A Brief History of Modern Bicycles
Once upon a time, when I was a kid, there were 2 types of Bike. There were bikes (or bicycles) and there were racing bikes.
You wanted a racing bicycle but your first bike was a bicycle. Then, when you were older, you got a racing bike.
If you were lucky (and your parents had the means) it had ten gears, my Carlton had five… but I loved it.
Then came the BMX bike and in the 1990s the mountain bike arrived. It created some more clearance on its bike frame, stole its brakes from cyclocross, stuck on some huge knobbly tyres and convinced us that we were no longer restricted to the highways… the byways and more beckoned.
Then came mountain bike suspension. First it was heavy and restricted to suspension forks then it became light enough to be attached to both wheels.
It is worth backing up a bit to recognise that the cyclo-cross bicycle (that pre-dates the MTB by decades) was then and, on all but the most serious singletrack, remains a superior off-road machine.
Then a strange thing happened; bikes disappeared. Mountain bikes became the vanilla option. Kids want a full suspension (full sus) but they got a hard tail, front suspension. Most needed neither but bikes had disappeared remember.
About this time we saw the appearance of the BSO or bicycle shaped object – poorly built, terrible to ride, heavy lumps of rubbish built to a low price point. How do you build a bike for £100? Badly….
So what happened to bikes? Well they came back, while they were away they picked up the prefix ‘hybrid’. So bikes are now hybrid bikes.
It seems a terrible injustice that the immediate precursor of all the different types of bicycle is now seen as the mutant but the victor has always written the history.
Racing bikes are now road bikes and they can be subdivided into touring bikes, sportive bikes, single speed and fixed bikes and, er, race bikes.
Mountain bikes still come at a basic level as full-sus and hard tail but you can also sub-divide to downhill, jump, all-mountain and xc.
And it doesn’t end there. The brilliant Danny MacAskill has made popular trials bikes. Brompton have made folding bikes cool and recumbent bikes, well, there are recumbent bikes as well.
Does all this choice improve our riding? Hell yes!
Your choice isn’t easy but if you choose the right bicycle you will be a very happy cyclist.
