The Story of Shifting

The Story of Shifting

The story of shifting is quite an intriguing one with the Penny Farthing the basis of shifting. The Penny Farthings Cranks were attached to the wheel. This meant the  rollout or how far the bike would move in one rotation of the pedals was all about the size of the wheel.

After the death of the penny farthing and the beginning of the then called safety bicycle the transmission was via a chain driven by a crankset. This meant that different ratios of gears could be used by altering the number of teeth on the sprockets or cogs on the rear wheel or the teeth on the front chainring. Bicycles from the late 1800’s to the 1930’s could have two gears with a sprocket on either side of the wheel. Those gears would be typically a flat gear and a hill gear.

The next important inovation was the what happened after the scene on the Croce D'Aune Pass in 1927. Tulio Campagnolo was in a chance to win the Gran Premio della Vittoria when he tried to change into his climbing gear. The axle nuts were frozen so he was unable to change gear. This cost the promising racer a chance at victory this brought a string of inventions that would improve gear shifting. It was on that mountain he muttered the legendary quote in cycling folklore “Something has to be changed in the rear”. He meant by this a new way of changing gear that was quicker and easier. What he did although quite a small change was to invent the quick release skewer. The skewer allowed quick wheel changes without much effort.

The next big innovation in cycling was only 10 years later with the creation of the Cambio Corsa rod gears . This worked with two rods. One was a quick release lever and the other was a rod that was used to push the chain before the days of the derailleur. Without the derailleur the dropouts would have to be long to take the slack out of the chain. How this would work is that the rider would open the quick release lever so that the wheel could move freely around the dropouts. Then the rider would push the chain onto a different sprocket and then let the chain take up the slack in the chain then you would close the quick release and then the shift was complete.

A few years after Tulio Campagnolo created the Roubaix gear shifter that combined The quick release lever and the chain pusher in one. However this didn’t last long because a couple of years later he created the Gran Sport derallieur. This was one of the single most important invoations in cycling. Put it simple it revolutionzed cycling. This meant that that the rod shifter could be replaced with downtube levers. That meant better ease of use and faster shifting as well as being more smooth with less rubbing of the chain.

Then after twenty years of innovation the changing stopped. It wasn’t that nothing improved it was just that there was no big change. The amount of gears increased as well as speed of shifting but in comparison there was no change. There has from then to now only one major innovation in cycling. Electronic shifting. The Japanese have added another innovation against the Campagnolo Italians. Electronic shifting is more efficient with the system run by a computer it makes little adjustments to the chain and overshifts to make a more efficient shift.

As you can see the technology has changed a huge amount since the now ancient Penny Farthing. Now are we at the peak can we improve the technology? There isn’t much we can think of but like the 40 year gap between Derallieurs and Dual Integration Levers not much happened. Could we say there will be another big gap in innovation all we can do is improve what we know. So that’s the story of shifting from the humble penny farthing to the Japanese computer shifting.

James Moffat