History
The history of the mountain bike includes contributions from cyclo-cross in Europe and the Roughstuff Fellowship in the UK. The name "mountain bike" first appeared in print in 1966 as "mountain bicycle". The mountain bike was a modified heavy cruiser bicycle used for freewheeling down mountain trails. The sport became popular in the 1970s in Marin county, California, USA. The 2007 documentary film, Klunkerz: A Film About Mountain Bikes, looks at this period of off-road cycling in detail. However, it was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that road bicycle companies started to manufacture mountain bicycles using high-tech lightweight materials, such as M4 aluminium, although in recent years, titanium, hydroformed aluminium, and carbon fiber frames have become more common but can be very expensive. The first mass production mountain bike was the Specialized Stumpjumper, first produced in 1981. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, mountain biking moved from a little-known sport to a mainstream activity complete with an international racing circuit and a world championship.
Read more about this topic: Mountain Bike
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)