Wash your hands, and don’t panic

The recent events have caused me to think back to sometime around October 1957 when I was 21 years old.

I dealt with the worst case of flu, or for that matter the worst illness I have ever suffered.

It was caused by a worldwide pandemic known as the Asian Flu.

Politically incorrect today, but if I used its other name of H2N2 virus, few would know what I meant or understand the impact it had at the time.

I lived in a boarding house in North London, located in a huge Victorian brick and stone building. I lived on the fourth floor, and as heating was by an individual gas fire in each room, when everyone in the house had their gas fire on, there was so little gas pressure on the fourth floor that heating may as well been from a candle. A bucket of drinking water I kept in the room would sometimes freeze overnight in winter.

As well as renting a single room, the owner of the home provided breakfast and dinner which we ate in a communal dining room. There was also a shared sitting room with a TV. When the virus hit, it quickly spread though almost all the residents.

I was not hospitalized but stayed in my room, and do not remember even seeing a doctor. I was given aspirin by my landlady, and food was left on a plate outside my door, where it mostly stayed overnight as I was too weak to get out of bed to go get it.

I ran a high fever and my sheets and bedding were soaking wet from sweat. My landlady would come in every day, help me out of bed and down one floor to use the bathroom. She would then change my bedding, and try to get me to eat something, or at least drink some water.

In the early stages I was either in a semi-coma, or delirious with the room seemingly spinning around. I felt like I was about to die, and one knows they are really sick when they feel that death would be a blessed relief, and they care little for the outcome either way.

I remember at least one person died in this boarding house, a nice old gentleman named Mr. Edwards, whom I had got to know quite well. Altogether some 14,000 people died in the UK, 100.000 in the US, and estimates vary worldwide between one and two million.

Looking back on these events, I can’t help but compare the situation then and now. For those of us who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, getting seriously ill was almost a way of life. Throughout our childhood we would catch at least one (Sometimes two.) contagious diseases every year.

Mumps, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, and German measles went though entire schools, towns and villages alike. I had them all at different times throughout my childhood except German measles.

My mother, born in 1897, lived through even worse diseases. Typhoid fever, smallpox, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, and diphtheria. Plus, the Spanish Flu of 1918 and 1919 that killed 50 million people worldwide.

Catching the Asian Flu at the age of 21 was just part of life that had to be dealt with. We knew it was coming, it had been on TV and the radio, and in all the newspapers, but life went on as normal. But back then news casters simply read the news, and the big difference was, they didn’t express opinions, and above all they didn’t express political opinions.

No one blamed the government, the then prime minister Harold McMillan, or President Eisenhour. Trains and busses kept running, people flew on airplanes. Businesses did not close, and people did not view everyone else with suspicion and bump elbows instead of shaking hands.

Looking back, I wonder, were we too complacent? Possibly, had I washed my hands a few more times, and avoided eating in the communal dining room, I may, or may not have become infected.

I can tell you what I was not. I was never at any time fearful of catching the flu. Neither were most people as I recall.

The difference was, we didn’t have news 24/7, and we did not have cell-phones or the Internet. How many times a day do I need to be told to wash my hands?

Governments are placing restrictions on everything but the news media, where restriction is needed. Tell us what we need to know, and give us some other news, not just the coronavirus.

Take precautions, but don’t panic. Look out for your elderly neighbor, go buy their groceries so they don’t have to go out. If you get the coronavirus it will be unpleasant, but it probably won’t kill you.

In spite of receiving no medical attention what-so-ever, and only being checked on once a day, the Asian Flu didn’t kill me at 21, and along with all those other childhood diseases, it probably helped me build a strong immune system that will serve me well now I need it in my eighties.

When this is over, and we compare this pandemic with past ones. Possibly the numbers will be better and there will be fewer infections and deaths. However, the way it was handled could be greatly improved.

Was it really necessary to throw the whole world's population into a panic?

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What’s in a Logo

What do you see when you look at the head tube logo on my custom frames?

Many people see a tic-tac-toe or the pound symbol you see on a telephone keypad.

If this is what you see, you are looking at the blank space inside the logo.

It is simply four lower case letter “m” placed north, south, east, and west in the form of a cross.

During the 1970s in England there were strict rules regarding the amateur status of athletes, especially Olympic athletes. No sponsorship was allowed, and I could not advertise the fact that a few 'World Class' cyclists were riding my bikes. One way around this was to have my name prominently displayed on the frame.

I did this in a simple typeface similar to that used on British road signs, easy to read and distinctive in my name being spelled out in all lower case letters.

A picture of a leading cyclist riding my bike on the cover of the British "Cycling" Magazine (Like the one on the right of Paul Carbutt.) would result in a huge boost in sales.

Sometimes a photo would be a head on shot and all that could be seen was my logo on the head tube. The logo was simple and instantly recognizable.

Paul Carbutt at the 1976 Olympics held in Mantreal, Canada.
When I resumed building my own custom frames in California in 1981, while still working for Masi, I used the old stock decals I had brought with me from England. This included the logo with the words “Worcester England” underneath. (The address of my English frameshop.) I felt somewhat justified because after all the Masi frames said “Masi, Milano” on the head tube even though they were built in California.

I later added a decal that read:

FRAME GUARANTEED HANCRAFTED
BY DAVE MOULTON
IN CALIFORNIA USA

This was placed at the top of the seat tube, under the seat lug where the tube manufacturer’s decal would normally go.

I followed Masi’s lead and left the tubing decal off my custom frames because they were prone to bubble and fester in the heat of the paint-curing oven.

To my chagrin there was resistance to the ‘dave moulton’ name on my frames when I first started building in California. “Not exotic sounding enough” was the excuse I usually heard. Some wanted to order a frame without decals for that reason, which I refused to do.

It was traditional for English framebuilders to have their full name on the frame, usually with an abbreviated first name; Bob Jackson, Ron Cooper, Harry Quinn, Stan Pike. To the ear (Or is it the eye?) of the American cyclist these names were not as appealing as Colnago, Cinelli, Pinarello, or Pugliaghi.

When I decided to bring out a line of production frames in 1984 my main competition was these Italian import frames, so I looked through an Italian/English dictionary for a suitable name. I ended up choosing a word that did not sound particularly Italian.

I came across the word “Fuso” Italian for molten metal. It was a play on words on my name.

I sketched out the logo of a crucible pouring molten metal into a mold, and the Fuso brand was born.

I did not know at the time that Fuso was also a Japanese word and there was a famous Japanese battleship named Fuso during WWII.

There is a subtle difference in pronunciation; my frame is pronounced the Italian way, Fuse-oh. The Japanese pronunciation is Foo-so. Mitsubishi has a line of commercial vehicles with that name.

If you can believe this also, when I brought out the Fuso frame, many of my customers protested and wanted ‘dave moulton’ on it. By now, I my reputation had grown, and no one cared if the name sounded exotic or not.

However, to put ‘dave moulton’ on a line of production frames, even though the quality was high, would have been unfair to those who had paid top dollar for individually built custom frames. So once again, I had to refuse.

I am reminded of the old adage, “You can’t please all the people all the time.”

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Geoffrey West

East Woodhay School

The winter of 1944, approaching 1945 was a brutal and bitterly cold one across England and the rest of Europe. Those familiar with WWII history will know that. Allied Forces fought their way through France, Belgium and Holland to defeat Germany in the last six months of the war.

I was eight years old, soon to be nine, attending school in the little village of East Woodhay, Hampshire in the South of England. Geoffrey West was a classmate in school, we were about the same age. He was from a large family of eight or nine, his sister Dorothy West was in the same class.

His father used to cut my hair. Every month or so I would walk the three or four miles to his house, with a silver shilling, (The cost of a haircut.) clutched tightly in my hand. Sometime just after Christmas, 1944 Geoffrey went missing.

A police constable came to school to ask if anyone had seen him. Volunteers searched for at least two weeks, breaking ice, and dragging ponds. Then someone remembered that some Italian Prisoners of War had been clearing some trees in the nearby village of Ball Hill.

They had used a huge army bulldozer and a chain to uproot the trees, then cut the tree trunk near the root as the tree lay on the ground. There were no chainsaws back then, they would have used a two-man hand saw. It would have been a long process.

Out of a number of trees that had been brought down in this fashion and the trees had since been removed, all the roots stood upright, except for one that had flopped back into the hole. The bulldozer was brought back, and the root was pulled up again. There lay Geoffrey’s body.

What made him jump down into that hole? Who knows, but to an eight or nine-year-old boy when the ground opens up and you see a place where no man has been before who knows what treasures lay there just waiting to be picked up. He sees no danger, only adventure.

These are things I think of often, along with questions like, why do some have their lives cut short, while others go on to live their's to its full extent? And who even remembers Geoffrey West?

His family, his brothers and sisters, and a few classmates like me. I was reminded of this tragedy recently when I came across this video (Below.) which illustrates exactly what happened.

I hope that as well as memorializing Geoffrey West, I am making people aware. It is not my intention to place fear into the hearts of adventurous young boys, but to make them think of consequences, and of hidden dangers in life that one needs to be aware of.

via GIPHY

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Success and Fate

Looking back on the United States part of my framebuilding career, although some of my success I created, fate also played a large role.

For example, in 1980 I went for a job interview with Trek, in Wisconsin. I didn’t get the position, but later that same year I landed a job with Masi in Southern California.

When I eventually started my own business, I was definitely in the right place. California, and in particular the southern part of that state, has a climate where one can ride a bike year-round. Had I opened my own framebuilding shop in Wisconsin, business would have definitely been seasonal.

Also, when Masi laid me off at the end of 1981 it was due to an overstock of unsold frames coinciding with a recession. It was not because of anything I had done, and it was not necessarily Masi’s doing either.

They were only too pleased to rent me space in their shop to build my own frames, as they also had a drop in income. This got me started back in my own business again, and I was able to resume building custom frames, something I had not done since leaving England in 1979.

Then when John Howard, ex-Olympic rider and winner of the first Ironman Triathlon approached me in 1983 to build frames under his own name, it gave me a contract to build five frames a week.

This brought in a steady income to supplement what I was already making from my custom frames. It enabled me to open my own framebuilding facility, along with my own paint shop.

The John Howard frame was a short lived project that only lasted a year. Again due to circumstances largely outside of my control, and of which I have outlined here in a previous article.

This left me scrambling to find a replacement to fill the void in my production capabilities. Once again fate had played a hand and out of that the Fuso was conceived.

The John Howard frame was always underpriced, and profit margins were small. It was competing head on with the Masi and Italian import frames, but was not an established brand at that time, so we had to produce and sell it for less.

With lessons learned from the John Howard frame, the Fuso came into being in 1984. The extreme luxuries like chrome plating were dispensed with, and the Fuso was a well-designed, well-built product with nice paint and graphics.

No longer having to split profits with a middle-man, I now had a frame that was a reasonable price and would compete favorably with the import frames.

The Fuso had a good run for almost ten years, when once again fate took a hand in the form of the Mountain Bike, people stopped buying road bikes. However, this time I did not rise to the challenge and re-invent myself or my business.

Maybe I had been knocked down one too many times. I was thoroughly burned out with the bike business, and no longer wanted to be a part of it.

If someone had offered me a job in the bike business, I would have considered it. But to run my own business again, subject to all the whims of the market and the consumer. No, thank you very much

Looking back, I have no regrets, but can't help but wonder what if I had landed that job with Trek back in 1980. Would they have treated me well enough that I stayed?

I might have retired by from some executive position with a large pension. On the other hand, I doubt if it would have been as satisfying as what I did do.

And is money the only consideration when a person looks back on what they have achieved? At some point we die, and money has little bearing on anything

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Fractal Geometry and Frame Design

Benoit MandelbrotFractal is a word coined by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (Left.) who published his findings as recent as the 1970s.

Up until that point, throughout history geometry was all about straight lines, triangles, pyramids, circles and cylinders, etc.

This geometry applied to everything man-made, buildings, bridges and other engineering projects, and of course bicycle frames fit right into this category, being made up of straight lines and triangles. Up until Mandelbrot’s findings, everything in nature outside of that which is man-made could not be explained by geometry and mathematics.

Mandelbrot changed all that when he discovered that shapes and forms in nature. For example, cloud formations, trees, mountains, river flow and even blood vessels in our bodies, were a series of repeating irregular shapes, which could be recreated and proven mathematically.

Like many great minds, Benoit Mandelbrot was at first scoffed at by other experts, but now with improvements in computing his theories are being proved mathematically. Now taken seriously, fractals are being studied and used in the medical and the environmental fields.

One of the places we also see fractal geometry in practice is in special effects for movies. Not only are images of nature being created, like landscapes, plants, trees, and even human and animal forms, but fire and explosions can be created and animated on a computer. 

This subject has always fascinated me, because on the one hand you have the bicycle which is traditional man-made geometry, and the task of the frame builder is to match that to the human body, so the two become one, and the bicycle becomes an extension of its rider.

The human body, like all forms in nature, appears to be chaotic and infinite in its makeup. Yet it was possible for me to build a series of production frames, the Fuso for example, in a range of sizes that would fit just about anybody.

From as far back as the late 1960s I found I could fit someone to a frame “Intuitively.”  I did not let this be widely known for fear of being labeled a crack-pot. I was basing my estimation of frame size primarily on a person’s height.

Long after I left the bike business, and therefore the effect of the “Crackpot” label had diminished, I wrote an article here in February 2006, stating that frame size could be estimated around a person’s height.

I came to this conclusion, not so much by what I could do in sizing a person, but more by what I could not do. A person who is six feet tall would normally fit on a frame around 58 or 59 centimeters (Measured center to top.)

However, it is quite a common occurrence to find a person six feet tall (183 cm.) with a 30 inch (76 cm.) inside leg measurement. You cannot put a person like that on a 51 centimeter frame as his inseam would suggest then build a long top tube to accommodate his long body.

I would simply drop the frame size down to a 56 or 57 centimeter because of the short legs, and leave the top tube as standard for that size frame. (55cm. or 55.5 respectively.) This same frame would also suit a person 5’10” tall, (178 cm.) with an inseam around 33 inches.(84 cm.) The difference being the taller guy with short legs would have his saddle lower and possibly use a longer stem.

I knew this was so, but never knew why. It all became clear to me on watching a PBS Nova episode back in 2010 on Benoit Mandelbroc and his discovery fractal geometry. The program mentioned a group of environmentalists were studying rainforests. They cut down a large tree, then measured and documented the dimensions of all its branches, overall height etc.

They then found that a seemingly random pattern of trees of all sizes growing throughout the rest of the rainforest followed the same pattern as the branches of the one tree they had documented; both in the position of their branches, and their position in the forest relative to other trees.

Watching this, it occurred to me that if you took a large group of humans all the same height, you could fit them all to the same size bicycle frame. (Within a centimeter or so.) This is why this theory works, although on the surface it appears that my group all the same height are each different in every other way, they are no different than the trees in the rainforest. They all follow the rule of fractal geometry that can be plotted mathematically.

Fractals are once again in the news with this recent article, which prompted me to re-visit my previous piece written back in December 2010.

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