http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3469993.ece
Sheldon Brown
Bicycle mechanic who dispensed technical advice and his family news on
the internet to millions
Sheldon Brown
If Sheldon Brown had been only an excellent bicycle mechanic, the
esteem in which he was held, while great, could not have extended much
beyond his native Massachusetts. But because of the selfless use to
which he put the internet, regret at his death has been felt across
the world.
His knowledge of bicycles, from a lifetime of riding them, taking them
apart, fixing and modifying them, was encyclopaedic. For more than 20
years he earned a living from that knowledge with the spanners,
screwdrivers and tyre levers of a succession of bicycle workshops
around Boston, and he could probably have gone on doing so happily
until retirement. Then, at 49, he found at his disposal an invention
more powerful than anything in a mechanic?s toolbox. He quickly saw
that the internet could make his expertise available not just to the
customers of one bike shop, but to anyone who wanted it, anywhere. It
turned out that a lot of people did. The website he built,
sheldonbrown.com, has attracted millions.
Sheldon Christopher Brown was born in Boston in 1944. After his
father?s death in an air crash when Brown was 9, the family settled in
Marblehead, Massachusetts, and it was in the Marblehead town dump that
his career in the bicycle business originated. During high school he
built bikes out of parts scavenged from the dump and sold them. Like
many in the 1960s he heeded Timothy Leary?s call to turn on, tune in
and drop out, not staying long at college or in a series of jobs
selling shoes and hi-fi, and driving taxis.
By 1972 bike repair was his career, and he set up the Boston Bicycle
Repair Collective, a fellow founder member being Stan Kaplan, inventor
of the Kryptonite bike lock. After, as he described it, being ?purged
by Maoists? from the collective, for a time Brown turned his dexterity
to camera repair. But he went back to working on bicycles, and by the
early 1980s, in a move towards his ultimate future, he was not just
repairing bikes but writing about them.
His audience in specialist cyclists? magazines, however, was
necessarily limited. Then came the internet.
In 1990 Brown had joined Harris Cyclery, a shop a few minutes? bike
ride from his home in Newtonville, a Boston suburb, as a mechanic. As
the internet developed, he became a contributor to cycling newsgroups,
and in 1995 Aaron Harris, his employer, let him set up a website in
association with the shop. Initially it was intended to sell
specialist parts, but soon Brown took it far beyond that. ?Aaron let
me spread my wings,? Brown said in 2001.
The website certainly flew. Last year sheldonbrown.com had more than
half a million visitors a month. They came for everything to do with
bikes, from advice for timid beginners on how to mount a bike to
instructions for the daring on how to build their own tandem. The site
has a glossary of almost 1,000 terms from ?A and B chainrings? to
?Zzipper?.
If you couldn?t find what you needed on the website, you e-mailed and
asked, and ?captbike? usually replied the same day. Answering 200
e-mails most days, he was courteous and informative, but hadn?t time
to be wordy. One correspondent, told that replacing his 20-tooth back
gear with a 22-tooth would make climbing hills easier, asked how much.
Back shot a classic captbike reply: ?10%.?
Brown did not charge for access to the site or for his e-mail advice,
but the site was a vindication of the internet freeware credo that
putting up free content will bring its own reward. It brings in about
half Harris?s business.
But sheldonbrown.com was, and is, about more than commerce. Nor is it
just a compendium of technical information. It includes a blog that
started before the term existed, recording the personality, the
philosophy, the likes and dislikes, and above all the family life, of
the man who built it. In 1979 Brown married Harriet Fell, who teaches
at Northeastern University, Boston. A daughter was born in 1981, and a
son in 1983. The blog records his devotion to them, his pride in their
accomplishments, and such family adventures as touring in France on
two tandems when the children were 6 and 8.
Given his lifelong delight in cycling, it was particularly cruel that
in the past two years multiple sclerosis gradually robbed him of the
ability to ride a two-wheeler. His response was characteristic ? he
got a recumbent tricycle and kept pedalling, still riding it to work
until shortly before he died. And he wryly put a page titled ?The
Bright Side of MS? (easy parking with a disabled sticker, jumping
airport security queues) on his website.
The response to his death has been a fitting combination of bicycles
and the internet. From Melbourne to Missouri, cyclists have held or
are planning memorial rides ? co-ordinated, naturally, on the web. The
London ride is on April 6.
Sheldon Brown, cyclist, was born on July 14, 1944. He died of a heart
attack on February 3, 2008, aged 63