17 thoughts on “Do You Want a Bicycle?”

1. It looks like $100 in 1897 is close to $3,000 in today’s dollars. That’s a lot for what seems to be a single-speed bike.

2. Yeah, I’ll have to go for the $15 model. Unless, maybe, the Browning Bros. have added some armament not mentioned in the ad …

3. Very interesting brake on the front wheel. I’ve never seen one like that. I hope the back wheel has brakes too.

4. Were these the same Brownings of the gun design and manufacturing fame?

5. The very same. They often advertised their sporting goods — arms or otherwise — in the Church magazines of this era.

6. A copy of their 1902 letterhead is posted here. There must have been an Ogden City realignment of addresses between 1897 and 1902, because the address then is 2461 rather than 1461.

7. The $100 price is staggering. I remember trying to save $100 for a 10-speed in 1970. But I also remember when calculators cost $400 and PCs with 64K of RAM cost $3,000. So it’s interesting that bicycles took a similar price path.

8. I’m with Gary and Last Lemming: $100 for a bike in 1897 was an impossibly huge amount of money. And, I bought my first bike, a Schwinn Varsity, for about $100 in 1969 or 1970–even then $100 was a lot of money for a teenager.

9. Ardis, I hope this okay. For anyone who’s interested, here’s a link to a site with more information, and photographs, about the Ladies Rambler Model D:
   https://ramblercycles.wordpress.com/1895-gormully-jeffery-ladies-rambler/

10. What a way to bring an old advertisement to life, Gary! Thanks.

11. That was really interesting, Gary.

12. So, if $100 then is equivalent to about $3000 now, then $15 would be equivalent to $450. That still seems like a lot for a low-end bike, especially considering that the high-end bike barely has brakes.

13. About braking: I had supposed that the bicycles had a coaster brake, which would be applied by pressing backward on the pedals, and which have no external parts other than a brace between the rear hub and the frame. (I can’t such a brace either in the advertisement or in the photos that Gary linked to.) But then I discovered that the coaster brake wasn’t invented until 1898. It’s likely, then, that the Rambler D did not have a freewheel hub, and that the rider slowed the bike by slowing the rate he or she was pedaling.

    Though the freewheeling hub had been invented 30 years earlier, it didn’t become standard in bicycle manufacture until after the invention of the coaster brake.

    So the ladies who rode the Rambler D were like the Brooklyn hipsters on their fixies–“Look ma! No brakes.” But so long as they managed to keep their feet on the pedals they would have been able to stop.

14. Were not most bikes of the period not high-wheelers? These early but now standard design bicycles are truely iconic, and recumbants aside, their imitators will dominate the industry for some time to come. Even when we get the image wrong in our heads ( see the once linked in “Notes from the Field” http://www.gianlucagimini.it) we still know this is what a bicycle IS.

15. There is a handbrake for the front wheel in the pictures. All ready to send you face first on the pavement since it’s only on the front. And it won’t allow a front fender.

16. When a bike is braking, regardless of which wheel is being braked, weight shifts off the back wheel and onto the front wheel. The maximum friction between the tire and the road is proportional to the force holding the tire down against the road, so as the deceleration increases, the rear brake accomplishes less and less and the front brake does more and more of the braking work until the point is reached that there is no more force holding the rear tire against the pavement and any greater deceleration will lead to flipping over the handlebars. (It’s an exhilarating feeling to be just short of that point on a bike that handles well, or at least it was when I was twenty years younger.) If only a rear brake is used then the amount of deceleration possible cannot be enough to flip the bike since the friction that produces the braking is, as said already, proportion to the weight holding the tire down; a rear brake is self-limiting. A front brake alone can slow down a bike faster than a rear brake alone, but braking too hard and flipping the bike is possible. For a biker who knows what she is doing, a rear brake doesn’t do much work and is not really needed.

    –John Mansfield, mechanical engineer and sometimes bike rider

17. I confess I never expected a post like this (ads are for the most part just throwaway posts, for historical flavor) to generate this much discussion, and especially this much knowledgeable discussion (link to the modern pictures, conversion of dollar values between then and now, and now this engineering detail.

    I know I say it a lot, but I mean it — readers add so much value, even create nearly the entire value, to so many Keepa posts. You are fantastic.

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