Mountain bike: An invention born out of love for adventure
Darting through rugged hilly terrains on a bicycle can be an experience of a lifetime for sure. Imagine yourself cycling down the hills while the sun is about to set in between two mountain peaks. Mesmerising, isn’t it? But if you take your regular cycle and try to traverse through the mountains, not only will you lose balance, you might even go off path or meet with an accident. So, what you should opt for instead is a mountain bike. But how did they come into being? Let’s find out.
Mountain bicycle vs. regular bicycle
Mountain bike is a custom-made bicycle specially designed for off-road riding and typically has straight and flat handlebars, a heavier frame than normal bicycles, wide tires, sometimes even with knobs and a higher ground clearance. No wonder, mountain bike is also known as trail bike and off-road bike.
Mountain bike: An invention by Joe Breeze and his friends
Mountain bike does not have a long history. It’s a fairly a new invention and has been around only since the late 1970s. However, contrary to what people may think, mountain bikes were invented not by a big bicycle manufacturing company and their team of developers, but through a trial-and-error method by a group of friends while they were doing what they loved: Riding through dirt tracks down the side of a mountain in San Francisco.
Okay, so here’s how this unique kind of bicycle, meant for hilly terrain was born. A group of friends, Joe Breeze, Otis Guy, Charlie Kelly and Gary Fisher, one fine afternoon decided to race their regular bikes down the rugged paths on Mount Tamalpais, situated in the Marin County in northern San Francisco, US. But it wasn’t before long when all of them agreed that it was difficult to ride their bikes down the rough trails.
They came back and decided to experiment with different types of bicycles. The goal was simple, to find one to tackle the rough and tough trails. Incidentally, they came upon balloon-tired, single-speed bikes that were made before World WarII and had heavy frames as well as big tires. Joe Breeze and his friends named these old bikes ‘klunkers’ and riding them came to be known as ‘klunking.’ Interestingly, these were also called ‘ballooners’ in Colorado and ‘dirt bombers’ in Oregon.
Inspired by klunkers, in 1977, Joe Breeze welded the first customised heavy frame ideal for downhill racing, giving birth to the first mountain bike. However, it was his friend Charlie Kelly who coined the term ‘mountain bike.’
Moving away from the klunkers
Around the same time when Joe Breeze and company conceived the first ever mountain bike, a bike club near Californica, named Morrow Dirt Club, was doing a similar experiment. They too were aware of the klunkers, but knew that it needed to be upgraded. As a result, one of the members of the club, Russ Mahon, added 10 speed gears and disc-like brakes to the klunker. As time went by, they kept adding one feature after another, such as thumb shifters, motocross-style handlebars and a specialised frame made out of steel alloy. To add strength and stability, they also added two lateral tubes that ran diagonally across the frame.
This became an instant hit. Manufacturers across the world were trying out similar prototypes with slight variations, such as lighter carbon or aluminium fibre frames, finely-tuned suspensions, powerful disc brakes and precision shifters, until they perfected the mountain bike as we know it today.
Bonus fact: Mountain biking debuted as a sport in the Olympics in 1996 in Atlanta, USA.