[CR] OFF LIST Re: Eugene A. Sloane

Hi Jan,

I don't post much any more, but remain an avid reader on the CR list. Your analysis of Sloane's lack of influence and of advantages of center-pull brakes are on the mark. And I hope everyone noticed your final point that the advantage of recovering technology from the past can be greatly compromised, if one makes them by a wrong process and so too heavy. Trade-offs, trade-offs.

Further, your rare combination of a civil tongue combined with a persistence in sifting wheat from chaff improve the community of vintage lightweight cycling and by doing that (i.e., by sharpening memories and clarifying insight about legacy technologies), in small increments, once in awhile help to reintroduce ideas from the past worthy of a second shot.

I am not a person who likes to live in the past, unless occassionally forced to do so momentarily by inadequate products of the present. Vintage lightweight bicycles represent more to me than museum pieces, or nostalgia, or speculation opportunities, none of which are bad things either. I have hoped that our community--by championing and investing in these bikes--would over time focus the ever restless new bike producer/marketers on the virtues of past bicycles and precipitate reintroduction of worthy elements in a viable way. We are, if they have any brains at all, a free product focus group. We ransack the past for them and find aspects of bicycles that could be reintroduced and achieve market appeal, were they to understand us.

Some prefereneces like handle bar height and big tires are thought to be age driven. Phooey. Young persons on college campuses and in crowded cites, and in rural areas, the last 20 years turned to mountain bikes and balloon cruisers modified into daily riders in some cases even sooner than we turned back to vintage lightweights. Unfortunately, when the kids embraced street adapted mountain bikes and ghastly performing retro cruisers because of the penny-wise-pound-foolishness of then producer/marketers, they threw the brilliant baby of vintage lightweights out with the bath water; i.e., they threw out the brilliant capability of classic light weight frame geometry when matched with 650B tires and some sensible handle bars to do a better job of getting you over the most frequent spectrum of terrain.

How I have pitied the unthinking sheep riding down paved roads on knobby tired mountain bikes. How I have pitied the unthinking sheep riding on hemmorhoids waiting to happen synthetic bike seats, when there were fabulous old leather saddles still to be had. Etc. Etc.

It makes no difference what age you are. Finding a product or component that works well at its task and fits homo sapien's contact points well, and then having awareness of that good product amplified, makes for acceptance. yes, when we are young and stupid we can endure more pain. But pleasure seeking is ageless, really, and high functioning utility is often the underpinning of sensual pleasure. The French, since their enlightenment, seem always to have gotten this in some ways better than the rest of us.

You help make the proliferation of pleasure and function happen by amplifying our preferences in your writing here and in your publication, and occassionally by exposing some of our own slavish adherences to wrong-headed notions.

Most persons do not fully appreciate just how much of a herd instinct has been selected into human beings and how willing we are to take on faith conventional wisdoms, especially when those conventional wisdoms are attached to what are considered the best products in any markets.

This herd instinct is noticeable even among small groups of persons who fancy themselves to be purveyors of the virtuous in the midst of a rising tide of the virtue-less. These avant gardes, or alternatively, as are we, derriere gardes, can get caught up in the herd instinct on all manner of things, too.

I coined an epigram that has guided me for sometime now. It goes like this: "common sense, yes; conventional wisdom, no."

I coined the phrase, because I was tired of being fooled by high technology applications in my work. Technologism, the ubiquitous and stupid ideology that the next technology is necessarily best soured even me--a person who loves science and technology and the new. These technologues--aka high tech snake-oil salesmen--that I dealt with had a mantra: it was that common sense was not to be trusted. After being burned repeatedly, I decided I needed to turn that bromide on its head, because that was how I kept getting fooled into trying stuff that never paid for itself and yielded profit. I kept ignoring that little voice in my head that said, "Don, this won't work; this can't work; this is just digital Rube Goldberg."

So: I turned that bromide into "common sense, yes; conventional wisdom, no," because every truly smart person I ever met, from plumbers to nuclear physicists, from day care persons to several philosophers, had enormous dollops of common sense that they used in their work. What these persons were not guilty, or perhaps even capable, of (note: common sense may be as hard-wired as stupidity seems to be sometimes) was accepting conventional wisdom in their problem-solving. They selected every fitting tool they had, or could find, or could create, no matter how primitive, or sophisticated, based on ruthlessly calculating common sense--would it do the job more effectively than another tool? These persons were all doers. I wanted to be more like them. Now I am.

But they also focused on solving the most vexing problems without burden of conventional wisdom. I asked one of these wonders of humanity one time: why do you have so little respect for conventional wisdom? He put it very clearly. He said when something worked well what did it matter what conventional wisdom believed and when it worked poorly what did it help what conventional wisdom believed? I distilled this to either: a) conventional wisdom didn't matter, because it didn't really explain what worked; and b) conventional widsom didn't matter, because it didn't really explain what did not work.

Time and again we see that the march of progress brings improvements in function and net benefit of cost and price. But time and again we also see the peak rationality and functional effectiveness of some product (or component) was reached in the past and has since begun a downward trajectory of "de-development." De-development is my term for marketing driven changes in products that make the product sell better (for a time) but perform worse.

My favorite example of de-development is not even from bicycles, though the migration of properly engineered and manufactured center pulls de-evolving to side-pulls is definitely one memorable example. No, my favorite example is from deep water fishing boats. Hull design and manufacture of same in deep sea fishing boats peaked in the early 1970s with hulls like the famed Bertrams. They took you where you needed to go in the smoothest, driest and safest way possible at a given hull length.

Then de-development began, first as an attempt to cut manufacturing costs and power requirements. When you de-develop something, you always have to rationalize doing so to consumers, because they might rightly feel cheated otherwise. The hustles of lighter weight and greater speed and less fuel consumption are usually resorted to, as if those were all that mattered in a boat (or a bike). De-development is also usually accompanied with a resort to sizzle aesthetics; i.e., aesthetics that do not improve function. If you do not resort to this sort of flummery, consumers are apt to say, "Hey, this isn't progress at all." But if you do resort to this sort of flummery, consumers tend to buy into the techno-gibberish. Put another way, they tend to normalize preference for products that perform better in a few ways, while performing worse in a lot of ways. Its a great entrepreneurial magic act to cut costs and rationalize raising prices.

But here's the thing: 40 years later, if you want to fish in the ocean, buy a Bertram and rehab it. If you want to save gas and look cool, buy a contemporary boat. (Note: fisherman are rediscovering the lost broad utility of older fishing boats just as bicyclists are rediscovering the same in vintage lightweight bicycles and manufacturers are slowly, incrementally recognizing this and slowly building the lost utility back into a few high end new boats). And the real beauty is that new technology and materials fused with the broader utility of some older products and components can yield real progress...sometimes.

Regardless, our vintage light weight bicycling community benefits substantially from your (and others) analyses. Critical thought about old bikes and clear expression of our thinking about old bikes make what we think more coherent to today's producers looking for new products.

Of course all approaches to developing a product have pitfalls and risk failures. The center pulls that were too heavy make this clear. Borrowing ideas, or principles from the past, are as susceptible to being botched, when not thoroughly understood, as is developing a new idea. There is in the end no substitute for a good engineer who can thoroughly think a new idea, or old product, through systematically based on sound design and engineering principles and get it right.

Thank you for your assistance in this process. Every community needs a gate keeper (preferrably several); not to keep people and ideas out, but simultaneously to encourage more to participate and accelerate the search for wheat in the chaff.