Customer Reviews

Bicycles & Tricycles: A Classic Treatise on Their Design and Construction (Dover Transportation)

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Honestly, I have studied some of the older bikes, like highwheelers and the safeties and even the racing frames used by 6-day racers like Major (Marshall) Taylor... and I honestly thought most of the early bikes were designed by luck and a prayer.
Sharp shows how much engineering knowledge was known about bicycles at the early parts of the 20th century. No wonder bikes were the precursors to --the automobile, --the airplane, --Harleys!
Concerns about bottom-bracket flex, weight distribution, climbing efficiency, transmission systems, steering control, comfort, stability at speed, etc. are all covered. Various materials and their pros and cons are covered (but back then exotic materials were bamboo and heat treated rolled steel!).
If you are an engineer or have a good background in math, you will be entertained by the incredible amounts of analysis presented in the text. If you are just a techie bike geek like me you will still enjoy it without breaking out the calculator to verify the formulaes. There are lots of 'pretty pictures' and well explained concepts to inform and entertain anyone interested in the fundmental engineering priciples and concerns of bicycles.

The greatest bicycle engineering book ever written, and it's from 1896. When resources and minds were focused on bicycles, Archibald Sharp was leading the pack. Soon after the focus turned to internal combustion engines and no other books like this one have ever been published. This new edition is economical and a must for any serious bike book collection.

One of Sharp's goals was to debunk the truly awful designs of his day, and hopefully bring about their demise. When the book was written, the "ordinary" had only recently given way to the "safety," and the proliferation of designs described here is truly mind-boggling. As a historical record of early bicycle design, no other book even comes remotely close. The technical section is thorough enough to qualify as an engineering textbook, and needs no updating. The section on the design of individual components is of course limited by what was available at the time, but nevertheless is still of interest. After the numerous references to this book in Mike Burrows' "Bicycle Design," I had searched unsuccessfully for years for a used copy. The reissuance of Sharp at a reasonable price shouldn't be passed up by anyone with even a passing interest in bicycle design and history. Be forewarned: this is a faithful facsimile of the original, and as such, the typeface isn't as clear as what we're used to nowadays. We're lucky that the book is available at all, and this edition is undoubtably superior in appearance to an original (assuming you can even find one).

A great source for bike history - a classic from 1862. Often quoted in other books about bicycle history and technology.

This is a remarkable book.

It was written at the height of the first great period of mechanical engineering, which had transformed productive capabilities of European nations, Britain in particular, by railways, powerful factories, steamships. As such it records the immense and sophisticated technical competence of the age of, say, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. But it also introduces, in essentially final form, the impudent and revolutionary device that is bearing us forward into the post-indstrial and perfectioniat-environmental age.

The Oregon Historical Society possesses a beautiful photograph of Linus Pauling, as a high school student, cruising his bicycle over cobbled streets and streetcar tracks to deliver telegrams in downtown Portland; he possessed the energy to do that in support of his widowed mother and her rooming house on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard. Pauling went on to revolutionize chemistry, connecting it with physics on one hand and biology on the other. His first chemistry laboratory was in the basement of that house, which now is adjacent to a prominent cycle shop that specializes in urban mobility.

Enough said!

Archibald Sharp wrote a text of mechanical engineering that is general enough to serve as such to this day. In its specific interest, bicycles, it has never been surpassed, even though freewheels, rim brakes, derailleurs were in the future; it is rigorous, which is why it endures. Here I recapitulate what I think is Sharp's most remarkable and insightful achievement: exact description of pedaling and production of torque and power.

On pages 28-29 Sharp employs an extremely sophisticated method of mathematical physics, the hodograph of velocity, to figure the speed of the knee throughout a complete rotation of the cranks. Why bother with that? Because on page 268 he demonstrates that the figure of speed at the knee also is the figure of force at the pedals. Freewheels were unknown then, so Sharp's figures apply only to fixed-gear bicycles. Now it is possible to develop a kind of hodograph for a bicycle with a freewheel from detailed measurements of force on pedals, but such hodographs are smaller, and so comprise less torque and power than those for fixed-gear machines.

An ineluctable conclusion: a fixed-gear bicycle can develop about one-third more torque and power for every stroke of its cranks than a equal machine fitted with a freewheel. Startling but true!

Sharp used hodographs to demonstrate that the rotary cranked-chain driven bicycle is optimal, so establishing the wondrous machine we all know and love today.

Especially fixers!

This book shows that many current 'new' ideas in cycling are not at all new ..... very useful even now.

Although 100 years old, it has great potential as a technical reference for small mechanism design as well as bicycles.