On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 07:10:47 GMT, "Blair Maynard"
<
[email protected]> may have said:
>I have searched but can't find exactly where the 26 inch wheel came from
>before it was used in the early seventies by the ATB pioneers. I believe it
>came from Schwinn Black Phantom, which seems to have been a "boy's" version
>of a larger "Cruiser." Could someone help me out here:
>
>What bicycle(s) popularized the 26 inch wheel before it was adopted by the
>ATB community?
The 26"/559 rim was the dominant size for the "balloon tire" bikes of
the era from WWII through the 1960s, and was already common prior to
the war. Most US makers had multiple models, Schwinn among them. By
the mid-60s, the three common sizes of adult bike in the US were using
either the 26"/559 rim, the EA3/590 rim, and the 27"/635 rim. The
wide availability and ruggedness of the 26"/559 bikes were prime
factors in their choice by Gary Fisher and his cohorts when they
started to popularize "mountain biking" as an activity. (This is a
fancy way of saying that Fisher and his accomplices had lots of cheap
26" bikes available to bash around; the EA3 and 27" wheels didn't have
wide enough tires to be useful.)
> Any knowledge or speculation on why it became the standard
>ATB wheel?
Price, availability, and suitability at first, and then tradition
later. The early mountain bikers were working with what they
had...which was largely old 26" cruisers with 559 rims.
>Were any balloon tires available for 700c wheels in the early
>seventies?
Wider-than-38mm tires for the 700c have never been common in the US
market, and have only recently become something other than a rarity.
They still do not reach the widths of the knobbies used on the typical
mtb today. In part this is due to the fact that the typical 700c rim
is too narow to support such a tire.
>Which came first, the tire or the ATB?
The 559 tire size predated the ATB (or mtb in the jargon more common
here) by more than 40 years if you accept that the mtb did not exist
prior to its "official" debut. On the other hand, people have been
riding down dirt paths on bicycles since the very first, and while the
specific combination of features which characterizes the modern mtb
(near-flat handlebars, knobby fat tires, wide gearing range, etc) may
not have been common previously, this is not to say that they were
never seen before the mountain bike's advent.
Essentially, the one unique characteristic that the early "mountian
bike" had over its predecssors was the name. Everything since is
simply a refinement of what was already available.
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