Re: RIP - Sheldon Brown, Bicycle Mechanic and Repairman and Store Owner .... died March 3, 2008 after illness
Andrew Chaplin
"Bicycle" <Bic...@rogers.com> wrote in message
news:jbvdv3plosa6dndl9...@4ax.com...
>
>
> Sheldon Brown
>
> Bicycle mechanic who dispensed technical advice and his family news on
> the internet to millions
> If Sheldon Brown had been only an excellent bicycle mechanic, the
> esteem in which he was held, while great, could not have extended much
> beyond his native Massachusetts. But because of the selfless use to
> which he put the internet, regret at his death has been felt across
> the world.
>
> His knowledge of bicycles, from a lifetime of riding them, taking them
> apart, fixing and modifying them, was encyclopaedic. For more than 20
> years he earned a living from that knowledge with the spanners,
> screwdrivers and tyre levers of a succession of bicycle workshops
> around Boston, and he could probably have gone on doing so happily
> until retirement. Then, at 49, he found at his disposal an invention
> more powerful than anything in a mechanic's toolbox. He quickly saw
> that the internet could make his expertise available not just to the
> customers of one bike shop, but to anyone who wanted it, anywhere. It
> turned out that a lot of people did. The website he built,
> sheldonbrown.com, has attracted millions.
>
> Sheldon Christopher Brown was born in Boston in 1944. After his
> father's death in an air crash when Brown was 9, the family settled in
> Marblehead, Massachusetts, and it was in the Marblehead town dump that
> his career in the bicycle business originated. During high school he
> built bikes out of parts scavenged from the dump and sold them. Like
> many in the 1960s he heeded Timothy Leary's call to turn on, tune in
> and drop out, not staying long at college or in a series of jobs
> selling shoes and hi-fi, and driving taxis.
>
> By 1972 bike repair was his career, and he set up the Boston Bicycle
> Repair Collective, a fellow founder member being Stan Kaplan, inventor
> of the Kryptonite bike lock. After, as he described it, being "purged
> by Maoists" from the collective, for a time Brown turned his dexterity
> to camera repair. But he went back to working on bicycles, and by the
> early 1980s, in a move towards his ultimate future, he was not just
> repairing bikes but writing about them.
>
> His audience in specialist cyclists' magazines, however, was
> necessarily limited. Then came the internet.
>
> In 1990 Brown had joined Harris Cyclery, a shop a few minutes' bike
> ride from his home in Newtonville, a Boston suburb, as a mechanic. As
> the internet developed, he became a contributor to cycling newsgroups,
> and in 1995 Aaron Harris, his employer, let him set up a website in
> association with the shop. Initially it was intended to sell
> specialist parts, but soon Brown took it far beyond that. "Aaron let
> me spread my wings," Brown said in 2001.
>
> The website certainly flew. Last year sheldonbrown.com had more than
> half a million visitors a month. They came for everything to do with
> bikes, from advice for timid beginners on how to mount a bike to
> instructions for the daring on how to build their own tandem. The site
> has a glossary of almost 1,000 terms from "A and B chainrings" to
> "Zzipper".
>
> If you couldn't find what you needed on the website, you e-mailed and
> asked, and "captbike" usually replied the same day. Answering 200
> e-mails most days, he was courteous and informative, but hadn't time
> to be wordy. One correspondent, told that replacing his 20-tooth back
> gear with a 22-tooth would make climbing hills easier, asked how much.
> Back shot a classic captbike reply: "10%."
>
> Brown did not charge for access to the site or for his e-mail advice,
> but the site was a vindication of the internet freeware credo that
> putting up free content will bring its own reward. It brings in about
> half Harris's business.
>
> But sheldonbrown.com was, and is, about more than commerce. Nor is it
> just a compendium of technical information. It includes a blog that
> started before the term existed, recording the personality, the
> philosophy, the likes and dislikes, and above all the family life, of
> the man who built it. In 1979 Brown married Harriet Fell, who teaches
> at Northeastern University, Boston. A daughter was born in 1981, and a
> son in 1983. The blog records his devotion to them, his pride in their
> accomplishments, and such family adventures as touring in France on
> two tandems when the children were 6 and 8.
>
> Given his lifelong delight in cycling, it was particularly cruel that
> in the past two years multiple sclerosis gradually robbed him of the
> ability to ride a two-wheeler. His response was characteristic - he
> got a recumbent tricycle and kept pedalling, still riding it to work
> until shortly before he died. And he wryly put a page titled "The
> Bright Side of MS" (easy parking with a disabled sticker, jumping
> airport security queues) on his website.
>
> The response to his death has been a fitting combination of bicycles
> and the internet. From Melbourne to Missouri, cyclists have held or
> are planning memorial rides - co-ordinated, naturally, on the web. The
> London ride is on April 6.
>
> Sheldon Brown, cyclist, was born on July 14, 1944. He died of a heart
> attack on February 3, 2008, aged 63
>
>
>
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3469993.ece
Brown was an important champion of the bicycle as a primary means of transport
rather than a toy. His site remains both useful and fun for cyclists.
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/eagle.html
--
Andrew Chaplin
SIT MIHI GLADIUS SICUT SANCTO MARTINO
(If you're going to e-mail me, you'll have to get "yourfinger." out.)