Big Tech, Tiny Progress

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Many, many moons ago, back in the 1960s, I was growing up, and out of my first 'proper' bike; a 24" wheel Rudge bicycle, that I had ridden since I graduated to it from the 'kiddie' cycle on which I learned to ride at the age of four or five, and which was nicked from me, anyway, by miscreant or miscreants unknown [the local police then, as now, saying that I would never see it again: they were right]. My dad, unable and unwilling to fork [sorry] out for a new machine of more sensible proportions to accommodate my growing frame [sorry], opted to do what was natural to him as a long-standing, poverty-stricken cyclist: he built one for me from component parts he either already had or made available from small ads in the Evening Mail or from friends and acquaintances. The basis of the build was a frame: a Reynolds 531 tube racing frame, that hung on the cellar wall, looking for wheels, crank and all the other bits that would complete a bicycle.

As was usual, dad built the thing in secrecy, taking the frame down to bare metal, applying some four or five coats of aluminium paint over red lead primer, followed by a similar number of coats of varnish: it would have stood head and shoulders above anything available today in quality of finish. The wheels were 26" steel rims - I wasn't to ride alloys for some years hence - and the gear-set comprised a [steel also] 52-tooth crank and pedals and a four-speed Derailleur gear change, with a 13-tooth top gear; the combo good for well over 30 mph, should you have the muscle, or a decent downward gradient to assist. The saddle was a Brooks leather racing job, and the brakes were standard side-pull callipers. The end result looked amazing and rode fabulously well, serving me throughout my adolescent years.

Today, I took delivery of this month's Wired magazine from the States, which featured the pictured: a bicycle produced from a collaboration between titanium bike builder J. Laverack and no less than Aston Martin: a bespoke - if you have to ask the price you can't afford it - machine built to order to the highest engineering specs imaginable. Carbon fibre, titanium, electronic transmission: you name it, it has it. No price is quoted in the review, but I would guess, conservatively, we're talking twenty to forty grand. I could be wrong there, but sure as hell, given the people making it and the processes involved, it is not going to be anywhere within the reach of the hoi polloi: my bike costed out at a few quid, if even that. The thing that motivated this post is that, though no price was quoted in the review of this ultra-high-tech beast, it said that the bikes were available at a starting weight of sixteen and a half pounds. Mine weighed in at exactly that: I could lift it with two fingers, at the age of sixteen. Progress? It is, after all, only a bicycle: how much progress does all that represent?

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