Almost all of us have had a bicycle at one point in our lives. Probably when you were a child you had a “two wheeler’ with training wheels that came off when you reached the age of being able to reach the pedals.
As you got older, if you were lucky you got what we called an “English Racer”. This was a sleek, usually black, metal frame with three gears that shifted from a small lever on the handle bars.
If you really took to riding you may have stepped up to a “road bike”, which was an even sleeker model that had from 9 to 21 gears on three chain rings, a handlebar mounted lever, and a derailer to shift the chain from the large sprocketed ring to the smallest ring, all on your rear wheel….or something very close to that.
