Description
✳️ High resolution vintage digital image
✳️ Heavyweight, lightly textured fine art paper
✳️ Fade resistant archival inks
✳️ Fits standard sized frame
✳️ Rolled and shipped in a heavy mailing tube
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Our Posters provide a glimpse of an era when the bicycle was the king of transportation and on the cutting edge of technology.
These posters depict famous races and racers, bicycle brands and component manufactures.
Beautiful women in elegant clothes are often part of the advertising message of these posters. This is because the manufacturers were selling freedom to women in the suffragette era at the turn of the century as much as they were selling bicycles.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec poster from the 1896, Constant Huret riding with a Simpson chain behind the Gladiator tandem pacer at the Velodrome de la Seine.
The Simpson Chain or Simpson Lever Chain was an English-made bicycle chain invented by William Spears Simpson in 1895. The design departed from the standard roller bicycle chain: it was composed of linked triangles forming two levels. The inner level was driven by the chainring and the outer drove the rear cog. Instead of teeth, the chainring and cog had grooves into which the rollers of the chain engaged.
Simpson made claims, widely discredited, that the levers of this chain provided a mechanical advantage that could amplify energy produced by the cyclist. Simpson hired top cyclists such as Constant Huret (depicted in Toulouse-Lautrec's poster) and Tom Linton (of Paris-Bordeaux fame), and the Gladiator Pacing Team from France to race for high stakes in England for the Chain Matches. His teams were largely successful.
