History of the Modern Day RecumbentMajor Sponsor

Makers of the first recumbent (a trike) to go 60 mph (in 1980)

Led by Tim Brummer, their machines continue to press the envelope of speed.

Toward that end, their 5 day, 1 hour and 8 minute Race Across

America record has stood head and shoulders above the crowd since 1989.

When the 1934 UCI decision turned a very conformist, top-down driven world into believing that a recumbent

was not a real bicycle, recumbents disappeared from the mass consciousness for 35 years. Or in other words

almost two full generations thought they knew what the bicycle under their Christmas tree was supposed to look

like.

From time to time we hear stories of recumbent bicycle sightings in the 1940’s and 50’s such as the one Dale Clark,

owner of longtime recumbent shop, Angle Lake Cyclery, had heard about a recumbent rental bike concession at Green Lake in nearby Seattle. He was told of a fleet of armchair bikes that

were in use around the lake during that time.

Clive Bucker’s 2003 Advanta

1905 Recumbent Sighting

For the most part, recumbents remained hidden from all but a few Americans. The window to a different

possibility was reopened in 1969 when Popular Mechanics published photos and a story about the

recumbent called a Groundhugger that hang gliding expert, Robert Q. Riley, had been shopping around

in S Cal.

This video of Robert Q Riley’s recumbent was shot with 8mm film in 1965 in Griffith Park Los

Angeles

QuickTime™ and a decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Now back in the day, Popular Mechanics was the leading tech magazine when, before the Internet, that was how

people got their information about the latest and greatest. Owned since 1958 by the William Randolph

Hearst empire, their readership still stands at over one million

Several years before Riley, at left, hit the jackpot with Popular

Mechanics, it's a little known fact that the Ground Hugger was

introduced at a dealer show, run by Howie Cohen, the man who brought Nishiki and other Japanese bicycles

to America.

Called West Coast Cycle & Supply, at a private showing, dealers placed orders for about 50 - 60

of them, but Riley and his partner ran out of money and couldn't deliver. If it were not for that,

they would have introduced a production recumbent in 1967..

As it turned out, Riley's bike ended up only being available if you built it yourself from the plans the PM credential helped him sell

thousands of sets of. As a result of this visionary success, he has gone on to become a prolific creator of plans for electric

automobiles as well as his other cutting edge innovations in the recreation, fitness, and medical industries. He keeps his original

Groundhugger plans current and is also now having success with the carbon fiber recumbent plans he now also sells. You can buy his

plans at our site Bikeroute.com/Recumbents

You can also hear the podcast he and I did together if you do tune in you will learn Robert

Riley is beyond legendary.

The seed for a different way to pedal a bike had been re-planted. By 1973 Chet Kyle, a CA college professor with his faired upright

Teledyne Titan and Jack Lambie were riding what they think were the two only known

streamlined bikes on the planet.

Unknown 1910 Teledyne Titan

Also in 1973, in the middle of the USA, in Kansas, Randy Schlitter had begun making sail trikes that took advantage of the recumbent seating position. For the next ten years, his

company, Rans, would end up selling 1600 of these wind surfer bikes for $800-1200 apiece.

Here is the Rans Sail Trike in action:

QuickTime™ and a decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Then in 1975 he spent a couple of hours replacing the two back wheels on the sail trike with one wheel so that he could go out for bike rides on it. When his

brother John, who was racing competitively, couldn't drop him on his Colnago, he started working for Randy to build the recumbent bicycles that were the result. This well before John helped to start Bacchetta. And as such, making Rans America’s oldest recumbent

bicycle producer.

Short Lived Rans Response of 1996 built to replicate Sail Trike Power Plant

If you want to hear Randy talk about a lot of the above and how he also got into the airplane

business, the podcast we did is at

Bikeroute.com/NBGPodcasts.php

And here up close and personal, is the also amazing man, Jerrell Nichols, that Randy, in

2015, entrusted the bike part of his business to.

The podcast he and I did is at Bikeroute.com/NBGPodcasts.php

Also in 1975 Kyle and Lambie, the two streamliners, formed the IHPVA. The officers and board of directors of the IHPVA included such notables as Tullio Campagnolo, owner

and president of Campagnolo - then the largest racing-component manufacturer in the world,

Sir Hubert Opperman, O.B.E. Australian Member of Parliament and renowned holder of numerous long-distance cycling records, Eddy Merckx of Belguim, many time winner of the Tour de France, and famous authors Frank

Whitt and David Gordon Wilson, creators of the best-selling cycling book, Bicycling Science.

Soon on both coasts small time tinkerers began to crop up. Some such as Dr Alan Abbott, who in 1973 set a world record when he went 138.8 mph behind a race car, were interested in how they could change the look of a bike so they could go faster. . In 1975

Abbott went 38.8 mph on this bike.

Also in 1975, Gardner Martin,

who with his wife Sandra was on the cover of the famous - 1969

Woodstock album (she still has the

quilt!)

Was busy making custom parts such as gas tanks and fairings for motorcycles of which he owned in his own words in an

interview he did with Kelvin Clark the "best and fastest ever built" when he saw a magazine cover that would change his

life. By Chet Kyle it read "Are Streamline Bikes in Your Future?" In the article, the challenge, "Let's have an anything

goes speed contest race in the spring of 1975" excited him. Gardner, got busy.

Soon, 13 bikes showed up at at a drag strip in Irwindale CA. where Garden went through 3 different riders and got a top speed of 34 mph. The winning speed that year was 44.69 mph by Ron Skarin on Kyle's upright Teledyne Titan. Two years later, in 1977, at the Ontario Motor Speedway, Norm Gall a well known S Cruz racer went 42.6 mph on this, the

Belly Bike.

It would form the nucleus of Easy Racers, the second oldest recumbent bicycle company in America.

Also in 1977, the two-person White Lightning trike, conceived as a Northrop College class project went 48

mph. Tim Brummer was the chief engineer.

In 1978 White Lightning hit 50 mph. By 1979 the White Lightning tandem trike had become the first to hit 55 mph.

And in 1980 it became the first HPV to hit 60 mph.

Tim Brummer, went on to make his mark as a leader in the aerospace

industry but felt called to start making bicycles full time in 1991 when the Space Shuttle mission drew to a close. However

instead of three wheels, with the experience he had gained, which

included access to wind tunnels for testing, as well as his knowing how and where to source the aerospace materials

he needed, he switched to two wheels and soon his Lightning bikes became the bikes to beat in the IHPVA racing circles.

The interview he gave us is at Bikeroute.com/NBGPodcasts.php

In 1980, the Vector built by the Versatron Corporation, a parts manufacturer for war missiles in Sonoma CA,

came on the scene to go neck and neck with Lightning. It raised the bar to an even higher level when their

tandem trike went 62 at Ontario Motor Speedway (a 2-1/2 mile track that would get torn down the next year)

in southern California. .

Also in southern California, Jack Baker, Smitty Smith, and Milt Turner were busy entertaining people on the S Cal boardwalks with the first ever SWB called the Hypercycle. It did nosies

and on some of the bikes they sold, they put a skateboard wheel in front of the chairing so it could be ridden for a short way with the back

wheel off the ground.

The podcast Jack Baker and I did before he died in 2011 (RIP) is at Bikeroute.com/NBGPodcasts.php

Sometime in the early 1980’s, Smitty and Jack teamed up to form S&B Recumbents. Under that name, they brought the Hypercycle SWB platform to a much higher spec and much enhanced performance. They even made a line of

trikes as far back as the mid 90’s.

On the East Coast, in the Boston area in the mid 70s, the MIT professor and IHPVA board member, David Gordon Wilson, talked about earlier, had

commissioned his students at MIT to build a bike similar to the one Fred Willkie had built in Berkeley, CA.

Soon, he also convinced Bike shop owner Dick Forrestal and his partner Harold Maciejewski to build the LWB recumbent bicycle that he called the Wilson-Wilkie that he had been riding to and from his college, often in a suit, since 1975. Soon the team would take on engineer, Dick Ryan, who would later keep the Avatar tradition alive

with the Ryan Recumbent.

David Gordon Wilson

Avatar began building bikes in 1977. Their first bike came to market in 1980 . Each of them were numbered and when they started out, they sold for the

unheard of price of $1699 for a bicycle or 5,896 in 2015 dollars.

Also in 1977, using

Wilson’s power plant, on June 12,

the Gossamer Albatross

became the first fully human-powered aircraft to

cross the 22 mile English

Channel. Based on

aeronautical engineer Dr.

Paul B. MacCready's design, it was pedal piloted

by Bryan Allen

By 1982 the Avatar 2000, though slower than the Lightning or Easy Racer, still had gone 52

mph at IHPVA speed championships.

In 1983 the Avatar even made one of the most widely read pre-internet publications

of its day People magazine.

At the time of this article, 145 people had become elite Avatar owners.

The Avatar lasted until 1989. It was then that Dick Ryan took them over and simplified the design as the Ryan

Recumbent. From 1989-1999 his company sold 1200 LWB Vanguards and 250 tandems before he sold to Greg Peak of Longbikes who could not make a go of the bike and has since pretty much returned his energies to the wheelchair

business he long had run.

Dick talks about all this here Ryanownersclub.com/history/ryanhistoryrcn.htm

Ryan also made a beautiful delta trike that is still available for sale through

select dealers.

In 2001, I wrote:

“Too much FUN. A grown man should not feel compelled to smile so almost uncontrollably so much. Nor should the very act of turning on to a different street be

so very much looked forward to. No not at all. If you feel guilty having this kind of fun, you don't belong on the machine responsible for all this, an adult trike (see "Why

Trike").

Nor are they worthy of your interest if you still feel like riding a bike in comfort should be an outlawed activity. But if trike riding sounds interesting to you; when you finally

decide that the joyous experience of three-wheeled performance is something you are worthy of, the Penninger trike may likely have your name on it.......[..]

Also pretty much when Ryan started up, he convinced Bob Bryant to begin publishing Recumbent Cyclist News. Important to the fledgling new

industry, RCN was a professional publication, RCN not only reviewed recumbents and trikes, but it offered classified ads, letters to the editor, a calendar of recumbent events, a home-builders corner and guest articles.

RCN also helped to establish a nomenclature for all the different designs that were starting to come out such as SWB, Short Wheel Base, LWB, Long Wheel Base, USS, Under the Seat Steering, etc It did this with a new media that had

begun to emerge, the internet, pre-web bicycle newsgroups such as rec.bicycles.misc, rec.bicycles.rides and ba.bicycles, etc.

While recumbents never had their own newsgroup, though Martin Krieg did

begin, alt.rec.bicycles.recumbent. because it was an alt

newsgroup, many ISP's did not offer it as an option to

their new clients, those who paid a monthly fee to read ad-free and graphics free

discussions that had begun to to take place all over what was also called the Usenet about every topic

under the sun.

While the Avatar was soon busy w/raising the profile of bicycle from a toy to a serious transportation option, on the other coast, in California, Easy

Racer and Lightning were still battling it out for top speed honors. Both of

them had their sights set on winning the 18,000 dollar DuPont prize for being

the first HPV to break 65 mph.

As they chased, from 1983 to 1991 Steven Roberts was busy touring the nation on one of

three different heavily modified Avatars (Winnebiko - 1983-1985, Winnebiko II - 1986-

1988 and then the BEHEMOTH) that were loaded down with electronic research gear.

He wrote a book called “Computing Across

America, the Adventures of a High

Tech Nomad”, that the Nation's press widely

celebrated thus raising the recumbent possibly for even more people.

It was also during this time, in Berkeley, CA, in 1983, that Eli Rubin introduced Martin Krieg to the LWB that former Bicycling Magazine tech

editor Jim Langley had built on the other coast in New Hampshire. Krieg, who had come back

from a major head injury to ride an upright bicycle across America in 1979, was overcome with joy. He had thought his days riding quality bikes were finished. Unwilling to torture himself anymore on bikes with down turned handlebars, he had become a short distance 3-speed rider. He didn't know there were any options to the road and touring bikes that appeared in the

stores and bike magazines of the day.

Krieg so much wanted everyone to know about the recumbent that in the Fall of 1985 he

began organizing a ride across the U.S. for the National Head Injury Foundation. Unaware of Steve Roberts, he was going to do it on Eli's

bent and pull a huge cargo trailer.

Having already garnered support from the mountaineering industry, he went to the second ever Interbike in Long Beach hoping to pick up a few bicycle sponsors. Well as luck would have it, Linear Recumbent who had exhibited at the first 1984 Interbike held in Reno, was joined by a breathtakingly beautiful recumbent called the

Via made out of Reynolds 531 steel tubing.

Its builder, Mark Hajek, pictured at left below, picked up on the excitement Krieg felt for this bike. Mark had a

background in building race cars and had successfully fabricated a LWB, under the seat steered recumbent that

caught the attention of many of the show's attendees. The bike’s lines and its welds were all impeccable. If that were

not enough, in between the show and Krieg's scheduled start for the following April, Hajek also built a fiberglass cone

shaped trailer for Krieg to pull.

In the end, Krieg's ride was a huge

media sensation and

reached 40 million people.

As such, in 1986 Krieg was riding what was

arguably the most

sophisticated street legal

bicycle on the planet, the Via

Recumbent across the

USA!

Freddy Markham, the Olympic cyclist who would go on to set 20 World Records was all the news when on little known Hwy 305 off the Loneliest Hwy in America, in Battle Mountain, NV, he went 65 mph in the Easy Racer Gold Rush. The course he and Gardner Martin chose has gone on to become the home of the World HPV Championships. Set at 4500 feet where the air is slightly easier to push through and

with a drop of 2/3 of 1% or about 30 feet per mile, theirs was a perfect course. So much so that the Gold Rush is now in the

Smithsonian.

Krieg felt that with all the attention recumbents were getting, he could use that energy to help him build a coast-to-coast bicycle highway as

he also got recumbents more known about as well as accepted. Toward that end he played a big part in building an industry to support his

vision. He first attempted, from 1987 to 1994, to legitimize recumbents with display advertising in his Cycle America Regional Directories

Then when the web came about, using BikeRoute.com as a portal, by building web sites, he helped to legitimize the operations of well over a hundred different small recumbent builders as well as businesses that

sold them, many of which are still in business today.

In 1994, Krieg's story finally got published as a hard back book, "Awake Again, all the way back from head injury". After a two

year foray into Hollywood where he and his publisher were

considering TV movie deals for his story, his publisher, a

billionaire named Waymen Spence, a man who was carving a

name for himself in the bike industry with the Spenco line of

products, disappeared from scene. The company went silent.

Krieg's phone calls and emails went unanswered.

What was odd was that they

were also planning a

coast to coast bicycle author

tour. Krieg would only find out why years

later the communication

had ceased. His publisher had taken his

life.

Not knowing what had happened to his once very bright future, he decided to use his fleeting fame on the recumbent bicycle industry. In fact it was his review of the BikeE that he built his

story into that helped that bike gain acceptance in regular bike shops. The BikeE people circulated Krieg’s review far and wide.

Well it's almost 30 years since Krieg's recumbent ride across America and he feels

more hopeful than ever. He thinks we are now on what many feel is the precipice that will steer

both the recumbent and the NBG into the mainstream.

Example pioneering businesses some of which continue to support the

National Bicycle Greenway vision besides Lightning, Linear, Angle Lake Cyclery, Bicycle Man, Bilenky Cycle Works, Recumbent Bike

Riders and Easy Racer include:Kirk's Bike Shop in Ramona, CA. In fact, more than just

one of the first bike shops in America to stock recumbents, owner Kirk Newell was one of America's first IHPVA racers. With The Other Woman, a tadpole trike, covered by a

shell that consisted of foam panels and aluminum strapping with fiberglass folded over, he personally pedaled to 40 mph in 1981 at the Pomona Fairgrounds in the 200 meter pursuit.

With a new trike body patterned as much as possible after the Vector that had come to dominate

HPV racing, and using the mold for a sailplane canopy, along with other improvements such as

chrome moly tubing, he hit 47 mph the following year. Out of the 30 who had entered the competition,

he took 6th place.

Labor of Love: Kirk’s HPV Build

Kirk’s machine was so much like a real bike, as it could do more than just go straight ahead, that he was convinced to bring it out of retirement for a criterium race. As such in 1984 at the LaJolla

Criterium, the Cat 1 racer who had never ridden Kirk’s trike before, took a close second behind the feared Fast Freddy Markham. And this was in a race that included Greg Johnson, the man who was once ahead of the Vector in a race, only to drop out due to a

lost chain. The photo below shows Greg Johnson, on his supine bicycle leading

the Vector

Ever since they were re-introduced, as all this activity was taking place, recumbents long have fought to gain acceptance by the upright crowd.

One development that stands out as an icebreaker in this regard is the Bilenky

Viewpoint, made by Bilenky Cycle Works

Before highly respected frame builder, Stephen Bilenky, at left here, took it on in the mid

90s, it was called the Counterpoint Conveyance and Angle Lake Cyclery in Seattle, WA, one of America's first bent dealers, had an exclusive on

it. It was originally designed by a musician named, Jim

Weaver. By the time Bilenky brought it to market, it had

been tweaked and reinforced in many different ways.

What makes Stephen Bilenky’s Viewpoint important is the fact that it had the effect of

smoothing out the tension that existed between the two worlds. It showed that off the race track

and in the real world that recumbents were serious bikes; that they were genuine machines

to be taken seriously. And that biking for performance could be done comfortably.

Here for example, are the bikes Rob Gentry has sold at Recumbent Bike

Riders in College Station, PA

Radius, Trimuter, Calfee, Cannondale, Reynold's Weld Labs, Haluzak, Vision, Linear, SideWinder, Optima, Burley, BikeE, Trisled, Sun, Cycle Genius, KMX, Challenge, Longbikes, Lightfoot, Volae, HP Velotechnik, Hase, RANS, Easy Racers, Lightning Cycle, Greenspeed, AZUB, ICE, Catrike, TerraTrike, Performer, MetaBikes, Trident and Bacchetta

A lot of bents came and went along the way. Many entered the marketplace and

stayed too!

Larry Black is also one of the original recumbent dealers in America with Mt Airy Bicycles and

College Park Bikes in the Washington DC area. When we did his web site for him, he wanted a

simple, catchy name back when stuff like that was available. He chose bike123.com

Like myself, Larry also rides a HiWheel bike

In the next slide you will see the spectacular crash he just did on one at a Hiwheel race in Frederick,

MD

QuickTime™ and a decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Recumbent and Tandem Riders magazine, the producers of this show also go back to the

beginning.

Peter Stull at the Bicycle Man, whose web page we got on line in 1996 has been at it so long that from 2003 on he was the BikeE parts go to guy

after they shut down their operation. He also has the only bent shop so huge, it is visible from the moon. Soon, the on-

line version of this presentation will be augmented by the

podcast he and I are doing that discusses the recumbent

History Museum his shop also houses. You don’t want to miss the fun podcast he

and I did at Bikeroute.com/NBGPodcasts.php

Modern Recumbent HistorySponsors

Lightning Cycle Dynamics Kirk's Bike | Sportaid | Linear Recumbent

Bicycles | Bilenky Cycle Works | Bicycle Man LLC | RBR Recumbent Bike Riders | Rhoades Car |

Angle Lake Cyclery | Rans | Denver Recumbent | Easy Street Recumbent | Easy Racer | Rose City Recumbent | Bike Friday | Cruzbike | The Used

Bike Shop | LaBent by LaDue | Mt Airy Bicycles | College Park Bicycles | Ti-Trikes | Back Country

Recumbent Cycles Rapid Transit Cycles | Trident Trikes | Maxaraya