Stumpjumper: the first production bike
The college degree was in the bag and the beer was flowing. If you want to understand the origins of the world's first production mountain bike, you have to look back to 1974. More precisely: to the 1974 Oktoberfest in Munich. It was there that the current Specialized boss Mike Sinyard decided to earn his money with bike parts. Hardly back in the States, Sinyard started the Specialized chapter with 1500 dollars in start-up capital. Frame builder Tom Ritchey was one of Sinyard's first customers. "He told me about these new types of mountain bikes," recalls Sinyard, who immediately had Ritchey weld one for him.
Back then, bikes were only available from a few small garage workshops. "Things should be different," thought businessman Sinyard. So in 1980, he had a frame built by Tim Neenan in Santa Cruz and ordered 450 of them from a company in Japan under the name "Specialised". The first Stumpjumper cost just under 750 dollars in 1981 and the first series sold out within a few weeks. The door to the global cycling scene had been opened and mountain biking could grow from hippie fun to a sport. The Stumpjumper was therefore the original model of all production bikes and has now been running for 28 years in countless model variants and embodies the tradition of the sport like no other mountain bike.
Rock Shox One: the first MTB suspension fork
In the beginning, there was paper and shared suffering. Paul Turner sat in the frame forge of his mate Keith Bontrager and discussed the design of a full suspension bike. Bontrager limited himself to the rear end, Turner took over the suspension fork. What the bike world dismissed as crazy at the time was logic for Turner. As a motorbike racer and Honda mechanic, he had a lot of experience with suspension systems. The only question was how to shrink a massive motorbike fork down to bonsai level. Bontrager and Turner tinkered with possible designs for months. Turner held the first prototype in his hands in 1988, one year after the start of development. He had made it. Five centimetres of travel, air suspension, damping with oil: a telescopic fork. The rest of the bike world grabbed its head. Who needs all this motorbike stuff on their bike? Apparently everyone. Although Turner initially assembled the fork with his wife in the garage, things then took off: the component giant Diacompe took over the production and distribution of the Rock Shox. A thousand forks were produced in 1990. Six years later, production hit the million mark.
The first disc brake
Yes, Bob Sticha also came from motorbike racing. And he also transplanted the genes of petrol-driven bikes to the mountain bike. But right from the start: The Prague Spring was one year old in 1969 and Czech Bob Sticha emigrated to Switzerland. Quickly infected by the bike culture, Sticha began to emerge as a true source of bike innovation. Be it with disc wheels, a somewhat silly-looking all-wheel drive or the elastomer suspension fork - Sticha paired everything that could be found on the bike with the bike. The disc brake seemed to be just a question of time, which was answered in 1990. He fitted the mechanical brake anchor to the self-designed fork - who would have thought of a disc brake mount back then? World champion Albert Iten raided Sticha's garage and bolted these miracle weapons against acceleration to his bike. Sticha himself staged his braking revolution in the press and raced down a bobsleigh track. The tabloid press ran the headline "They've all got a spoke loose", ZDF kept the cameras on it, but the money was a long time coming. Bob Sticha was stuck with most of his inventions. He was only able to sell the disc brake to Hope.
Component giants: Shimano XT and clipless pedals
The two partners could not have been more different. Nevertheless, the marriage of convenience between Japanese developers and American hippies in the 1980s produced children with cult potential who have now grown up.
It has been rattling along on bikes around the world for 27 years now and is the epitome of reliability: the Shimano XT. The story of the groupset, which is still the benchmark for solid mountain bike components today, began with a phone call. For four hours, Yoshizo Shimano told his brother Yozo about the American hippies who were hurtling down the Californian mountains on their self-built clunker bikes. A trend that spread like wildfire. Just as quickly, the two brothers came up with the idea of designing the world's first bike gearstick together. In 1982, just one year after the phone call, the Japanese company presented the "XT M700" ("Cross Terrain") at trade fairs in New York and Milan. Uphill bikers now had six sprockets and three chainrings at their disposal via the handlebar shifter, while downhill bikers could brake with cantis instead of shoe soles or steaming drum brakes. The Japanese developers also had their persistent test riders to thank for the fact that the XT was ready for series production so quickly: hippies like Joe Breeze and Gary Fisher, who had inspired Yoshizo to come up with his bold idea.
Just six years later, Shimano delivered the next ground-breaking development. When Shimano developer Kazuki Tanaka designed the first clipless pedal together with his colleagues Okajima and Terada in early 1988, the solution to a serious problem was within reach: the fixed connection between man and machine. Until then, bikers either tied their feet to the pedals with hooks and straps or pedalled along the trails on bear paws or with dirt-prone racing bike pedals. Here, too, field testers helped with the development of the first drawing of the "Pedaling Dynamics" pedals until they were ready for series production. One of them was the American Greg Herbold, who became downhill world champion in Durango in 1990 thanks to the new secret weapon. Today, the clipless pedal belongs on the bike like a chain, at least in cross country. However, engineers will never get to grips with one problem: the embarrassing beginner's crash at red lights.
Kestrel Nitro: the first MTB full-suspension bike
Muscle power just wasn't his thing, Keith Bontrager was more into horsepower-driven bikes than bicycles and was tinkering with motocross bikes at the end of the sixties. At least until 1979, when he welded together his first racing bike. "Just like that", as Bontrager still says today. But it was precisely on this whim that one of the greatest chapters in bike history was to develop: The first fully. The hard times of biking came to an abrupt end in 1987. Keith Bontrager was commissioned by bike manufacturer Kestrel to build the world's first fully. Anyone who wanted a little more comfort on their bike before then had few options: Almost deflated tyres or a lugged, butter-soft aluminium frame. But there were no alternatives for real wimps. His experience as a motorbike designer helped Bontrager with the design, but he had no idea how to build a suspension fork. Paul Turner was able to help - even if Turner was struggling with more problems than he would have liked. Keith Bontrager was then able to present the first fully to the excited public at the 1988 bike show in Long Beach. Even though the function of the shock still left a lot to be desired at the time, the Kestrel Nitro marked the start of the biggest revolution in the development of mountain bikes.
The Eberminator: the first U-turn
The spirit was willing, but the wallet was weak. As soon as the industry spat usable downhill forks onto the market, Wolfgang Ebersbach despaired of his financial strength. The Rock Shox Boxxer 1995 cost 1600 Deutschmarks. For the downhill-loving student, this was a sum that drove him to build it himself. Using parts from a moped fork, a handful of custom-milled parts and a lot of pioneering spirit, he assembled his first downhill fork. As his studies progressed, Ebersbach sold his fork 200 times until he was about to write his thesis. But instead of frantically working on his degree, the Freiburg native set himself another test: the ultimate downhill fork. 30 centimetres of travel as an upside-down design, more stable than anything that had gone before, in short: Ebersbach built the Eberminator.
Good, thought the downhill community, it's just an even bigger fork. Or so they thought, but the stroke of genius was hidden under a small wheel on the fork tube. In order to get up the mountains with this monster in Swabia, a region with few gondolas, the fork had to be adjustable in level. At first, Ebersbach did not realise that he had achieved a real stroke of genius with this bike. It was bike designer Peter Denk who first drew his attention to it. "Wolfgang came to us in the workshop and had some kind of detail problem with the damping. When I asked him what that wheel on the fork was, he replied that he needed it to lower the fork. He had absolutely no idea what ingenious thing he had built," recalls Denk. The wheel turned into patents, and the patents turned into the first U-Turn that Rock Shox used.
Klein Attitide: the bike of the future
Gary Klein was at the start of the "Davis Double", a 200-mile race. At that moment, the 18-year-old college boy had no idea that he would one day embody the future of mountain biking. But at least it was at this race that Klein discovered his passion for cycling. He was so fascinated that he joined the cycling club at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology in Boston. Soon the chemistry student was all about cycling. He learnt the art of frame construction in university courses. And with 20,000 dollars in start-up capital from a university fund, Klein and three friends finally took the plunge into professionalism. It was clear to Klein right from the start: standing still means death.
With this attitude, he achieved his masterpiece in 1990 - the Attitude. The bike boasted so many innovations that it was like gazing into a crystal ball. In order to increase stiffness to a maximum while keeping weight to a minimum, the frame had voluminous aluminium tubes as thin as a cola can. The headset was huge and glued into the frame, as was the bottom bracket. The cockpit formed a single unit, the cables ran inside the frame and the weld seams appeared invisible. Innovations that are still standard today - only the colours would probably no longer suit today's tastes.
The Horstlink: the four-bar link
They were simply too soft for him, those suspension systems that flooded the bike market in the early nineties. Soft like sofas, power-sapping on the climbs, nervous on the descents. More rodeo ride than dressage horse. But Horst Leitner had a mission: he wanted to tame springs and dampers. In the mid-1980s, the Austrian moved to California and began building suspension elements there. His AMP bike fork quickly became a cult object and sold thousands of units. His background, of course, was motocross. Even 20 years before the first fully, Leitner was already racking his brains to design motorbike suspensions that were as drive-neutral as possible - back then in the service of Puch.
The only thing he didn't recognise was his real stroke of genius: the HorstLink. "I just asked myself: Horst, what are you actually doing, nobody needs that," Leitner remembers today. His doubts were finally dispelled when Specialized called. In 1996, Leiter was granted a patent for his HorstLink. The patent protection related to the joint, which was located in front of and slightly below the dropout. It provided torque support that made the shock independent of the drive and brake inputs. This small joint tamed the shock absorbers and is still standard today.
The Moser Guide: the first bike tour guides
A change of industry could hardly be more radical than for Elmar Moser: Moser made a career at cigarette giant Philip Morris until the air became too stuffy for him in the mid-1980s. Without further ado, he quit his job, was bored in front of the television and had an inspiration. The programme "Bergauf, Bergab" (Uphill, Downhill), in which bikers chased over the trails, was currently being shown on the third channel. Sure, he wanted to do that too, bought a bike and stood frustrated in the forest with a mountain bike guide. "He was totally rubbish," Moser recalls of the book. The rest is quickly told and yet blurs into legend. Moser rode all the routes on his bike, painted, wrote and distributed his tour guides - whether it was Lake Garda or the Alpine foothills. He became the prophet of tens of thousands of tourers and disappeared from the public eye as suddenly as he had arrived. What remains are route guides that lead you safely to your destination - even in the age of GPS.
