It's All About the Bike by Robert Penn

Author:Robert Penn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2010-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Tullio Campagnolo manufactured parts in a workshop behind his father’s hardware store, before registering the company and inaugurating production of the quick release in 1933. In the same year, he patented a prototype derailleur mechanism, using a sliding hub and rods attached to the seat stays. This was slowly modified and improved over the course of more than a decade until, in 1948, Gino Bartali used the Cambio Corsa (‘race changer’) derailleur in the mountain stages, en route to victory in the Tour de France. In 1950, a parallelogram derailleur with an extended jockey cage — something we’d recognize today — was revealed at the Milan bicycle show. It was as complex a piece of componentry as the bicycle had ever seen, but it meant that no-fuss gear shifting was suddenly a reality. Everyone wanted one. Only pro racers and amateurs with deep pockets could afford them.

In the early 1950s, the bond between Campagnolo and the elite of road racing was sealed with a string of victories for riders using Tullio’s components: Hugo Koblet in the 1951 Tour de France; Fausto Coppi in the 1950 Paris—Roubaix, the 1952 Giro d’Italia and Tour de France double, as well as in the 1953 World Road Race championships. Both riders were using Gran Sport derailleurs.

Campagnolo, now employing over 100 people, began to reappraise and manufacture pedals, seat posts, cotterless cranksets, aluminium hubs and chainwheels. Business boomed. By the 1960s, the company diversified into motorcycle hydraulic and cable disc brake components, magnesium wheel rims for super-cars like Maserati, and even aerospace parts, including the chassis for a NASA satellite launched in 1969.

A staggering amount of research and development in close association with professional riders ensured that all the ideas to improve the bicycle introduced by Tullio reached a point of unrivalled reliability, before the product was sold on the market.

Tullio Campagnolo died in 1983. Plaudits and awards — the Stella d’Oro by the Italian Olympic Committee, the Cavaliere del Lavoro, Italy’s highest business honour — had been heaped on him by then. In a lifetime of inquiry, he re-appraised many aspects of the bicycle, established the most coveted name in the components industry, and helped claim ownership of the racing bicycle for his country. Eddy Merckx gave a eulogy at the funeral: ‘I tell it to you in bad Italian, maybe, but with an Italian heart because, thanks to you, there is a piece of Italy with your name on all the bicycles of the world.’

Until recently, the history of the bicycle was murky. Only following the rigorous academic work of a small collective called the International Cycling History Conference has it become clearer. Prior to the late twentieth century, the true technological progress of the machine, together with the hands and minds involved, was muddied by the proprietary claims of several industrial nations. Such jingoism was at its worst before World War I. Germany claimed Baron von Drais’s 1817 ‘running machine’ was the first bicycle, though it was really only a prototype. The French avowed that de Sivrac had invented the bicycle in 1791, but it was a non-steerable machine.

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