Penny Farthing to E-Bike: A Local and Global Bicycle History

Bike history gets a lot more interesting when it’s told by someone who still rides it. Peter is joined by Gordon Hobbis, son of Cap Hobbis, founder of Caps Bicycles of BC — once the largest chain of bike dealerships in Canada — who in 'retirement' now runs his own bicycle museum in Maple Ridge.

Gordon takes us on a wild ride linking early two-wheel transport to climate disruption following the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, and then brings us into the modern era: how bike retail changes with online shopping, massive model variety, and the explosion of e-bikes. We also dig into Canadian bike manufacturing history including how tariffs protected local brands, how free trade reshaped the market, and why large-scale bicycle manufacturing largely disappeared in Canada. 

Also: Gordon’s research trips to Davis, California, where the first U.S. bike lanes opened in 1969; the rise and fall and rebirth of bicycling in China; and how bicycles revolutionized dating and helped women transcend restrictive social rules. Finally, Gordon explains how a bike refurbishment charity and mechanic training led to Western Canada’s only bike museum in Maple Ridge, and how you can come for a visit. 

Did we say it was a wild ride?! We're picking up speed, and on a replica 1888 Penny Farthing it's seven feet down to the ground — so hang on to your riding cap!

**************

Visit the Two Wheeled Time Machine Museum HERE. 

And if you're looking for a bike or some two-wheeled wisdom come on down to Cap's Cycle shop, still going strong in New Westmister and Langley.

Transcript

Welcome And What We Cover

Peter Ladner 0:04

Welcome to Bike Sense the BC Cycling Coalition's podcast, where we talk about all things related to active transportation advocacy in BC. I'm your host, Peter Lagner, chair of the board of the BC Cycling Coalition. I hope you enjoy the show. My guest today is Gordon Hobbis, the son of Cap Hobbis, who is the founder of Caps Bicycles, which was once the largest bike dealership in Canada with 16 locations in Western Canada. We're going to talk about how bike retail has changed with the arrival of e-bikes and online shopping, what it takes to survive in retail today, and how we created Western Canada's only bike museum in Maple Ridge. And in a historical vein, we will also look at how the first bike lanes in North America came into being and how the invention of the bicycle liberated women. Gordon, welcome.

Gordon Hobbis 1:08

Hi, great to be here,

Canada Day On A Penny Farthing

Gordon Hobbis 1:10

Peter.

Peter Ladner 1:10

We're going to start you with a question about your personal life. Tell me about your most recent bike ride.

Gordon Hobbis 1:18

Oh, you do that to everybody, don't you? My most recent bike ride was to take my penny farthing bicycle out on Canada Day with my oldest son, Jake, and we rode around Queens Park and New Westminster. So the Penny Farthing bike would date from 1880. The ones we were on are replicas of 1888 machines. So they're very nice to ride.

Peter Ladner 1:42

They're nice to ride. Describe a penny farthing bike. Is it the one with the big front wheel and the little back one?

Gordon Hobbis 1:48

Penny farthing bike has a big front wheel, little back wheel. It's a direct drive, it's the original fixie. So if the wheel's going around, your feet are going around. And my my bike has a 52-inch front wheel. My son's a little taller than I am, so his front wheel is 56 inches. So you're sitting , seven or eight feet off the ground with your heads that far off the ground.

Peter Ladner 2:13

What happens if you stop? You've got to fall down seven feet and grab make sure you land properly.

Gordon Hobbis 2:20

Any landing's a good landing if you land on your feet, but there's a mounting step and a dismounting step at the back of the machine. So you you do that. And we rode to this Canada Day celebration in Queen's Park, and my son is very good on his bike, and he weaved his way through the crowds, and I'm a little less confident on that. So I walk my bike through, and then I think it would be kind of fun to let some kids sit on the seat and see how tall it is. So I put this one little boy up on the bike and I took him for a circle. And by the time I'd come back around, there's a lineup of 20 kids that all want to do the same thing. So we spent our Canada day giving penny farthing rides to kids at the park.

Peter Ladner 3:01

Did your father ever sell penny farthing bicycles?

Gordon Hobbis 3:06

Uh no, no, no. But the penny farthing bike was our emblem, our trademark, what we used on our advertising and our signage. And and we rode, , I grew up on a penny farthing. I had one, everybody rode them in the family, and we'd ride in local parades back in the 60s and 70s, the early days. My dad would always go on parades for the word of mouth. And one time there was a penny farthing race. Labat sponsored a penny farthing race from Vancouver City Hall to Victoria City Hall, it was 26 miles, and , I was seven years old and I participated in that for part of the way.

Peter Ladner 3:46

When was the penny farthing replaced by the more standard frame that we know today?

How Modern Bicycles Took Over

Gordon Hobbis 3:52

Uh so the penny farthing, the high wheel bike came to be in about 1876. James Starley invented the tension wire wheel, and that allowed bikes to get bigger and bigger wheels and then go faster and faster and become more of a useful practical bike. Then the um the development of what we ride today, which is known as a safety bike, the double diamond frame, that was in 1885 when his nephew, John Kemp Starley, had the the rover safety bike. And so the penny farthing was around for a very brief time. The safety bike developed and evolved very quickly after 1885 to become the popular machine. Basically, by 1890, we had set the mold, and bicycles shape-wise haven't changed since then.

Climate Change And The First Bikes

Gordon Hobbis 4:48

We can talk about the history of bikes, but the bicycle was born from climate change in 1814. How was that? Uh in 1814 there was Mount Tambora, and this volcano erupted, and it's one of the top five largest eruptions recorded, and it sent so much ash into the atmosphere that it led to what they call the winter in June. Uh, it was snowing in June in New York City. This is all around the all around the world or where all around all around the Western Hemisphere. And this is an Indonesian volcano, so it affected the Western Hemisphere. And at the time, , horses were the transportation, and so the fuel for transportation were were oats and corn, and the crops were failing, and the price of fuel was going up, and horses were being put down because people couldn't afford to have them. The fuel was going to the war effort for the Napoleonic Wars. So this German inventor came up with something called the Drazine, and this is the first time where people sat on two wheels in line with each other. You know, we're used to buggies or Roman chariots where the two wheels are on an axle and they're side by side, but this was the first time somebody put them front to back, and you would sit on the drazine and it's the walking machine, and you just like today's kids learn, you pushed along with your feet. Right. And and this was the replacement for the horse. This was the iron horse, and you could travel at eight miles an hour, maybe 12 miles an hour down a hill. Um, but then the the skies cleared and and crops came back, and horses were more viable. So the drazine had a brief sort of three or four year time frame where it was useful, and then it got replaced again.

Building Caps From A Basement

Gordon Hobbis 6:57

Uh, my dad was 14 years old. He was working at Thurston Favelle Cedar Mill in Port Moody, and he got a raise from 25 cents an hour to 50 cents an hour, and on that day he quit. He came to the understanding that he wasn't going to make it working for somebody else, he had to work for himself. So he him and his his brother Bert, they got an old bike they had traded some magazines for and they fixed it up and then they sold it, and they just kept doing that out of the basement of the house. And he had told his mom that his dream was by the time he was 20, he would have a store with big red letters over the door that said caps, and by 1940, he opened his retail store in Saperton, New Westminster, and you couldn't make a living just doing bikes at that time, so he sold housewares and hardware and did repairs and started a business.

Peter Ladner 7:58

And the business grew to 16 outlets. What's the status of the business now?

Gordon Hobbis 8:04

Well, my dad's business plan was very creative. He decided to have seven kids, and , I'm the youngest of those seven. I have three brothers and three sisters. The deal was the sisters got they were mums and the boys were dads, and we all got taken to work at a young age, and his brother Tom had two boys, so the nephews came in, and through the 70s and 80s, we all worked together in the bike shop building the business. And then by 2000, we had gotten weary of working for each other, so we decided we just wanted to work for ourselves, and we each separated from the business. And I took over the store in New Westminster, the original store by the Royal Columbian Hospital, and I ran that for 20 years on my own, and then in 2022, I my sons weren't interested in being the third generation, so I sold the business to specialized bicycles who carry on operating there with the caps name and they keep the tradition in the community. There is a third generation in the caps in Langley. Uh, my nephew Graham is carrying that on. He he took it over from his dad, so we've got the third generation of hobbices in the bike business in Goodstead.

Why Canada Lost Bike Factories

Peter Ladner 9:21

Gordon, you talked about amalgamation in the bike business. Are there any bike manufacturers left in Canada?

Gordon Hobbis 9:27

Uh large-scale manufacturers know there isn't. And I'm gonna make a long answer out of a short question. When we talked about CCM amalgamating with five companies coming together to create the Canada Cycle and Motor Company, that was in 1899. And that was done to keep American companies out of Canada. So what was happening with the market collapsing with oversupply, American companies were looking at selling their bikes into Canada, and this would wipe out Canadian manufacturers. So these five companies got together and lobbied Ottawa to put restrictive tariffs on U.S. bikes so that it would be too expensive to sell your American-made bikes into Canada. And that is why when we were growing up, there was these really cool Schwinn balloon tire bikes and Schwinn high-rise bikes and and these really cool American bikes that we didn't have access to in Canadian market. We were selling Raleigh bikes and CCM bikes and bikes that were maybe not as stylish or as cool. We talk about that on in the tour of the museum. Uh so the restrictive tariffs had the benefit of protecting Canadian manufacturers, but it had the the the the con of it was that Canadian manufacturers got a little bit lazy. So CCM as the company never invested in new technology. They couldn't weld aluminum in their factory, they couldn't keep up with modern manufacturing. Uh so we lost ground on that. And when free trade came in, that brought in American companies. Free trade was scaled in over ten years, so that's how we have Trek and specialized in Cannondale in the Canadian market now that really changed it. So the Canadian companies like Rocky Mountain, Kona, Brody had to change and go offshore to compete with Price. Uh the last manufacturer, and they're still making some of their bikes in Canada, would be Da Vinci in Chikudami, Quebec. Uh so they they're still manufacturing some product here. Uh but for the most part, we have some wonderful small builders like Chris DeKurf or something like that. We can do handbuilt bikes here, but we just don't have the large format manufacturing anymore.

Peter Ladner 11:55

How

Retail Survival With E-Bikes Online

Peter Ladner 11:56

is bike retailing different now from let's say even 10 years ago?

Gordon Hobbis 12:02

Oh, bicycle retailing. Yeah, I think the more it changes, the more it stays the same. You know, we dealt with catalog sales in the in the 60s, , the Eaton's catalog, the Sears catalog. In the 70s, we dealt with low heed mall shopping up, opening up , , and the big box retailers. The thing that the independent bicycle dealer does is they bring experience and service to your bike buying quest. Having somebody help you select the right bike is so important. Experienced people, you you could do that. Uh, I'm sure you could buy a bike online, I could buy a bike online, but people just getting into the sport or getting into commuting, they may not know it, but they need the advice. They need to be set up on the right size of bike and the right type of bike. And bike retailing now is all about choice and variety. You know, in the 1980s, when we were selling Nishiki bikes, the Nishiki catalog had eight models. You know, today we're selling specialized bikes, and the specialized catalog has 200 models. Uh, so many specialties, whether you're getting a gravel bike or you're doing a grand fondo bike or you're doing a crit racing bike or you're doing a commuting bike, and then you take all of those models and you electrify them. So now your bike shop is almost doubled. So bike retailing is is a challenge with the online sellers, it's a challenge with having the experienced staff, but the the rewards are still there. You get to go to work every day and talk to people and improve somebody's life. You can help them lose weight, you can help them spend time with their family, you can help them save money, and every day you get that feeling of I've helped people out today.

Peter Ladner 13:46

It's a little bit the same of the way we feel the BC Cycling Coalition. I think that it's all part of a quest for a better life for a lot of people. I

The First North American Bike Lanes

Peter Ladner 14:07

want to go back into history a little bit. You have studied bike lanes and you've been to California and found the first bike lanes ever installed in North America. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Gordon Hobbis 14:19

I I've made this pilgrimage twice to a university town, UC Davis, big university campus. At any one time, there's 20,000 bikes on campus. And I talked to the person who was for over 30 years the transfer the bicycle transportation manager for UC Davis. He's got a wonderful name, David Takamoto Wirtz. And he's also the curator of the the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame, and they have a museum in Davis as well, a wonderful collection. And most recently I went on a little fact-binding trip with my son and and and wife, and we went down to Davis to study bike museums as we were preparing to open ours. But the bike lanes there are fabulous. It's it's got an advantage. Davis is very flat, it's a grid, and they've got wonderful bicycle transportation. And when I was investigating that a little bit, I learned that these bike lanes opened in 1969, and they were the first bike lanes in the U.S. And when I delved into it a little bit further, these bicycle lanes were put in by car drivers. People that drove cars around Davis were frustrated because there were so many bikes, it was so difficult to drive a car, they had to get these bikes out of the way. So the idea of the bike lanes was to put the bikes where they belong and make it easier for the car drivers. And I thought when I heard that, I thought, oh, that's the way we have to approach

China’s Bike Lane Comeback

Gordon Hobbis 15:50

it here.

Peter Ladner 15:50

Well, you've also looked at the the the rise and fall and rebirth of bike lanes in China. Tell us about that.

Gordon Hobbis 15:59

Uh, my research about bike lanes led me to okay, what's going on in China? So there was the Cultural Revolution. Chairman Mao came on and said the modern Chinese family is going to have three things. They're gonna have a sewing machine, they're gonna have radio, and they're gonna have a bicycle. And Chairman Mao put in a a public bicycle manufacturer and made millions of bicycles to get Chinese public mobile and moving. Then the 1980s roll around and and and there's a change, Tiananmen Square, and China's gonna get more modern, and the bicycle is a sign of the past. So we're gonna abandon that and we're gonna go all in on the car, and we're gonna build thousands of miles of paved highway, and every every everybody's gonna drive a car. And very quickly, they noticed a difference. They noticed smoggier cities, more pollution, they noticed health problems that they weren't having beforehand. Uh, there was a big rise in obesity, there was lots of problems, and they traced it to the car. And China's very quick to adapt and change. And starting in the in the mid-1990s, they started to go back to the bicycle, but in a modern way, and they built thousands of miles of bike path and elevated bike routes, and today China's back on the bicycle in a modern way, and of course, the thing that changed that for them was the electric bikes. And so I use that as in my presentation to just talk about climate change, bicycles, bike lanes. Let's move past the anti-bicycle movement that has been around since bicycles started right back in the 1860s, when the pedal was put on the bicycle by Pierre Michaud, that upset the horse people. They were startling horses and getting in the way of the horse wagons. So the anti-bicycle movement isn't anything new, it's something that bicycle riders have been dealing with since the dawn of the bicycle. But let's let's get past that.

Why Bikes Felt Like Flight

Peter Ladner 18:36

Physical health and so on, advantages of the bicycle, but you also like to talk about the cool factor and how how cool it was when a bicycle came in and suddenly people were liberated from walking on their own two feet or depending on a horse to move around before the airplane, before the car, before the motorcycle, then there's this guy with his self-propelled transportation.

Gordon Hobbis 19:00

Nobody had ever seen it before. Nobody had ever seen anybody that was on a machine where they're the motor and they're the passenger. How amazing that was. Now, the the things that come out of that is by the time the bicycle really gets rolling in the 1890s, and we get into the golden age of bicycle, it was the most perfected machined item you could buy. It was the the iPhone 27 of the day. It was they were light, they were 20 pounds, they were strong, they were um efficient, they were super well-made machines, , because this was the highest tech thing you could have, and it was the the real first sort of consumer, high-end consumer good that you could buy. Um, that was a recreational that wasn't you you didn't need it for the farm, you didn't need it for the house. So that's the cool factor of bikes. If you were on a bike, you were like the penny farthing bike, that was for the young men, that was the daredevil thing, that was amazing to see. So you were you had stature, you had status with riding a high wheeler and and through the 1890s with being on a bicycle. Uh that was a cool thing. But part of that all comes from that that first time, that first feeling of being on a bike, and people relate to it in in stories of the time, , as this was the closest they were gonna ever feel to being a bird, to having flight, to having freedom. Uh, and then you start to think, well, maybe this is what inspired the Wright brothers to to look at human-powered flight from their bicycle store. And it's really fun in the museum because it's not, I thought that was pretty common knowledge, but we tell that to people, and they kind of didn't know that the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics. And I asked them now that they know that, does it change their opinion of flying?

Peter Ladner 20:56

Or bicycles. Um,

How Bicycles Helped Women Break Rules

Peter Ladner 20:59

you also talk about how bicycles liberated women. You mentioned that that these early bicycles were not used for commuting or cargo deliveries or anything, it was recreation and sport. And what what did that do for women?

Gordon Hobbis 21:13

Well, originally the bicycle was a male-dominated thing because high-wheel bicycle for the 1880s, , the Victorian times, women couldn't some women did. They they threw their reputation to the curb and they would wear their bloomers and they would do what the boys are doing. But most women, , the bicycle was for the men, and the men were getting out of the house on their Sunday rides and and traveling the countryside. By the time the 1890s came along with the advent of the safety bike, and now bicycling was more accessible to various ages and to men and women equally. And the bike was came to be popular as a courting machine, as you're as going out on a date with your bicycle. And what I've come to learn from that. Is that the bicycle helped to break down the barriers of old ways being one chaperone? So if you were going to leave the house with a gentleman, social dictates would say you have to have a chaperone. So now on a bicycle, you're going out on a on a physical endeavor, you're you're exercising. So you can go out as a young lady on your bike on your own, and you don't need a chaperone. And then you can meet up with with other friends and go for a ride in the country, and maybe you're gonna ride with a gentleman along the way and stop and have a picnic. So it really we we roll back the statement that that the bicycle freed women as the bicycle didn't do that, the bicycle was there for the trip. The bicycle was there as one of the things. Along the same time was the Rational Dress Society, and things were changing as far as how women were were required to dress. And the bicycle was there for that because women still wore corsets when they rode a bike, but now they developed an athletic corset, if there's such a thing. Um, so some of these things came on, but there was a big push to get women off of bikes, too. There was lots of medical people were paid money to to write articles and say that bicycling was unhealthy, it was unhygienic, it was going to affect your ability to have children, it wasn't gonna be good for women. Um the the church was feeling the effects of bicycle use because people weren't coming to church on Sunday, they were out for bike rides, so that was affecting attendance. So there was even one case where doctors said that bike riding was bad for your complexion. Uh the high speed and the wind would stretch your skin back and would give you bicycle face, and you wouldn't it and you wouldn't want to have bicycle face.

Peter Ladner 23:50

Well, we all know that.

Gordon Hobbis 23:51

That one that that concern didn't last very long because it didn't take long for marketers to develop cream that would cure bicycle face.

Booms Busts And Bike Industry Lessons

Peter Ladner 24:01

Gordon, you said that bicycles were there were many, many sold then, even compared to today's numbers.

Gordon Hobbis 24:08

So sales records in the US show that by 1895, in the in the year 1895, over a million bicycles were sold. So on a per capita basis, that number hadn't been exceeded until 2020. I mean where everybody had to have a bicycle. That was the peak. Now, nobody was managing the industry at that time, so there ended up being an oversupply. There was over 400 bicycle manufacturers. Everybody at the start of the 90s, everybody got into making bikes. And so the bicycle manufacturing numbers would come down. The bicycle manufacturers by the end of the 1890s, by the turn of the century, they were having a hard time selling because with so much inventory, prices had dropped and and many bike manufacturers went out of business, and and the other ones amalgamated. So in Canada, we had five big companies come together to create the Canada Cycle and Motor Company. Uh , so that was from oversupply, but the bicycle usage didn't stop, and the bicycle became more of a democratizing machine as prices came down and then it's more accessible to people. More people were riding. They just weren't we weren't tuned into the new and improved marketing that we use now. They there there wasn't such an importance on model year, so people weren't weren't so interested in the new technology that was coming

Refurbished Bikes Charity And Classes

Gordon Hobbis 25:36

about.

Peter Ladner 25:36

Well, when you talk about affordable bicycles, I know in your retirement, and in fact, I I think throughout your life you've been involved with refurbishing old bikes and giving them away to people. How how how does that work well Peter?

Gordon Hobbis 25:51

I joked that I was retired for about 15 minutes before I needed to find something better to do. I'm not very good at golf, so I didn't think I'd want to torture myself five days a week. So I decided to fix up old bikes in the backyard and work with a local group, the um New Westminster Welcome Center. And then I joined up with the New Westminster volunteers at Hub, and they've been very helpful to come out and help refurbish the bikes and to deliver the bikes to the new people. Uh so that led to becoming a not-for-profit organization, and then I thought, well, why stop there? Let's become a charitable organization. So now we have the Dandy Horse Bicycle Society that has the charitable purposes of refurbishing unwanted bikes and giving the people that need bikes, as well as operating a bicycle museum and teaching bicycle history.

Peter Ladner 26:47

You also teach mechanics?

Gordon Hobbis 26:48

We do with the bike refurbishment. I have a eight-session class on bicycle mechanic introduction so that we can have more mechan more mechanical ability to fix up these bikes and do all that in the backyard too.

Peter Ladner 27:04

Is this for people who just want to look after their own bikes or people who want a career as a bike mechanic?

Gordon Hobbis 27:09

Their motivation is gonna gonna vary. Uh the people that we have in the class now, I can do three people at a time in my little space. Uh, and it's been supported, I have to make a mention. The city of New Westminster has a community grant that came forward and supported the purchase of tools and parts to do this program. Uh one of the fellows in the class is just interested in learning more about how to take care of his own bikes. Uh, and somebody else is actually interested in pursuing maybe in his retirement, having a bicycle store and wanted to get a bit of a foundation on on what what this is like. So that can be anything.

Peter Ladner 27:48

Well, Gordon, I I have to say you are in some way responsible for making cycling cool and possible for for a certain number of people and bring these advantages and pleasures and fun to more people. So thank you for all the work you're doing.

Visiting The Maple Ridge Bike Museum

Peter Ladner 28:07

And how if we wanted to go and visit your museum, when when can we go and where is it?

Gordon Hobbis 28:12

Well, this was an a museum that is on residential property in in Maple Ridge. It's very close to Wanwick Lake. Um now there's a lot of great things to do out there. If you're a mountain biker, you could go to Thornhill Mountain Bike Trails. If you're an extreme one, there's still the wood lot. If you just want to ride the dikes around Pit Meadows, you could do that. So you could make a day of it and then drop in and see the museum. We are open one day a month for a free open house. And the way you find out about that is to go to the two wheeltime machine.com website, all letters, no numbers, two wheel time machine, and you put your email address in. And when my wife and I pick a date for an open house, we'll send an invitation out to everybody on our list, and then it's up to you to RSVP. Uh we can handle about thirty people per open house. We do that once a month. Our next one's gonna be in August. The other way you could see the museum is you could do a private tour. Uh, I asked for a hundred dollar donation for a private tour, and four people is really manageable for me on my own. I could probably manage six people if that was the size of the group that wanted to come out. Um, and then we could just arrange that on whatever day was good for you. I'm retired, I got a pretty open schedule.

Peter Ladner 29:38

Okay, Gordon, thank you so much. Thank you.

Ratings Subscribes And Goodbye

Peter Ladner 29:48

You've been listening to Bike Dance, an original podcast from the BT Cycling Coalition. If you like the podcast, we'd be grateful if you could leave us a rating on whatever platform you use. You can also subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. If you have comments or suggestions for future episodes, email me at theater.ca. You can have 80 cycling collections.