The Splendid Book of the Bicycle by Daniel Tatarsky

Author:Daniel Tatarsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781911042631
Publisher: Pavilion Books
Published: 2016-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

Thousands of Raleigh bicycles lined up and ready to go in the 1980s.

It is a sad thing that so many inventions and innovations come as a result of war, but we cannot ignore the impact of the Great War. One company in particular in the U.K. that made great strides in the war years was the Birmingham Small Arms Company. Up until 1908 BSA, as they were commonly referred to, had only produced bicycle parts, but from this year they went into the production of finished bicycles. They quickly became a big supplier of cycles to the police and the army and during the war they introduced a bike that could be folded and carried on a soldier’s back (see here). In fact most armies had at least one bicycle infantry. Obviously, given their name, they also supplied arms to the army including probably its most famous weapon, the Lewis Gun.

With the economic strictures imposed by the conflict, the war also led to a further boost in cycling at home because it was still such a cheap form of transport. This growth continued when peace returned and with a new-found workforce, the women who had been forced into factories, output was continually increasing. Raleigh, for instance, was producing half a million cycles a year by the end of the 1930s. This rise was halted suddenly with the outbreak of the Second World War, with the factories that had been producing cycles being forced into making items for the war effort. Raleigh’s factory output of bikes went down to just 5 per cent of the total production.

Bicycles were still present in the conflict but were superseded by their motorised cousins, and this was a harbinger of the fate of pedal power after the war. Not necessarily a harbinger of doom, but a warning that the need for bikes would change. Up until the Second World War the bicycle had been used mainly as a necessity for getting to work, for delivering goods and so on, but this changed from the 1950s. With the growth of motorbikes and cars and a gradual increase in wealth, the need to have the cheapest form of transport reduced. This could have been the death knell for the bicycle but it wasn’t – it just created a shift in usage from business to leisure.

The shift into leisure and sports use meant that innovation and diversification became a vital part of keeping the industry afloat. When bikes had just been used to get to and from work, they needed to be built and designed in a very particular, similar way. With new uses varying from off-roading to racing via trick-cycling the shape and look of the bike became much more varied. This led to a split on the manufacturing side between at one end the mass-market off-the-shelf bikes made at huge factories, to the other end with artisan bike makers building individual machines to order. And so while all bikes can still be traced back to the

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