FACTORALY - E22 BICYCLES

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

This time it's life on two wheels as Simon and Bruce investigate the history and tragedy (sorry, MAMILs) and the general story of the bicycle. From its bone-shaking beginnings to the oddest tandem, you'll discover much more about the bike than you ever wanted to know! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

hello simon hello bruce how are you today i'm feeling chipper thank you very much how are you i'm trying to think of a word that also means chipper. Without stealing your thunder, I'm feeling perky. Perky. There you go. We're perky and chipper. Maybe we should start by telling people who we are and what this is and what we do. That's a good idea. It leaves less up to the imagination, doesn't it?

So we are, first of all, I'm Simon Wells. And I'm Bruce Fielding. And we are both professional voiceover artists, as hopefully you can tell by now. Yeah, we can do this all day long. Absolutely. And we are also both nerds. We love random facts. We are both pub quiz attendees.

We are. And we're here to share some of our useless knowledge with you through the platform of this podcast, which is called Factorily. We're not aficionados by any stretch of the imagination. We're not experts on any of the subjects that we talk about. But we're here to have a chat, and you are welcome to come and listen. Shall we talk about bicycles? Go on then. Why not? I don't know that much about bicycles, actually.

I know a reasonable amount. I've had some. I've got one at the moment. I had a tricycle when i was very young did you i did i had a boot a tricycle with a boot yes okay of course i'm a chauffeur well naturally of course what did you put in the boot of your tricycle when you were a boy toys it was blue it was a baby blue color oh that's sweet little bruce on his little trike yes so what was your first bicycle um my first bicycle was a bmx i had a a blue bmx couldn't do any tricks on it or anything like that but it was the popular brand at the time so that's what i had and um i took it down to the local park we had this sort of it was

a very small racing track, and it was used primarily for remote-controlled cars. Oh, wow. Which my dad and I went and used quite a lot. We had a couple of RC cars. But when there was no one using it for that purpose, kids went around it on their bikes. Yes.

Which I did with great glee. And gusto. Indeed, some of that as well. Yeah, I mean, I learned to ride in my back garden, but I learned to ride backwards because there was a hill and I figured I was safer going down the hill backwards than going down forwards.

And I was completely unsupervised. I was given a bicycle and there you go, learned to ride that. That's an interesting logic. Immediately, that makes me think, how on earth did you know where you were going? I was, it was only in the back garden I knew where I was going. Oh, fine.

Okay. That's okay then. So, bicycles. Yes. Bicycle. It's like two wheels. Very good. Yep.

The etymology of the cycle bit comes from the word kuklos, which means wheel. So, a bicycle is a two-wheeled device and these have come in so many different shapes and sizes and varieties over the years the first piece of equipment that we can sort of look at that looks like what we would imagine didn't have pedals but it was called the dandy horse yes i'll put some in the show it says some wonderful pictures of people dressed up on on dandy horses yeah so yes you know gentlemen in top hats ladies in in big billowing gowns rode these things um dandy horse it was originally i say it was originally there are different claims as as always. It was British. No, no, it was definitely British. If you ask the French, they say it was them. If you ask us, you say it was us. It was

most likely a German chap called Karl Dreis, who created the Laufmaschine, the running machine, in 1817. But not a running machine. Not a machine that runs. Yes, and not one of the machines that you get on to run. No, no, not that.

So these things have actually had a bit of a resurgence with children recently. I think they call them balance bikes these days. A small wooden bike with no pedals or anything like that, and your feet touch the ground, and you simply push yourself along one foot at a time. I've no idea why i'm making this action this is an audio podcast so yes that's how it started off it uh you sat astride this wooden frame and you sort of walked yourself or ran yourself along on wheels so you could kind

of like lift lift your feet up when you're going downhill yes and let did it have brakes no you sort of put your foot out on the ground and dragged yourself to a halt um but at the same avoid hills then avoid hills yes absolutely you know going up one would be nigh on impossible anyway under such conditions yeah um but yes the idea of seeing a victorian lady or gent astride one of these things is quite a silly image. Yes. And I think when they did the illustrations, they kind of overdid the legs as well. So it always looks like they've got sort of fairly short body and fairly long legs. Yes, that's true.

So that was the dandy horse or the lauf machine yeah um and then it sort of went through various permutations you know in in french it was called the velocipede um which means well isn't that a dinosaur close that's a velociraptor okay silly sorry being silly um uh but yeah so this thing first appeared in 19 sorry in 1817 um it was not until around the late 1830s early 1840s that they became mechanical pedals were put on so instead of going under well I suppose you're still under foot power in a strange way, but instead of pushing yourself along with your feet, there were pedals attached directly to the front wheel. And as you turned the pedals, the wheel went round and that's what made you go. Several claims for that as well. It may have been first invented by a Scottish

fellow called Kirk Patrick Macmillan in 1839. It may have been invented invented by a Scottish fellow called Kirk Patrick Macmillan in 1839. It may have been invented by a Frenchman around the same time. It was the Scotsman. It was, was it? Yeah. You sound very certain. Don't I? That's one of my specialities in voiceover. I know what I'm talking about.

No, I really don't. Well, you said it in such a manner that it sounds trustworthy. So this Scotsman that invented the pedal-powered bicycle. Absolutely, uncategorically invented it. Uncategorically, absolutely. Yeah, totally. So were both the wheels at that point the same size? No, so right from the start, the front wheel was slightly bigger than the back

um until we got to the point of it being ridiculously bigger than the one on the back think of the penny farthing yes um i can never remember which of those two coins is bigger a penny or a farthing you're so young thank you so a penny was bigger was it a farthing was a quarter of a penny okay well there you go right so the penny was the front wheel and the farthing was the back wheel is what we've established yes good um with the seat precariously perched directly above the center of the of the front wheel um so it's quite a thing to to get onto you sort of push the bike along you clambered one foot up onto the pedal and then you just jumped up onto the seat above the front wheel yeah i've seen people do it have you in real life yeah yeah it just looked it

frightens me it looks really scary if you're practiced at it it looks very elegant because you basically you sort of like hop along, you sort of run with the bike a little bit to get it up to speed. And then you sort of hop on with your, it's a bit like a horse. You kind of put your left foot on the left pedal first with your right foot sort of trailing. And then you sort of hop. And then you swing your right leg over the bicycle.

And then sit down. That was a perfect description yes but yes if you see people who don't know what they're doing to it it looks very clumsy and horrible and generally ends in tears but um yeah if you see somebody who knows what they're doing it looks good so yes the the front wheel was bigger than the back wheel. In a time before gears, you know, the pedals were fixed, completely fixed to the wheel. A fixie. A fixie. Is that what they called it?

Yeah. Well, no, that's what they call it now. Oh, I see. Retrospectively. You know, people have those really posh, super-duper light aluminum sort of titanium carbon fiber bikes that have no gears they basically it's a direct drive yes from the pedal to the back wheel yes they're called fixes because it's a fixed ratio oh i see i see so you really do have to pedal as hard as as you know as much as the speed that you're going and the number of rotations of the wheel yes no stermy archer for you young man thank you do you care to explain yourself sturmy archer hmm still i mean when i was a kid sturmy archer gears was like it's like the first three-speed uh gear was it was a sturmy archer gear it was like a a fairly large aluminium control and yes it had like a lever on it and you would click it like with a very

satisfying clack hmm from between one two and three hmm and it would shift the the derailleur would shift the chain from the smallest to the largest gearing right okay so no gears on these things no gears on them at all um yeah so gears didn't come in until the early 1870s so this idea of having your pedals fixed directly to the wheel went on for you know half a century um before here it comes an english person bruce yes and you know i actually know who made the the company that made the first geared bicycle. Go on then, over to you. It's a company called Aerial.

And the reason I know this is because the company, well, there's a company called Aerial that still exists. I mean, Aerial went on from making bicycles to motorcycles. So it was called the Square Four Aerial Motorcycle. It was very famous in its day. And then some nearly 20 years ago, a guy started to make motor vehicles called aerials. And I bought one of the first aerial atoms that was made. And bought two more after that one. And founded the owners club so i was the i was i was the chairman of the aerial atom owners club so that's why i know about aerial bicycles

but i don't know much more about them than that you first geared bicycle you you know more about them than i do because i wasn't going to um i wasn't even going to mention the fact that they were called Ariel because I didn't realize that. I do know that it was invented by a chap called James Starley in 1871, but I hadn't twigged onto the name Ariel. As soon as you started talking about Ariel, I started thinking of washing powder. Or the Little Mermaid. Or that, yeah. Yeah, so this gentleman, James Starley, there were three English chaps based around Coventry who got together to create the first, what they called then the safety bicycle.

Because the pedals were fixed directly to the wheels, it meant that you couldn't really slow down terribly quickly without doing know doing yourself a mischief yes or or you know without the bicycle just sort of grinding to a complete halt or tumbling yes exactly and there were quite a few accidents that you know had occurred because of this so yes starley lawson and shergold uh introduced the the uh the first chained bicycle certainly um and then as you say the first geared bike in in 1871 um so that meant that you didn't have to have the enormous front wheel anymore uh it meant that uh the you know you didn't have to be so high off the road because of the enormous front wheel and therefore it was all a little bit safer. And this was in the UK or all over the world?

So it started off in Coventry in the UK. And it slowly, well, not very slowly, actually, it quickly came on. People suddenly realized, oh, yeah, this is quite a good idea. I mean, they were big in America, obviously. Huge bicycles in America. They kind of gave you that freedom for less well-off people who couldn't afford a horse. Right. So if you can't afford a horse and you can't afford to keep a horse, what you can do is you can have a bicycle.

And there were a pair of brothers in America who thought, this bicycle idea, that's quite good. So they started a factory and their surname was Wright. Right. And these Wright brothers started a bicycle factory. And I think you might have heard of what they did after that. Yeah, something about flying. I can't really remember. Something.

Basically, their bicycle business took off and they did really, really well and they managed to invest in other things. Right, fine. But they started off making bikes. They were originally a bicycle company. I did not know that. But they've taken off quite a lot now, haven't they? I mean, it just exploded globally. Yeah, absolutely. I'm not a terribly proficient cyclist. The majority of my experience of cycling comes from the fact that I used to be a postman. And the bicycle was an essential part of our equipment. One of those two-tonners.

So Royal Mail used a manufacturer called Pashley. Oh, they're very smart bicycles pashley yeah so we went through we i'm not with them anymore they went through a few different uh varieties of bicycle but uh the one that was prevalent whilst i was there was called the pashley pronto which was a step through bicycle you could sort of slip on and off the bike on either side um you know without doing yourself too much yes of a bother because there was a crossbar which was like it again i'm using my hands bruce is now making a very good rendition of a crossbar using his arm parallel to the ground

thank you very much as opposed to the so that was sort of like the male crossbar yes and then they realized that it was that very difficult for women in sort of large skirts to get over that crossbar. Yes. So they basically made it into like a second bar at the bottom. Yes, that's right. Yes. So you sort of had a big gaping back gap between the upright that held the saddle and the upright that held the handlebars. You just had a gap in between the two and you could just casually sidle your way out of it um many of the uh postal workers i worked with referred to it as

the lady's bike in a slightly derogatory fashion but i liked it so yes royal mail were using bicycles to deliver the mail for ages ever since sort of the mid-1800s they started using them they they started giving their postal workers an allowance to go and buy their own bike if they wanted to. But in 1896, they made it an official policy and started buying and then producing their own bicycles for their staff to use. And then in 2010, whilst I was still in the company,

they officially stopped using them. Oh, shame. Postman on a bicycle is such a nice thing. Isn't it? What an image. Bicycles haven't always been for fun. They were also used in the Boer War. Really? Yes. Talk about that then.

So in 1895, in the Jameson Raid, it was in the Second Boer War. Horses were on the way out, but they didn't want to go full sort of – 1895, there were really no cars. But they realized they needed something to replace the horses. So they adopted the bicycle. Okay. And then this was kind of picked up by the Germans in the First World War. Right.

Who had the Jäger Light Infantry Battalion of bicycles. Wow. So the German military had them. And they had them in the Second World War as well. Okay. They were bicycle battalions. Really? Because the other thing is, of course, that you can't jump out of a plane with a horse.

No, I've heard that. So it's quite tricky. Yeah. But you can jump out of a plane with a horse. No, I've heard that. So it's quite tricky. But you can jump out of a plane with a bicycle. So technically, if you're a paratrooper, you can hit the ground and you don't have to be running. You can be cycling. So you get to where you're going much faster. You can be dropped slightly further away, so a bit more safe, and then cycle into the zone that you're supposed to be fighting in. I had no idea

this was a thing that they did it's it's amazing and the japanese in the second world war employed bicycles everywhere because a lot of those jungles that they were in were quite tricky to navigate but actually on a bicycle you're quite narrow yeah so you can go through gaps and you can move faster and you kind of get get from a to B a lot quicker than you do by marching. Yes, I suppose so. Yeah, how interesting. And in fact, the Eastern European and Scandinavian armies, like the Finnish, the Swedish, the Polish armies, they were using bicycles until about 1970. Really?

Yeah. That's incredible. There's only one country that actually didn't ever bother using bicycles in the military. Can you guess which one that was? Oh, don't tell me. It was us? It wasn't us. Oh, good.

Okay. It was the Americans. Oh, really? Yes. Americans have never used bicycles in war. Okay. Well, I mean, there are a lot more countries that have used bicycles in war than I ever realized because I didn't realise that was a thing.

Isn't it good? Well, it's not good. War is never good. Fantastic. I'm sort of picturing an awful lot of soldiers on bikes hurtling towards each other, perhaps to the ride of the Valkyries or something like that, in a sort of very aggressive and determined manner.

Almost like jousting. That was the picture that's going through my head, although they probably either had rifles with bayonets fitted or they would have had machine guns. Yes.

I think they mostly didn't use them for actively battle. I think they used them for transportation just to get from A to B. Okay. No, you've ruined that image now.

They used it for jousting. There have been various improvements to the bicycle over the years. I guess the biggest advance that came was on the tyres and the wheels. Yes, that's true, yeah. They were originally some of the earliest bicycles, even sort of going back to the dandy horse I mentioned right at the start. Some of them were nicknamed the bone shaker.

Yes, some of them still are, aren't they, today? It's like, oh, get in the old bone shaker. I didn't realize that was still in use. But yeah, in the days where there was zero suspension and your wheels were solid wood, you're going to feel absolutely every bump i mean there have been all sorts of other other improvements and and advantages to to riding bicycles and yeah as you said suspension is another big one yes and brakes and and having rubber brake brake blocks rubber brake blocks tongue twister of the day it's time just to time for the voiceovers rubber brake brake blocks oh yeah i brake blocks. Rubber brake blocks.

Oh, I'm going to write that one down. I'm going to use it. That's far better than Betty Botter with her bitter batter bit. Or something. Yes, it's better than that. Good. So, yeah. So, we had sort of rubber brakes and we had suspension and all sorts of.

And then the seats got comfier as well. Yes. Yes. And the first seats actually were sprung. Right, okay, yeah. Well, the first comfy seats were sprung. And then they started to put more fabric and material and padding in them. And then they started taking it out for some reason recently.

And the bicycle seats now look as though they do some serious damage. They're very narrow and pointy looking, aren't they? They don't look comfortable at all. No. But I think what that is, is that if you see the very well-designed Lycra cycling shorts, they are padded in that area. That's true. The seat itself, yes.

So maybe the padding has moved from the seat to the clothing. Interesting. I mean, some bikes are actually probably quite comfortable. There's a thing called a recumbent. Okay. Do you know about recumbent bicycles? No. I mean, they are are actually probably quite comfortable. There's a thing called a recumbent. Okay. Do you know about recumbent bicycles? No. I mean, they are literally what they sound like.

They're bicycles that you lay down in. Oh, is that what those are called? Yes. Ah. So the pedals are way up the front. Yes. And the seat is like halfway and there's like a back. So you actually like settle down.

They're very low. Yeah. So if you're driving any kind of decent-sized car, you can't see them. Yeah. So they have to have flagpoles and stuff to make sure that you can actually see where they're going. But there is a lot of people who believe

that the recumbent bicycle is the next level, is the evolution of the bicycle. Oh, we did talk about gears earlier as well and how gearing helps you. I mean, gearing is one of the things that helps you to go faster, helps you to go uphill. I did a quick bit of research and I discovered there was a bike that had 1,500 gears on it. Beg your pardon? I can't even picture what that would look like. You know when you make a sandwich with eight pieces of

bread oh yeah standard every day and each between each piece of bread there's quite a large filling i would imagine it looked like that yeah i would think so it was like practically impossible to eat i practically impossible to ride that's a lot of gears that is an awful lot of gears i was having a look at um what what is the fastest speed that someone has ever managed to get on a pedal bicycle. Well, obviously the speed limit is 20 miles an hour in Regent's Park, so nobody ever goes faster than that. Of course not, no.

I would think it would probably be up in the 60s, 60 miles an hour maybe, 70 miles an hour. Okay, that's a good guess, 183. Now, I should caveat this. What? Yeah, yeah. I should state that that speed wasn't gotten up to by manual power. Okay. They had a

helping hand. So they didn't start... A tow rope? Yeah, essentially, yeah. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. This was in September of 2018. Denise Mueller-Koronek from San Diego set this record. And she was towed by a drag car up to that speed and then released. And she maintained that speed for a full minute can you imagine what the gearing must have been like on that bicycle must be phenomenal mustn't it but

the because of the the speed she was going the the uh dragster the car that took her up to that speed had sort of a a screen around the back of it which created a nice little slipstream oh a bubble yeah exactly yeah so very very wind very, very little wind resistance and she managed to maintain that staggeringly high speed in the wake of this car for a full minute. And that is officially the fastest that anyone has ever cycled on a bicycle. And that's on the flat? I guess that must be on the flat rather than down the hill.

Yeah, so this was done in Utah on one of the salt lakes there. Oh, wow. So a nice big open flat area. I mean, frankly, for me going like 20 or 30 on a bicycle. I do have a bicycle. Right. And it's fine. It's not as nice as going on the motorcycles, but it's fine.

It does the job? It does the job. And I've actually replaced the front wheel with an electric front wheel. Oh, okay. I'll get a little bit of an assist, which is nice. Electric bicycles, that's something I did no research on at all. No, me neither. I don't believe in them. I think they're basically motorcycles.

It's a bicycle with a motor, so it's a motorcycle. And in fact, some of the earliest motorcycles were bicycles. Right. There was a thing in France, I remember in my youth, called a velocette, which is like it's a bicycle, but they have a very small petrol motor, like a two-stroke motor. Anyway, so it has a rubber wheel that drives the front wheel. Right.

And you can adjust the power of that on the handlebar. So technically it is a sort of a motorcycle. Yeah. But it's a bicycle that you've added a motor to. Yeah. And the first motorcycles were actually bicycles that you added motors to. I know you like a fact. Did you discover what the longest bicycle was?

I did. Now, we've had a few occasions in the past where we both think that we've found the correct world record. Is Simon's bigger than mine? Exactly, yeah. Exactly. world record is simon's bigger than mine exactly yeah exactly so on the count of three let's say how long the longest bicycle in feet will meters um oh crikey i've got mine in feet i'll i'll convert mine to feet it's fine okay just to keep up with you okay okay one two three one hundred and thirty six feet feet oh you beat me okay talk about yours i i researched it i saw i thought simon's gonna want to say how long the longest bike is and and

i yeah i got to 100 so obviously you beat me so tell me more about your 155 foot so my 155 foot and 8 inch long bicycle, which in metric is 47 and a half meters. This was built by an Australian fellow called Bernie Ryan. And it's a very odd looking thing. It's just one big, long, continuous welded frame of bars and crossbars and so on. It's got a seat at the front yeah where the one person sits and steers it has a seat right at the back where someone sits and pedals yeah and then there's just an awful lot of frame in between the two so just a huge amount of space between the front and the back yes yes i don't think it really has any useful practical purpose. It's probably very difficult to get round corners on.

Where are the brakes? I suppose they're on the person at the front. I didn't look into that. Because, you know you see these cars where they put one car on top of another and the car on top has the steering wheel and the car on the bottom has the accelerator and brake. Yeah, yeah. You must be able to have to have contact with the the person sitting 155 feet behind you you'd like to think so wouldn't you yes stop pedaling but of course you can fill that that that you can fill that space with more seats and more

handlebars and more and more pedals well yes i would imagine so, yeah. I remember the goodies. Yes, I do. Goody, goody, yum, yum. Yes. Used to have a – now, look this up. All bicycles with more than one seat are called tandems. Are they? Regardless of how many seats they have. So the goodies had a three-seater, which they called a trandem. Right.

Because it was funny. But technically, it's actually a tandem. So the goodies triple bicycle was a tandem. Okay. As was the one that had 35 seats. What? That was 67 foot long. Still called a tandem.

Oh, brilliant. But 35 people riding it. And all pedalling. And all pedalling. Okay. I mean, that makes a lot more sense than this. But can you imagine organising 35 people to start pedalling at the same time? It would probably have taken quite a lot of trial and error.

Yeah. A whistle, at least. At least. The very least. So there we go. That has been another episode of Factorally. Thank you so much for coming along and listening to us waffle. Thank you. And if you've enjoyed yourself, then please come again next time

where we will pick another random topic to talk about for about half an hour and we will enjoy your company then. Definitely. Until then, cheerio. Bye-bye.