Spokes

Celebrating the long, thin, quiet revolutionaries of cycling tech. They're easily overlooked, but crucial...

- Rob Ainsley

Those slender steel wires are one of many deceptively simple pieces of bike tech we take for granted, but they're vital. The twunk of one breaking spoke can set off a domino effect, successive snaps warping a wheel into half Pringle, half Picasso. It's one of cycling's less welcome sounds; but, more melodiously, bike wheels have been played like a chaotically tuned harp by experimental musicians. (There's a quaint b&w video of US rock legend Frank Zappa, pre-moustache, doing just that.)

Wooden wheels first appeared in various places around 6,000 years ago, notably modern-day Iraq, no doubt quickly followed by arguments about whether narrower ones had less rolling resistance. Wooden spokes - hence the first broken spokes and tooth-sucking wheel-builders - arose about 4,000 years ago.