CFRP drawbacks

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Indeed, there are problems with Mike's claim. First, it's simply
unprovable because there are no inventories or records, bikes not having
titles or license plates like cars there's no way to trace them.
Second, in the US 50 years ago most bikes were basically built for
children from welded mild steel and have long since been discarded due
to non-use; that means there's not that much of a selection of 50 years
old brazed US-made frames to begin with. Third, even most of the brazed
frames were long ago discarded due to non-use. Neither the second or
third groups failed in large numbers, they were just thrown away. Few
Americans have been riding regularly for 50 years, let alone riding
regularly for 50 years on the same bike.

OK, we could bring it back quite a few years then, and talk about bikes
from the 70s. Of that I have a great amount of first-hand experience. Of
the many thousands that I sold during the 70s, I would say a greater
number than people here are prepared to believe "failed" in use. That
"use" typically constituted running into thing and bending forks back and
buckling downtubes. Of the bikes coming into the shop for repair, a very
large number exhibited that sort of damage. It's my opinion that, used
long enough, most steel bikes would have fallen victim to that fate. For
what it's worth, I have personal experience with two different steel bikes
that did so. I have experience with one failure on a modern carbon frame &
fork; that was when a car backed out into me and I landed on the rear
hood. The steel fork column bent; everything else remained intact. The
frame continues on to this day (many years later). The fork was retired
due to the bent column.

That was a dumb response on my part. I started trying to substantiate the
claim I was making, when the point I was initially trying to make was that
you couldn't possibly substantiate that sort of thing (that there are a
whole lot of 50+ year old bicycles in service because they last so much
better than what's come after... since we have no idea how many were made,
what sort of use they've had, how many failed vs thrown away because they
weren't needed anymore etc.).

--Mike Jacoubowsky
Chain Reaction Bicycles
www.ChainReaction.com
Redwood City & Los Altos, CA USA

"Mike Jacoubowsky" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Indeed, there are problems with Mike's claim. First, it's simply
unprovable because there are no inventories or records, bikes not having
titles or license plates like cars there's no way to trace them.
Second, in the US 50 years ago most bikes were basically built for
children from welded mild steel and have long since been discarded due
to non-use; that means there's not that much of a selection of 50 years
old brazed US-made frames to begin with. Third, even most of the brazed
frames were long ago discarded due to non-use. Neither the second or
third groups failed in large numbers, they were just thrown away. Few
Americans have been riding regularly for 50 years, let alone riding
regularly for 50 years on the same bike.

OK, we could bring it back quite a few years then, and talk about bikes
from the 70s. Of that I have a great amount of first-hand experience. Of
the many thousands that I sold during the 70s, I would say a greater
number than people here are prepared to believe "failed" in use. That
"use" typically constituted running into thing and bending forks back and
buckling downtubes. Of the bikes coming into the shop for repair, a very
large number exhibited that sort of damage. It's my opinion that, used
long enough, most steel bikes would have fallen victim to that fate. For
what it's worth, I have personal experience with two different steel bikes
that did so. I have experience with one failure on a modern carbon frame &
fork; that was when a car backed out into me and I landed on the rear
hood. The steel fork column bent; everything else remained intact. The
frame continues on to this day (many years later). The fork was retired
due to the bent column.

--Mike-- Chain Reaction Bicycles
www.ChainReactionBicycles.com

"Tim McNamara" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

In article <[email hidden]>,

_ said:

On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:05:45 GMT, Mike Jacoubowsky wrote:

>> Perhaps it is becuase these plastic frames are not old enough (or
>> break before from other causes) for such failures to show up.
>> Brazed steel frames have been around for at least a century - not
>> the method, but the actual frames.
>
> I'll go out on a limb here, and claim that there are far fewer
> brazed steel frames more than even a mere 50 years old, intact,
> than there are such frames that have failed. Does that mean that,
> because the evidence is that most failed, steel is a bad material
> to build a frame out of? I don't think so, but...
>

Careful now, claims without evidence are jim beam's territory...

Indeed, there are problems with Mike's claim. First, it's simply
unprovable because there are no inventories or records, bikes not having
titles or license plates like cars there's no way to trace them.
Second, in the US 50 years ago most bikes were basically built for
children from welded mild steel and have long since been discarded due
to non-use; that means there's not that much of a selection of 50 years
old brazed US-made frames to begin with. Third, even most of the brazed
frames were long ago discarded due to non-use. Neither the second or
third groups failed in large numbers, they were just thrown away. Few
Americans have been riding regularly for 50 years, let alone riding
regularly for 50 years on the same bike.

I remember a few years ago someone at the CTC published the question
"does anybody have a 50 year old bike in daily use" and got hundreds of
replies and photos from their members, some of whose daily riders were
60+ years old which were hand-me-downs from their parents or other older
relatives. I remember a lovely RRA from the first couple of years of
production that was still being ridden thousands of miles a year. The
CTC magazine editor asked people to stop sending in pictures of their
bikes because it was overwhelming.

Locally, riding around town and casually observing, I'd say that fully
half the bikes I see are 25-30 years old. This has increased over the
past five years or so quite dramatically.

On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 06:10:41 GMT, Michael Press <[email hidden]>

Quoted message said:

In article
<[email hidden]>,

Michael Warner said:

Chalo said:

Perhaps you missed (or perhaps you agree with) the implication I took
exception to, which is that Trek buyers are somehow "serious" about
their cycling, whereas Chinese who cycle in much greater numbers and
for transportation, and who don't buy enough Treks to make that
company a profit, are somehow not serious.

Apparently they're so serious about cycling that they're all scrambling to
get cars instead, and bikes are rapidly disappearing from cities.

Are they really?

Of course they are. Just like europeans in the 50s/60s and americans in
the interbellum and post-WWII. Cycling for transportation *was*, in fact,
common all around, even in the US, around 1900-1920. But as soon as
motorcars appear and then start becoming affordable (ie, starting with the
T-ford), the bike gets phased out.

Bikes were a good shortrange alternative to a horse, and much, much
cheaper, but as soon as *cars* became cheaper than horses (a while after
the T-ford started, in the US -- took a lot longer in Europe[1]) they took
over.

Jasper

[1] There aren't really any ultra-cheap car-shaped-objects like the Model
T in early european car history. It's all rich man's toys. The first
really successful ones are the 2CV and the VW Type 1 (aka the Bug or
Beetle), which is not coincidentally when cars start to take over from
bikes and motorbikes.

On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:39:23 GMT, Jasper Janssen <[email hidden]>
wrote:

[snip]

Quoted message said:

But as soon as
motorcars appear and then start becoming affordable (ie, starting with the
T-ford), the bike gets phased out.

[snip]

Dear Jasper,

Actually, the U.S. bike boom of the 1890's faded long before cars
became widely used. Mass public transportation is usually considered
the culprit, not the gradual appearance of tinynumbers of extremely
expensive and unreliable automobiles, which usually required a
mechanic to drive and maintain.

If you browse around old newspapers and magazines, you'll find regular
bicycle columns simply vanishing.

A quick count of my links to curious bicycling articles from "Outing"
magazine, which began as a bike magazine in the 1880's, shows how the
bike boom collapsed:

1897 20
1898 15
1899 14
1900 5
1901 3
1902 1

Searches show that by 1900 bicycles simply lost much of their enormous
early appeal, many bicycle companies went bankrupt, and sales dropped
disastrously.

"Colonel Albert Pope and his American Dream Machines" makes the point
on page 184 with a picture of Teddy Roosevelt as the first American
president to ride in a car, which looks exactly like an open landau*
that hasn't been hitched to a team, with the driver up behind the
passengers, who enjoy the forward view of a landau:

http://i20.tinypic.com/wjj2ph.jpg

That was in 1902, after the bike boom had already burst. Here's a
landau to show the similarity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Elizabethboweslyonandkinggeorgeincanada.jpg

How far cars were from being popular enough to displace bicycles is
shown by the vehicle's silly appearance, the fact that it was used for
a presidential parade rather than normal transportation, and by the
quartet of Secret Service men still riding bicycles next to the
horseless carriage. (The two bikes on the left are clearly
Hartford-made Pope-Columbia chainless shaft-drive models.)

At that point, presidents and wealthy enthusiasts were willing to ride
in cars, but most people couldn't dream of such expensive
contraptions. Instead, they took trains and streetcars instead of
buying bicycles.

Karl Hodges wrote an interesting article with detailed graphs and data
"Did the Emergence of the Automobile End the Bicycle Boom?" for the
4th International Cycle History Conference, which shows that "Between
1895 and 1902, the bicycle industry ground to a halt, yet the growth
of the automobile industry in this same period is unremarkable."

"Unremarkable" is a wild overstatement of the tiny sales of
automobiles. There were probably more ocean liners docked in U.S.
harbors than automobiles in U.S. cities after the bicycle industry
collapsed:

"During this interregnum [1902-1905] between the bicycle and
automobile eras, the ratio of autos to population went from just one
auto for every million and a half Americans, to one for every
thousand. In contrast, bicycle sales declined from a peak of one for
every fifty citizens in 1897 to one for every 330 by 1904."

To put that in table form per thousand population:

cars new bike
owned sales
----- -------
1897 20
1902 0.00067
1904 3
1905 1

Hodges points out that it was only in 1909, years after the bike boom
imploded, that the Model T reduced the entry price for an automobile
to $850, still far out of reach for most people, who could afford a
1909 bicycle at $40, but preferred not to buy one.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

In article <[email hidden]>,

Quoted message said:

On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:39:23 GMT, Jasper Janssen <[email hidden]>
wrote:

[snip]

Quoted message said:

But as soon as
motorcars appear and then start becoming affordable (ie, starting with the
T-ford), the bike gets phased out.

[snip]

Dear Jasper,

Actually, the U.S. bike boom of the 1890's faded long before cars
became widely used. Mass public transportation is usually considered
the culprit, not the gradual appearance of tinynumbers of extremely
expensive and unreliable automobiles, which usually required a
mechanic to drive and maintain.

If you browse around old newspapers and magazines, you'll find regular
bicycle columns simply vanishing.

A quick count of my links to curious bicycling articles from "Outing"
magazine, which began as a bike magazine in the 1880's, shows how the
bike boom collapsed:

1897 20
1898 15
1899 14
1900 5
1901 3
1902 1

Searches show that by 1900 bicycles simply lost much of their enormous
early appeal, many bicycle companies went bankrupt, and sales dropped
disastrously.

"Colonel Albert Pope and his American Dream Machines" makes the point
on page 184 with a picture of Teddy Roosevelt as the first American
president to ride in a car, which looks exactly like an open landau*
that hasn't been hitched to a team, with the driver up behind the
passengers, who enjoy the forward view of a landau:

http://i20.tinypic.com/wjj2ph.jpg

That was in 1902, after the bike boom had already burst. Here's a
landau to show the similarity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Elizabethboweslyonandkinggeorgeincanada.jpg

How far cars were from being popular enough to displace bicycles is
shown by the vehicle's silly appearance, the fact that it was used for
a presidential parade rather than normal transportation, and by the
quartet of Secret Service men still riding bicycles next to the
horseless carriage. (The two bikes on the left are clearly
Hartford-made Pope-Columbia chainless shaft-drive models.)

At that point, presidents and wealthy enthusiasts were willing to ride
in cars, but most people couldn't dream of such expensive
contraptions. Instead, they took trains and streetcars instead of
buying bicycles.

Karl Hodges wrote an interesting article with detailed graphs and data
"Did the Emergence of the Automobile End the Bicycle Boom?" for the
4th International Cycle History Conference, which shows that "Between
1895 and 1902, the bicycle industry ground to a halt, yet the growth
of the automobile industry in this same period is unremarkable."

"Unremarkable" is a wild overstatement of the tiny sales of
automobiles. There were probably more ocean liners docked in U.S.
harbors than automobiles in U.S. cities after the bicycle industry
collapsed:

"During this interregnum [1902-1905] between the bicycle and
automobile eras, the ratio of autos to population went from just one
auto for every million and a half Americans, to one for every
thousand. In contrast, bicycle sales declined from a peak of one for
every fifty citizens in 1897 to one for every 330 by 1904."

To put that in table form per thousand population:

cars new bike
owned sales
----- -------
1897 20
1902 0.00067
1904 3
1905 1

Hodges points out that it was only in 1909, years after the bike boom
imploded, that the Model T reduced the entry price for an automobile
to $850, still far out of reach for most people, who could afford a
1909 bicycle at $40, but preferred not to buy one.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Carl: I think the missing link here might be motorcycles.

This 1900-1930 period is pretty much the golden age for American
motorcycle makers. They blossomed with nearly the diversity of bicycle
companies a generation earlier.

What stopped most of them dead, in the end, were the triple whammies of
the Model T, the Depression, and the post-war recovery.

The "T" was the first car to give motorcycles some real price
competition. The Depression made sure that only the strongest retailers
survived to make it to World War II (Harley-Davidson, Indian, and maybe
some unknown-to-me niche brands that survived, but only Harley and
Indian mattered post-war), and the post-war everybody-gets-a-car boom
pretty much killed Indian dead, and left Harley as the last motorcycle
maker standing.

This simplifies greatly, and smaller motorcycle companies keep forming,
re-forming, and dissolving, but that is the way of all things. The
sordid tale of the Indian trademark after the 1950s was the subject of
books and court cases. The present trademark holder is promising
motorcycles for 2009 model year.

Curiously, the Wiki entry on Indian does not note the rather curious
spelling of the company's full name, as seen on this stock certificate:

http://www.scripophily.net/inmocoma.html

"Indian Motocycle [sic] Company"

Yes, that was right. Somewhere along the line recent reincarnations have
dispensed with this eccentricity.

--
Ryan Cousineau [email hidden] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics
to think that they have to take drugs to succeed." -Paul Erdos

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 01:55:16 GMT, Ryan Cousineau <[email hidden]>

Quoted message said:

In article <[email hidden]>,

Quoted message said:

On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:39:23 GMT, Jasper Janssen <[email hidden]>
wrote:

[snip]

Quoted message said:

But as soon as
motorcars appear and then start becoming affordable (ie, starting with the
T-ford), the bike gets phased out.

[snip]

Dear Jasper,

Actually, the U.S. bike boom of the 1890's faded long before cars
became widely used. Mass public transportation is usually considered
the culprit, not the gradual appearance of tinynumbers of extremely
expensive and unreliable automobiles, which usually required a
mechanic to drive and maintain.

If you browse around old newspapers and magazines, you'll find regular
bicycle columns simply vanishing.

A quick count of my links to curious bicycling articles from "Outing"
magazine, which began as a bike magazine in the 1880's, shows how the
bike boom collapsed:

1897 20
1898 15
1899 14
1900 5
1901 3
1902 1

Searches show that by 1900 bicycles simply lost much of their enormous
early appeal, many bicycle companies went bankrupt, and sales dropped
disastrously.

"Colonel Albert Pope and his American Dream Machines" makes the point
on page 184 with a picture of Teddy Roosevelt as the first American
president to ride in a car, which looks exactly like an open landau*
that hasn't been hitched to a team, with the driver up behind the
passengers, who enjoy the forward view of a landau:

http://i20.tinypic.com/wjj2ph.jpg

That was in 1902, after the bike boom had already burst. Here's a
landau to show the similarity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Elizabethboweslyonandkinggeorgeincanada.jpg

How far cars were from being popular enough to displace bicycles is
shown by the vehicle's silly appearance, the fact that it was used for
a presidential parade rather than normal transportation, and by the
quartet of Secret Service men still riding bicycles next to the
horseless carriage. (The two bikes on the left are clearly
Hartford-made Pope-Columbia chainless shaft-drive models.)

At that point, presidents and wealthy enthusiasts were willing to ride
in cars, but most people couldn't dream of such expensive
contraptions. Instead, they took trains and streetcars instead of
buying bicycles.

Karl Hodges wrote an interesting article with detailed graphs and data
"Did the Emergence of the Automobile End the Bicycle Boom?" for the
4th International Cycle History Conference, which shows that "Between
1895 and 1902, the bicycle industry ground to a halt, yet the growth
of the automobile industry in this same period is unremarkable."

"Unremarkable" is a wild overstatement of the tiny sales of
automobiles. There were probably more ocean liners docked in U.S.
harbors than automobiles in U.S. cities after the bicycle industry
collapsed:

"During this interregnum [1902-1905] between the bicycle and
automobile eras, the ratio of autos to population went from just one
auto for every million and a half Americans, to one for every
thousand. In contrast, bicycle sales declined from a peak of one for
every fifty citizens in 1897 to one for every 330 by 1904."

To put that in table form per thousand population:

cars new bike
owned sales
----- -------
1897 20
1902 0.00067
1904 3
1905 1

Hodges points out that it was only in 1909, years after the bike boom
imploded, that the Model T reduced the entry price for an automobile
to $850, still far out of reach for most people, who could afford a
1909 bicycle at $40, but preferred not to buy one.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Carl: I think the missing link here might be motorcycles.

This 1900-1930 period is pretty much the golden age for American
motorcycle makers. They blossomed with nearly the diversity of bicycle
companies a generation earlier.

What stopped most of them dead, in the end, were the triple whammies of
the Model T, the Depression, and the post-war recovery.

The "T" was the first car to give motorcycles some real price
competition. The Depression made sure that only the strongest retailers
survived to make it to World War II (Harley-Davidson, Indian, and maybe
some unknown-to-me niche brands that survived, but only Harley and
Indian mattered post-war), and the post-war everybody-gets-a-car boom
pretty much killed Indian dead, and left Harley as the last motorcycle
maker standing.

This simplifies greatly, and smaller motorcycle companies keep forming,
re-forming, and dissolving, but that is the way of all things. The
sordid tale of the Indian trademark after the 1950s was the subject of
books and court cases. The present trademark holder is promising
motorcycles for 2009 model year.

Curiously, the Wiki entry on Indian does not note the rather curious
spelling of the company's full name, as seen on this stock certificate:

http://www.scripophily.net/inmocoma.html

"Indian Motocycle [sic] Company"

Yes, that was right. Somewhere along the line recent reincarnations have
dispensed with this eccentricity.

Dear Ryan,

It's a nice idea to consider, but unfortunately it turns out that
motorcycles were no more responsible for the bike boom collapsing than
cars.

Again, "Between 1895 and 1902, the bicycle industry ground to a halt,
yet the growth of the automobile industry in this same period is
unremarkable."

In 1897, about 20 bicycles were sold for every 1,000 people in the
U.S. With a population of about 70 million, that's over a million
bicycles sold in one year--1,400,000 bicycles sold. After that, sales
dropped to 3 per 1,000 population by 1904, when the population was
getting close to 80 million, a horrifying collapse for the bike
industry, but still 240,000 bicycles sold.

Here are the sales figures for Harley-Davidson and Indian, early and
successful motorcycle manufacturers:

bicycles Harleys Indians
sold sold sold
1897 1,400,000
1898
1899
1900
1901 3 3 [home-made]
1902 143 [by 1902 bike boom has collapsed]
1903 150 376 [Harley-Davidson actually founded]
1904 240,000 596

In other words, motorcycles had about as much effect on the bike boom
collapse as recumbents are having on U.S. bicycle sales.

When the bike boom collapsed, people who had bikes kept riding old
ones instead of buying new ones, far more people used trollies and
trains (and horses and carriages), and most people just walked. Cars
and motorcycles were about as common as private planes are today.

Yearly bike sales had dropped over 80% by the time that Harley and
Indian--combined--were selling fewer than 1,000 motorcycles a year in
a country with about 80,000,000 people.

But in 1904, even after the bike boom collapse, about 240 bicycles
were sold for every motorcycle from Harley and Indian.

Harley sales figures:

http://books.google.com/books?id=XF7V9w8ByrcC&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150&dq=%22motorcycle+sales%22+1901+1903&source=web&ots=B19LbVgNm7&sig=v85cRj1_vIJeeBRznWw9S2Eh7P4

Indian production figures about 3/4ths down the page:

http://www.indianmotorbikes.com/resources/serials.htm

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

In article <[email hidden]>,

Quoted message said:

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 01:55:16 GMT, Ryan Cousineau <[email hidden]>

Quoted message said:

In article <[email hidden]>,

Quoted message said:

On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:39:23 GMT, Jasper Janssen <[email hidden]>
wrote:

[snip]

>But as soon as
>motorcars appear and then start becoming affordable (ie, starting with
>the
>T-ford), the bike gets phased out.

[snip]

Dear Jasper,

Actually, the U.S. bike boom of the 1890's faded long before cars
became widely used. Mass public transportation is usually considered
the culprit, not the gradual appearance of tinynumbers of extremely
expensive and unreliable automobiles, which usually required a
mechanic to drive and maintain.

If you browse around old newspapers and magazines, you'll find regular
bicycle columns simply vanishing.

A quick count of my links to curious bicycling articles from "Outing"
magazine, which began as a bike magazine in the 1880's, shows how the
bike boom collapsed:

1897 20
1898 15
1899 14
1900 5
1901 3
1902 1

Searches show that by 1900 bicycles simply lost much of their enormous
early appeal, many bicycle companies went bankrupt, and sales dropped
disastrously.

"Colonel Albert Pope and his American Dream Machines" makes the point
on page 184 with a picture of Teddy Roosevelt as the first American
president to ride in a car, which looks exactly like an open landau*
that hasn't been hitched to a team, with the driver up behind the
passengers, who enjoy the forward view of a landau:

http://i20.tinypic.com/wjj2ph.jpg

That was in 1902, after the bike boom had already burst. Here's a
landau to show the similarity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Elizabethboweslyonandkinggeorgeincanada.
jpg

How far cars were from being popular enough to displace bicycles is
shown by the vehicle's silly appearance, the fact that it was used for
a presidential parade rather than normal transportation, and by the
quartet of Secret Service men still riding bicycles next to the
horseless carriage. (The two bikes on the left are clearly
Hartford-made Pope-Columbia chainless shaft-drive models.)

At that point, presidents and wealthy enthusiasts were willing to ride
in cars, but most people couldn't dream of such expensive
contraptions. Instead, they took trains and streetcars instead of
buying bicycles.

Karl Hodges wrote an interesting article with detailed graphs and data
"Did the Emergence of the Automobile End the Bicycle Boom?" for the
4th International Cycle History Conference, which shows that "Between
1895 and 1902, the bicycle industry ground to a halt, yet the growth
of the automobile industry in this same period is unremarkable."

"Unremarkable" is a wild overstatement of the tiny sales of
automobiles. There were probably more ocean liners docked in U.S.
harbors than automobiles in U.S. cities after the bicycle industry
collapsed:

"During this interregnum [1902-1905] between the bicycle and
automobile eras, the ratio of autos to population went from just one
auto for every million and a half Americans, to one for every
thousand. In contrast, bicycle sales declined from a peak of one for
every fifty citizens in 1897 to one for every 330 by 1904."

To put that in table form per thousand population:

cars new bike
owned sales
----- -------
1897 20
1902 0.00067
1904 3
1905 1

Hodges points out that it was only in 1909, years after the bike boom
imploded, that the Model T reduced the entry price for an automobile
to $850, still far out of reach for most people, who could afford a
1909 bicycle at $40, but preferred not to buy one.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Carl: I think the missing link here might be motorcycles.

Quoted message said:

Dear Ryan,

It's a nice idea to consider, but unfortunately it turns out that
motorcycles were no more responsible for the bike boom collapsing than
cars.

Quoted message said:

Here are the sales figures for Harley-Davidson and Indian, early and
successful motorcycle manufacturers:

bicycles Harleys Indians
sold sold sold
1897 1,400,000
1898
1899
1900
1901 3 3 [home-made]
1902 143 [by 1902 bike boom has collapsed]
1903 150 376 [Harley-Davidson actually founded]
1904 240,000 596

In other words, motorcycles had about as much effect on the bike boom
collapse as recumbents are having on U.S. bicycle sales.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Alas, another good theory shot down by actual data. Stupid data!

I think we are asymptotically approaching the truth. My suspicion is
that the first reason the bike boom stopped was because the bike buyers
all had bikes, and they don't need replacing that often.

--
Ryan Cousineau [email hidden] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics
to think that they have to take drugs to succeed." -Paul Erdos

In article
<[email hidden]>,

Tim McNamara said:

In article <[email hidden]>,

_ said:

Mike Jacoubowsky said:

> Perhaps it is becuase these plastic frames are not old enough (or
> break before from other causes) for such failures to show up.
> Brazed steel frames have been around for at least a century - not
> the method, but the actual frames.

I'll go out on a limb here, and claim that there are far fewer
brazed steel frames more than even a mere 50 years old, intact,
than there are such frames that have failed. Does that mean that,
because the evidence is that most failed, steel is a bad material
to build a frame out of? I don't think so, but...

Careful now, claims without evidence are jim beam's territory...

Indeed, there are problems with Mike's claim. First, it's simply
unprovable because there are no inventories or records, bikes not having
titles or license plates like cars there's no way to trace them.
Second, in the US 50 years ago most bikes were basically built for
children from welded mild steel and have long since been discarded due
to non-use; that means there's not that much of a selection of 50 years
old brazed US-made frames to begin with. Third, even most of the brazed
frames were long ago discarded due to non-use. Neither the second or
third groups failed in large numbers, they were just thrown away. Few
Americans have been riding regularly for 50 years, let alone riding
regularly for 50 years on the same bike.

I remember a few years ago someone at the CTC published the question
"does anybody have a 50 year old bike in daily use" and got hundreds of
replies and photos from their members, some of whose daily riders were
60+ years old which were hand-me-downs from their parents or other older
relatives. I remember a lovely RRA from the first couple of years of
production that was still being ridden thousands of miles a year. The
CTC magazine editor asked people to stop sending in pictures of their
bikes because it was overwhelming.

Locally, riding around town and casually observing, I'd say that fully
half the bikes I see are 25-30 years old. This has increased over the
past five years or so quite dramatically.

Around here it is as if the seventies bicycle boom never
ended. The streets and bicycle racks are filled with them.
In a ten minute radius from my home are three shops that
deal exclusively in buying, refurbishing, and selling used
bicycles.

--
Michael Press

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 07:54:20 GMT, Ryan Cousineau <[email hidden]>

Quoted message said:

In article <[email hidden]>,

Quoted message said:

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 01:55:16 GMT, Ryan Cousineau <[email hidden]>

Quoted message said:

In article <[email hidden]>,
[email hidden] wrote:

> On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:39:23 GMT, Jasper Janssen <[email hidden]>
> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> >But as soon as
> >motorcars appear and then start becoming affordable (ie, starting with
> >the
> >T-ford), the bike gets phased out.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dear Jasper,
>
> Actually, the U.S. bike boom of the 1890's faded long before cars
> became widely used. Mass public transportation is usually considered
> the culprit, not the gradual appearance of tinynumbers of extremely
> expensive and unreliable automobiles, which usually required a
> mechanic to drive and maintain.
>
> If you browse around old newspapers and magazines, you'll find regular
> bicycle columns simply vanishing.
>
> A quick count of my links to curious bicycling articles from "Outing"
> magazine, which began as a bike magazine in the 1880's, shows how the
> bike boom collapsed:
>
> 1897 20
> 1898 15
> 1899 14
> 1900 5
> 1901 3
> 1902 1
>
> Searches show that by 1900 bicycles simply lost much of their enormous
> early appeal, many bicycle companies went bankrupt, and sales dropped
> disastrously.
>
> "Colonel Albert Pope and his American Dream Machines" makes the point
> on page 184 with a picture of Teddy Roosevelt as the first American
> president to ride in a car, which looks exactly like an open landau*
> that hasn't been hitched to a team, with the driver up behind the
> passengers, who enjoy the forward view of a landau:
>
> http://i20.tinypic.com/wjj2ph.jpg
>
> That was in 1902, after the bike boom had already burst. Here's a
> landau to show the similarity:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Elizabethboweslyonandkinggeorgeincanada.
> jpg
>
> How far cars were from being popular enough to displace bicycles is
> shown by the vehicle's silly appearance, the fact that it was used for
> a presidential parade rather than normal transportation, and by the
> quartet of Secret Service men still riding bicycles next to the
> horseless carriage. (The two bikes on the left are clearly
> Hartford-made Pope-Columbia chainless shaft-drive models.)
>
> At that point, presidents and wealthy enthusiasts were willing to ride
> in cars, but most people couldn't dream of such expensive
> contraptions. Instead, they took trains and streetcars instead of
> buying bicycles.
>
> Karl Hodges wrote an interesting article with detailed graphs and data
> "Did the Emergence of the Automobile End the Bicycle Boom?" for the
> 4th International Cycle History Conference, which shows that "Between
> 1895 and 1902, the bicycle industry ground to a halt, yet the growth
> of the automobile industry in this same period is unremarkable."
>
> "Unremarkable" is a wild overstatement of the tiny sales of
> automobiles. There were probably more ocean liners docked in U.S.
> harbors than automobiles in U.S. cities after the bicycle industry
> collapsed:
>
> "During this interregnum [1902-1905] between the bicycle and
> automobile eras, the ratio of autos to population went from just one
> auto for every million and a half Americans, to one for every
> thousand. In contrast, bicycle sales declined from a peak of one for
> every fifty citizens in 1897 to one for every 330 by 1904."
>
> To put that in table form per thousand population:
>
> cars new bike
> owned sales
> ----- -------
> 1897 20
> 1902 0.00067
> 1904 3
> 1905 1
>
> Hodges points out that it was only in 1909, years after the bike boom
> imploded, that the Model T reduced the entry price for an automobile
> to $850, still far out of reach for most people, who could afford a
> 1909 bicycle at $40, but preferred not to buy one.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Carl Fogel

Carl: I think the missing link here might be motorcycles.

Quoted message said:

Dear Ryan,

It's a nice idea to consider, but unfortunately it turns out that
motorcycles were no more responsible for the bike boom collapsing than
cars.

Quoted message said:

Here are the sales figures for Harley-Davidson and Indian, early and
successful motorcycle manufacturers:

bicycles Harleys Indians
sold sold sold
1897 1,400,000
1898
1899
1900
1901 3 3 [home-made]
1902 143 [by 1902 bike boom has collapsed]
1903 150 376 [Harley-Davidson actually founded]
1904 240,000 596

In other words, motorcycles had about as much effect on the bike boom
collapse as recumbents are having on U.S. bicycle sales.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Alas, another good theory shot down by actual data. Stupid data!

I think we are asymptotically approaching the truth. My suspicion is
that the first reason the bike boom stopped was because the bike buyers
all had bikes, and they don't need replacing that often.

Dear Ryan,

It's an idea worth considering.

Certainly there were more and more used bicycles in use, reducing new
sales.

But there's that pesky gigantic rise of the ridership on trains and
trollies--no mud, no sweat, no rolling down the wretched streets of
the day in ice, rain, and blazing sun, plenty of company, low fares
compared to bicycle prices, and so on.

As a sidelight, it's worth remembering how few people in 1900 had
actually learned to ride a bicycle as a child--the first safeties were
introduced in 1885 and wiped out the highwheelers by 1892.

So the bike boom collapsed just when we'd expect it to be reaching its
full strength with a whole generation rising up behind the early
adopters.

One reason that this didn't happen was that there weren't quite as
many riders as you'd expect. The 1.4 million new bikes sold in 1897
were enormously larger than auto and motorcycle sales for over a
decade to come, but they were still only 20 new bikes per 1,000
population--hardly anyone rode a bicycle, despite the fanatic clubs.

The reason was that bicycles were still darned expensive in 1900, with
$40 being easily more than a month's pay for most people.

Think of the dollar-a-day $360 Model T that was sold from 1908 to
1927, years beyond the bike boom. It started out at $850 and was a
huge bargain compared to $2,000 and $3,000 cars, dropping to $300 or
so only on the far side of the First World War in the 1920's, two
decades after the bike boom $40 bikes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_T

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Mike Jacoubowsky said:

I'll go out on a limb here, and claim that there are far fewer brazed steel
frames more than even a mere 50 years old, intact, than there are such
frames that have failed. Does that mean that, because the evidence is that
most failed, steel is a bad material to build a frame out of? I don't think
so, but...

Uhm, you're being slightly unclear here, but what you're comparing is the
number of >=50yo steel brazed frames currently intact, versus the number
of >=50yo steel brazed frames that have failed?

The latter category is a bit ambiguous: do you count frames that ended up
on the scrapheap just because, or only those that actually failed? What
about rust, then scrap? Accident damage?

I suspect that if you count only those frames that actually broke while
still in regular use, the ratio might still be favorable.

Which is not to say I've never broken a lugged steel frame... The seat
tube came loose from the bracket in one of mine, by reason of the bracket
lug breaking coincident with the end of the tube (the tube itself was just
fine, being gaspipe or something of the sort).

Even so, hardly a catastrophic failure. It gave me an excellent
opportunity to notice that as long as you're not pushing hard, the
seattube is in compression, and when you do pedal hard, it gets pulling
and side=to-side forces (a good pedal stroke would send the bottom of the
seattube several inches to the other side..). The frame in question was a
Pretty Damn Cheap When New 25-yo or so, at the time.

Jasper

On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:39:23 GMT, Jasper Janssen <[email hidden]>
wrote:

[---]

Quoted message said:

[1] There aren't really any ultra-cheap car-shaped-objects like the Model
T in early european car history. It's all rich man's toys. The first
really successful ones are the 2CV and the VW Type 1 (aka the Bug or
Beetle),

Don't forget the FIAT 500 and the Renault 4CV.

Quoted message said:

On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:39:23 GMT, Jasper Janssen <[email hidden]>
wrote:

Quoted message said:

A quick count of my links to curious bicycling articles from "Outing"
magazine, which began as a bike magazine in the 1880's, shows how the
bike boom collapsed:

1897 20
1898 15
1899 14
1900 5
1901 3
1902 1

Searches show that by 1900 bicycles simply lost much of their enormous
early appeal, many bicycle companies went bankrupt, and sales dropped
disastrously.

That doesn't necessarily mean *bicycling* stopped, it just means that
there aren't as many new bikes sold.

Quoted message said:

"Unremarkable" is a wild overstatement of the tiny sales of
automobiles. There were probably more ocean liners docked in U.S.
harbors than automobiles in U.S. cities after the bicycle industry
collapsed:

"During this interregnum [1902-1905] between the bicycle and
automobile eras, the ratio of autos to population went from just one
auto for every million and a half Americans, to one for every
thousand. In contrast, bicycle sales declined from a peak of one for
every fifty citizens in 1897 to one for every 330 by 1904."
f
To put that in table form per thousand population:

cars new bike
owned sales
----- -------
1897 20
1902 0.00067
1904 3
1905 1

That is an *immense* relative growth in car ownership, though. 1 in 1000
is big enough that a prosperous street could easily expect to have one
car, on the average.

When was the chaindrive safety bicycle first made in the US? From that
point onward, you have an enormous boom because people don't have any, but
then you achieve market saturation and the amount of new bikes sold drops
through the bottom *even if* ridership remains high. A 1900 bike probably
lasted a decade or two with even just decent maintenance.

Quoted message said:

Hodges points out that it was only in 1909, years after the bike boom
imploded, that the Model T reduced the entry price for an automobile
to $850, still far out of reach for most people, who could afford a
1909 bicycle at $40, but preferred not to buy one.

But did they need a 1909 bicycle, or were they making do just fine with a
1901 model?

Jasper

Quoted message said:

Certainly there were more and more used bicycles in use, reducing new
sales.

But there's that pesky gigantic rise of the ridership on trains and
trollies--no mud, no sweat, no rolling down the wretched streets of
the day in ice, rain, and blazing sun, plenty of company, low fares
compared to bicycle prices, and so on.

I'm not sure that public transit -- even when it amounted to a damn in
america -- was a solid replacement for bicycles, though. On the other
hand, we're talking pre-burbclaves, so bicycles are primarily useful to
start with in cities, and american cities at this time are dense enough --
and the PT networks dense and good enough -- that most journeys could be
made on the PT network.

Quoted message said:

One reason that this didn't happen was that there weren't quite as
many riders as you'd expect. The 1.4 million new bikes sold in 1897
were enormously larger than auto and motorcycle sales for over a
decade to come, but they were still only 20 new bikes per 1,000
population--hardly anyone rode a bicycle, despite the fanatic clubs.

How much of the population at the time was in cities? I suspect that
*nobody* in the middle of the country bought a bike, because the distances
and roads were simply too great and bad respectively for it to be useful
(and country folk were *poor* back then.. at least money-poor). I would
imagine that the US as a whole in 1900 -- especailly given that that
includes the Southern states -- still had a significantly <50%
urbanification rate, which affects the effective number significantly. if
you go with roughly double then 4 or 5 out of 100 people in the cities
bought a new bike in that single year. It's entirely possible for there to
be upwards of several bikes per 10 cityfolk by 1905. And that's counting
children and old folk and people who simply didn't want to go much of
anywhere or could ride PT because it went everywhere they wanted to go.
And of course bikes weren't user-specific, the rest of the family could
borrow it when the primary owner wasn't using it.

That actually adds up to a fair market penetration, if you think about it.
Just not that many new ones necessary.

Quoted message said:

The reason was that bicycles were still darned expensive in 1900, with
$40 being easily more than a month's pay for most people.

But they were exceedingly useful to certain jobs -- the postman, the
bakery delivery boy, etc.etc. Some jobs in .eu came with use of a company
bicycle, back then, and it was considered a good perk too. Anything that
needs deliverin' and is small and light enough to fit into a freight
bicycle (and that's a *lot*) is greatly cheaper on that bike than with a
horse, and faster than walking or with a cart.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freight_bicycle

Quoted message said:

Think of the dollar-a-day $360 Model T that was sold from 1908 to
1927, years beyond the bike boom. It started out at $850 and was a
huge bargain compared to $2,000 and $3,000 cars, dropping to $300 or
so only on the far side of the First World War in the 1920's, two
decades after the bike boom $40 bikes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_T

But the model T is closer in usage to being comparable to a horse than to
a bike, and a horse back in those days was, IIRC from previous
discussions, >$500. Which is of course why stealin' a man's horse could
get you hung, back in them thar days, parenthetically.

But to get back to my original point a little: regardless of how
widespread bike usage was before, the availability of first cheap
motorcycles and then cheap cars pretty much completely finishes whatever
bike usage was there off, every single time. it happened in the US, it
happened in europe post-WWII, and it's happening in China today.

Jasper

Andrew Price said:

On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:39:23 GMT, Jasper Janssen <[email hidden]>
wrote:

[---]

Quoted message said:

[1] There aren't really any ultra-cheap car-shaped-objects like the Model
T in early european car history. It's all rich man's toys. The first
really successful ones are the 2CV and the VW Type 1 (aka the Bug or
Beetle),

Don't forget the FIAT 500 and the Renault 4CV.

Neither of those were very widespread here in .nl, but yes, same sort of
category and the 500 probably widespread at the very least in Italy. The
4CV is less of a car-shaped-object and more of a car than the 2CV, though,
as far as I can gather from a quick wikipedia. More expensive and a bit
more power. And more expensive double-curved bodypanels, for that matter.

Quick horror story: according to wp the 4CV was replaced by the Renault 4.
When I was little we owned a 4, from new. And it was scrapped after just 4
or 5 years because there were holes in the floor, not to mention the
bodywork, and it failed the compulsory test. (*%^*& Renault.

Jasper

In article <[email hidden]>,

Jasper Janssen said:

Quoted message said:

Certainly there were more and more used bicycles in use, reducing new
sales.

But there's that pesky gigantic rise of the ridership on trains and
trollies--no mud, no sweat, no rolling down the wretched streets of
the day in ice, rain, and blazing sun, plenty of company, low fares
compared to bicycle prices, and so on.

I'm not sure that public transit -- even when it amounted to a damn in
america -- was a solid replacement for bicycles, though. On the other
hand, we're talking pre-burbclaves, so bicycles are primarily useful to
start with in cities, and american cities at this time are dense enough --
and the PT networks dense and good enough -- that most journeys could be
made on the PT network.

Also, um, people couldn't afford cars. So it didn't really matter if the
public transit was "good enough." You either took the trolley, walked,
or you didn't go.

In a lot of cases, people didn't go.

Quoted message said:

But to get back to my original point a little: regardless of how
widespread bike usage was before, the availability of first cheap
motorcycles and then cheap cars pretty much completely finishes whatever
bike usage was there off, every single time. it happened in the US, it
happened in europe post-WWII, and it's happening in China today.

Jasper

--
Ryan Cousineau [email hidden] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"My scenarios may give the impression I could be an excellent crook.
Not true - I am a talented lawyer." - Sandy in rec.bicycles.racing

In article <[email hidden]>,

Jasper Janssen said:

Quoted message said:

On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:39:23 GMT, Jasper Janssen <[email hidden]>
wrote:

Quoted message said:

A quick count of my links to curious bicycling articles from "Outing"
magazine, which began as a bike magazine in the 1880's, shows how the
bike boom collapsed:

1897 20
1898 15
1899 14
1900 5
1901 3
1902 1

Searches show that by 1900 bicycles simply lost much of their enormous
early appeal, many bicycle companies went bankrupt, and sales dropped
disastrously.

That doesn't necessarily mean *bicycling* stopped, it just means that
there aren't as many new bikes sold.

Quoted message said:

"Unremarkable" is a wild overstatement of the tiny sales of
automobiles. There were probably more ocean liners docked in U.S.
harbors than automobiles in U.S. cities after the bicycle industry
collapsed:

"During this interregnum [1902-1905] between the bicycle and
automobile eras, the ratio of autos to population went from just one
auto for every million and a half Americans, to one for every
thousand. In contrast, bicycle sales declined from a peak of one for
every fifty citizens in 1897 to one for every 330 by 1904."
f
To put that in table form per thousand population:

cars new bike
owned sales
----- -------
1897 20
1902 0.00067
1904 3
1905 1

That is an *immense* relative growth in car ownership, though. 1 in 1000
is big enough that a prosperous street could easily expect to have one
car, on the average.

When was the chaindrive safety bicycle first made in the US? From that
point onward, you have an enormous boom because people don't have any, but
then you achieve market saturation and the amount of new bikes sold drops
through the bottom *even if* ridership remains high. A 1900 bike probably
lasted a decade or two with even just decent maintenance.

Quoted message said:

Hodges points out that it was only in 1909, years after the bike boom
imploded, that the Model T reduced the entry price for an automobile
to $850, still far out of reach for most people, who could afford a
1909 bicycle at $40, but preferred not to buy one.

But did they need a 1909 bicycle, or were they making do just fine with a
1901 model?

Now I remember what I wanted to know: does anyone have a concise chart
of mountain bike sales, from say, 1984-2000 or so?

--
Ryan Cousineau [email hidden] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"My scenarios may give the impression I could be an excellent crook.
Not true - I am a talented lawyer." - Sandy in rec.bicycles.racing

On Sat, 13 Oct 2007 03:02:40 GMT, Ryan Cousineau <[email hidden]>

Quoted message said:

In article <[email hidden]>,

Jasper Janssen said:

Quoted message said:

On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:39:23 GMT, Jasper Janssen <[email hidden]>
wrote:

Quoted message said:

A quick count of my links to curious bicycling articles from "Outing"
magazine, which began as a bike magazine in the 1880's, shows how the
bike boom collapsed:

1897 20
1898 15
1899 14
1900 5
1901 3
1902 1

Searches show that by 1900 bicycles simply lost much of their enormous
early appeal, many bicycle companies went bankrupt, and sales dropped
disastrously.

That doesn't necessarily mean *bicycling* stopped, it just means that
there aren't as many new bikes sold.

Quoted message said:

"Unremarkable" is a wild overstatement of the tiny sales of
automobiles. There were probably more ocean liners docked in U.S.
harbors than automobiles in U.S. cities after the bicycle industry
collapsed:

"During this interregnum [1902-1905] between the bicycle and
automobile eras, the ratio of autos to population went from just one
auto for every million and a half Americans, to one for every
thousand. In contrast, bicycle sales declined from a peak of one for
every fifty citizens in 1897 to one for every 330 by 1904."
f
To put that in table form per thousand population:

cars new bike
owned sales
----- -------
1897 20
1902 0.00067
1904 3
1905 1

That is an *immense* relative growth in car ownership, though. 1 in 1000
is big enough that a prosperous street could easily expect to have one
car, on the average.

When was the chaindrive safety bicycle first made in the US? From that
point onward, you have an enormous boom because people don't have any, but
then you achieve market saturation and the amount of new bikes sold drops
through the bottom *even if* ridership remains high. A 1900 bike probably
lasted a decade or two with even just decent maintenance.

Quoted message said:

Hodges points out that it was only in 1909, years after the bike boom
imploded, that the Model T reduced the entry price for an automobile
to $850, still far out of reach for most people, who could afford a
1909 bicycle at $40, but preferred not to buy one.

But did they need a 1909 bicycle, or were they making do just fine with a
1901 model?

Now I remember what I wanted to know: does anyone have a concise chart
of mountain bike sales, from say, 1984-2000 or so?

Dear Ryan,

Darned elusive.

Here's a kinda-sorta stab at sales figures, with some references:

http://www.mountainbike.co.nz/politics/articles/anstiss/chapter2.html

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Jasper Janssen said:

...
Quick horror story: according to wp the 4CV was replaced by the Renault 4.
When I was little we owned a 4, from new. And it was scrapped after just 4
or 5 years because there were holes in the floor, not to mention the
bodywork, and it failed the compulsory test. (*%^*& Renault.

The Renault R5 (Le Car to USians) generally suffered from the same
terminal rust problem (to be fair, so did other cars, such as the first
generation Golf (Rabbit to USians). The latter Kenosha made Renaults
were slightly less rust prone, but mechanically unreliable (though not
as bad as a 1970's MG).

I have had the misfortune to own all of the above, which is why I now
own Honda Civics.

--
Tom Sherman - Holstein-Friesland Bovinia
Beer - It's not just for breakfast anymore!

Tom Sherman wrote:
<snip for clarity>

Quoted message said:

which is why I now
own Honda Civics.

wow, there's hope for you yet!

Tom Sherman said:

As for disposable houses, that is due to the foolish decision of
purchasing for initial lowest cost, not lowest lifetime cost. Build a
house out of concrete and proper masonry, and it will not be disposable.
In Europe, there are 1000+ year old stone masonry buildings still in use.

But how many houses' worth of wood has been used to heat those cold
stone houses over the last 1000 years?

Chalo

Chalo Colina said:

Tom Sherman said:

As for disposable houses, that is due to the foolish decision of
purchasing for initial lowest cost, not lowest lifetime cost. Build a
house out of concrete and proper masonry, and it will not be disposable.
In Europe, there are 1000+ year old stone masonry buildings still in use.

But how many houses' worth of wood has been used to heat those cold
stone houses over the last 1000 years?

Probably about the same as the crappy wood frame houses I used to live
in as a child. The walls on those houses let the wind and numerous
insects through.

A modern concrete house with concrete/foam/concrete "sandwich"
construction will cost less to heat and cool than a stick-frame and wall
board box of the same size will. The concrete house will also be
practically impervious to fire, water damage, insect intrusion and
damage, will not need siding and roof replacement, and will have a
structure that will easily be as functionally as good as new several
hundred years later.

Of course, modern USian society prefers disposable items, and
CONSUMPTION, CONSUMPTION, CONSUMPTION!

--
Tom Sherman - Holstein-Friesland Bovinia
Beer - It's not just for breakfast anymore!