Great Inventions of Cycling... 1870 Brakes
I’ve always wanted to write a book called Somebody Stop Me! An Arresting History of Bicycle Brakes. So far, no publisher has been interested, so here is some preliminary research that I thought I might as well use for something.
The first brakes were ‘spoon’ brakes — just a bit of wood or rubber that rubbed against the outside of the tyre. On very early bikes with steel tyres, this was more use as an audible warning of impending disaster than it was for anything else. It was worked by a lever, or in one or two cases, by a cord wrapped round a rotating handlebar grip, so that braking was as simple as twisting the bar through 15 or 16 revolutions. Penny farthings had a similar ‘plunger’ brake, which pressed down on the front tyre. It was as well they didn’t work either, since if they had done, they’d have killed riders in their scores by flinging them over the handlebars.
Rim brakes became the standard in the 20th century; they were more effective, and didn’t shred the tyre.
By the 1950s, the hot topic was side-pull or centre-pull. The former looked better. The latter actually worked. You could tell everything you needed to know about a rider from their brakes. Not until dual-pivot side pulls became popular in the 1980s could you have the best of both worlds.
And now we have disc brakes, which, in so many ways, mark the end of history.