Talk:Safety bicycle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cycling Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Cycling. WikiProject Cycling is an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to cycling on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and contribute to the discussion.
Stub This article has been rated as Stub-Class on the quality scale.
This article has been automatically rated as Stub-Class because it uses a stub template.
  • If you agree with the assessment, please remove |auto=yes from this template.
  • If you disagree with the assessment, please change it by editing the |class= parameter in this template and removing the stub template from the article.
It is requested that a photograph or photographs be included in this article to improve its quality.
The Free Image Search Tool (FIST) may be able to locate suitable images on Flickr and other web sites.

Contents

[edit] Comment

"Ride in an upright position"? This seems backwards, as I see bicycles as described here as ridden leaning heavily forward while penny farthings would be ridden more upright. Leaning lowers center of gravity and, especially in bicycles with front wheel brakes, makes it much harder or impossible to fly over the bars without actually letting go of them and diving forward.


[edit] Removed

I have removed the following from the article, because as far as I can tell it has almost no relevance to this subject:

In 1890, two recent graduates of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, Thomas Gaskell Allen, Jr and William Lewis Sachtleben, literally took the safety bicycle to the world when they set out to circle the planet on the new invention. The inspiration for their journey was Thomas Stevens' then popular Around the World on a Bicycle (1887-88). Stevens had used the much more dangerous 'ordinary' bicycle in his trip.
In 1890 they traveled across Europe from England and wintered over in Athens. In the Spring of 1891 the two began the most dangerous part of their journey, a trip through Central Asia rarely visited by outsiders. That portion of their journey was not completed until the fall of 1892 and is described in their (still in print) book, Across Asia on a Bicycle. As they traveled, they demonstrated the bicycle for the first time to people across Asia. Along the way, they became the first Americans to climb Mount Ararat in Turkey, reaching the top on July 4, 1891.
On June 3, 1893 they completed their around the world journey by returning to New York City. The 15,000 miles they traveled was at that time the "longest continuous land journey ever made around the world." Thomas Allen's much battered 1890 Huber Safety bicycle is now part of a science museum and is housed in Hanger L4 at Wroughton Airfield in Wiltshire, England.

[edit] Photo would be nice

Incidentally, why is this template supposed to go on Talk pages? It would seem more logical to have it on the article page where people would see it immediately, as with the various cleanup tags. 81.158.1.206 03:35, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Diamond-shaped frame not necessary

The "Cogent" Safety bicycle shown in the illustration does not have a diamond-shaped frame as mentioned in the definition of a safety bicycle. So I have removed this part of the definition.

Gary 16:41, 12 November 2007 (UTC)