On 7/20/07, Jan Heine <heine94@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> Do you have an e-mail address for Bob Roll? Then I'll gladly tell
> him that derailleurs were invented in Great Britain around 1900 -
> before Tullio Campagnolo was even out of diapers - popularized in
> France by Joanny Panel in the 1910s, adopted by French cyclotourists
> through the 1920s and finally permitted in the Tour de France in
> 1937. Racers back then mostly used the Osgear Super Champion.
>
> Tullio Campagnolo's "back-pedal" derailleur was invented sometime in
> the 1930s, but used widely by racers only during the second half of
> the 1940s.
>
> The parallelogram derailleur seems to have been invented that year
Which year?
by
> Nivex, and Tullio introduced his first Gran Sport in 1949, which
> indeed created the shape that most derailleurs use to this day.
Mitch Harris
Little Rock Canyon, Utah