals, frame, tires, and all the other parts of the machine. Each bicycle-maker had his own little compartment, with samples of his bicycles, and a big sign with his name in electric lights upon it for the evening. Even if you knew nothing at all about a wheel you were intensely interested in all you saw, and the more intimately you knew bicycles the greater was your interest. ”

“ Whether the cyclist elects to provide the motive force by his own efforts or prefers to call in the aid of the internal combustion engine is a question of personal choice. The pedal bicycle, as it is termed, provides exercise with recreation, and the motor is therefore scorned by some athletic enthusiasts. The dependability and speed of the motor cycle are, however, now an established fact, and the advantages of the mechanical propulsion cannot be overlooked where time is a factor. ”

“ The objections to the high bicycle were many, and among its chief drawbacks were that owing to the disparity in wheel diameters and the small weight of the backbone and trailing wheel, also to the rider’s position practically over the centre of the wheel, if the large front wheel hit a brick or large stone on the road, and the rider was unprepared, the sudden check to the wheel usually threw him over the handlebar. ”

“ The boy who cannot own a motorcycle but who has a bicycle, may remodel it to resemble a power-driven machine by fitting it up with equipment, much of which can be made in the home workshop. The illustration shows how an ordinary bicycle was improved by several practical fittings. The lower end of the mudguard of the rear wheel was extended to form a clip, for the homemade stand A. Brackets were made of strap iron to support the bundle carrier B, the basket of which was made of wood. The tank C, 3 by 3 by 21 in., with two compartments and doors, contains batteries and tools. ”

“ The bicycle, in the hands of a novice, is as alert and acute as a spirit-level in the detecting the delicate and vanishing shades of difference in these matters. It notices a rise where your untrained eye would not observe that one existed; it notices any decline which water will run down. I was toiling up a slight rise, but was not aware of it. It made me tug and pant and perspire; and still, labor as I might, the machine came almost to a standstill every little while. ”

“ We have now arrived at the stage when a high bicycle was regarded as dangerous, and, if the front wheel were too small, it detracted from the rider’s speed owing to the shorter distance covered by each turn of the wheel. What was the next move? The engineer’s mind turned towards a method of gearing by cogs or chains, by which one turn of the crank axle would cause the driven wheel to turn more than once. That is where we get our method of describing the ratio of gearing between the crank and the wheel of a modern safety bicycle. ”

“ The true definition of the bicycle is a two-wheeled vehicle, with one wheel in front and the other in the rear, and both in the same vertical plane. Its life principle is the physical law that a rotating body tends to preserve its plane of rotation, and so it stands up, when it moves, on the same principle that a top does when it spins or a child’s hoop remains erect when it rolls. ”

“ His legs move only in the tread of the wheel, and his hands rest quietly on the ends of the cross-bar of his machine. The rope-walker keeps every muscle tense, and every limb in motion or ready to move. No wonder, when a tourist on his bicycle spins for the first time through a village here, or among the nomads of Asia, he is followed by a gaping crowd, till his machine carries him out of their sight. ”

“ A bicycle is some bother in traveling on the cars, for where they run such long trains as they do on all these trans-continental lines, and consequently have so much baggage to load, the machine is the last piece to be taken aboard, and as it is always at owner’s risk I often have to hand it up as the train is starting, and then jump on myself, rather than leave it to be left, perhaps. ”

“ This is a proper place to explain gear ratio or “gear,” which is a phrase not generally well understood, although in constant use; for instance, women have been known to ask dealers for a wheel with low gear, because they liked to be seated near the ground. The term gear, which is an adaptation from the old high wheel, expresses the ratio of forward travel of the bicycle for each pedal revolution, and yet this has nothing to do with either the height of the rider or the length of his leg, or the length of the crank. ”

“ On the other hand, the pedal bicycle is a restful and noiseless form of locomotion for those who do not care for the hurry and bustle of a motor cycle ride, and cycling, when undertaken in accordance with ones powers, is probably the most health giving form of recreation for the mind and body. ”

“ The reason why a small bicycle has, in general, more tendency to slip sideways than one in which the rider is seated high up is, that if the wheel slips off a stone or down the side of a rut, the distance sideways to which the wheel will slip is independent of the size of the wheel, and depends on the size of the stone or rut, the state of the road, the speed the machine is going at, etc. ”

“ For this reason the machine was regarded as dangerous, and however enthusiastic one may have been about the ordinary—and I was an enthusiastic rider of it once—there is no denying that it was only possible for comparatively young and athletic men, and if it had remained the only bicycle obtainable, the pastime and the utility of cycling would never have reached its present state of popularity. ”

“ The beginning of the 20th century saw the introduction of two innovations: one was the “free-wheel,” a device which allows the driving wheel to rotate independently of the chain and pedals, so that the rider, controlling his speed with powerful brakes, can “coast” down a hill using the stationary pedals as foot-rests; and the other was the motor-cycle, in which a petrol-engine relieves him, except at starting, from all personal exertion, though at the cost of considerable vibration. ”

“ To those who can realise, by actual possession, the pleasures of the motor-car, this chapter will be of little interest. But there are many aspiring motorists to whom the original cost of a car, or its maintenance when purchased, is a barrier to ownership. Hence the favour with which motor cycles are regarded, and the growing importance they are attaining in the automobile movement. The familiar forms are the tricycle, quadricycle, and the bicycle, the latter having rapidly come to the front, to the apparent supersession of the more cumbersome type of motor cycle. ”

“ Only by working to the finest limits employed in any branch of mechanical engineering is it possible to produce an intricate piece of mechanism contained in the space of a large sized bicycle hub. The plant, installed originally by the Raleigh Cycle Co., cost thousands of pounds, and cyclists certainly owe this firm a debt of gratitude for making it possible to buy such a beautifully made gear at a moderate price. ”

“ Bicycles can not be used to advantage on rough, hilly streets. To dismount, you wait until the left pedal is down; then imagine it a stirrup, throw the right leg backward over the backbone of the bicycle, and dismount exactly as you would from the back of a horse.
E. A. Hoare.—A good bicycle, such as you want, will cost about $25, to which you must add $1 for a crate and the express charges on a fifty-pound package from New York to your place of residence. ”

“ The safety bicycle, with pneumatic tires, rendered cycling universally popular, not merely as a pastime but as a convenient means of locomotion for everyday use. Made with a drop-frame, it also enabled women to cycle without being confined to a heavy tricycle or compelled to assume “rational dress.” In consequence there was an enormous expansion in the cycle industry. In England the demand for machines had become so great by 1895 that the makers were unable to cope with it. ”

“ Nowadays one need not be astonished at anything. Take cycling, for instance. Long ago, when velocipedes—three or four-wheeled, uncanny machines—were mere toys wherewith youths loved to dislocate their joints on the lower terraces of the Crystal Palace, no one dreamt that bicycles, outraging all the laws of gravitation and practically mono-wheeled, would ere long be used on road and field and moor, on mountain-side, on steppe and desert, over barren Asiatic tundras and snow-clad{32} Yukon plains—in short, wherever adventurous mankind has penetrated. ”

“ At the moment of entering each of these recurring spaces one may discern the fast uprising and darkening blue of distant mountains—and again the obscuring scrub envelopes bicycle and rider.
After the stories he will have been told, the cyclist, should he be a stranger and alone, will surely throw a glance to one side and to the other—ahead, too, as he turns each of the numerous sharp angles—in half-timid and half-hopeful expectation of seeing start out or up to intercept him a score or two of spear-brandishing and yelling bogie men. ”

“ This bicycle, however, as you can see in the accompanying illustration, is old style, for the cranks act on the front instead of the rear wheel. In fact the whole machine is like the tall bicycle first used in this country. ”

“ Leaving the bicycle outside in the snow, I clamber over the humpy forms of kneeling camels, through an intricate maze of mules and over barricades of miscellaneous merchandise, and, making a virtue of dire necessity, invade the menzil of a well-to-do looking traveller. ”