Perusing photos of Dublin during the Edwardian era it appears that bicycles were left propped up on the kerb and not locked to anything. Nowadays even a sturdy lock is no guarantee your bike will still be there when you get back. When did bicycle locks start becoming popular/necessary?
When I was in third grade (1957-8), I started riding my bike to school. Almost no one locked their bikes at the rack. My bike was taken and used for a ride and left at a different bike rack at the school. I found it two days later. I started using a lock then. It was a simple lock that you inserted through the wheel. You did not lock it to the rack, just disabled the wheel. Even afterwards, however, I did not always use the lock if I was just running into a store. This was outside Cleveland Ohio.
Do you mean locks specifically built for bicycles? Because I’m guessing the padlock / chain combo existed well before that.
Brian
I had a lock for my bike in the 1960s. I don’t know how much bicycle theft really existed, but you “knew” that you should never leave your bike unlocked if you rode it to a store.
Depends on where you are. I was shocked and baffled to find unlocked bicycles in Geneva in the late 90s.
I suppose I am asking about the practice more than the technology although seeing an ad for a bike-specific lock from the year whatever would be great.
A friend informs me that similarly they don’t lock them in Copenhagen either.
I was given my first real bike in 1964 in suburban SoCal. A lock was typical equipment then & there and most parents expected kids to use theirs every time.
My lock was a dedicated bike locking device with a ~24" flat chain (like dog collar chain) with a permanently attached funky combo lock of a style I’d never seen before or since. Many kids had lengths of ordinary chain with either a dial combo lock or padlock, typically “Master” brand.
Coiled cables were a decade in the future & the super heavy duty bulky U-shaped locks another decade after that.
I never locked my bike into the mid-70s, though I lived in a small town and didn’t ride it much after 1970.
Likely when they stopped cutting off hands for the crime of theft.
My father locked his bike to the railing alongside the basement steps in the mid 1930s. Thirty years later I asked what the rusty lock was for there.
I don’t lock my bike now, I also don’t leave it out of my sight.
Bicycle theft is endemic in Denmark. All New bicycles are required to have a built in lock on the rear wheel below the saddle and everybody locks their bikes when they leave it outside. Perhaps your friend is only used to chain locks and didn’t notice that.
You mean a barrel combination lock, or something else?
Something else. IIRC, the 4-wheel barrel or in-line combo locks first appeared a few years later.
This thing was shaped and proportioned like a hockey puck, about 1" in diameter with a 10-digit dial covering one entire face. The combo was a 3-digit number entered in left-right-left style. When unlocked, a small hasp pulled open on one side of the curved periphery to release the end of the chain. The other end of the chain was attached to a similar-shaped fixed hasp on the opposite side. It was pretty sleek & compact.
My combo was 3-1-4. Funny how numbers learned at an early age stick. I still recall our car license plates from my childhood although I have no idea what plate was on my car in 2014 before I changed states. Likewise my childhood phone number but none of the intervening ones before my current one.
England, 1961.
Standard practice to lock bike to bike rack at school, using hefty chain and a sizable 4-ring combination lock.
My faith in this arrangement was much diminished after I discovered I could open the lock in 10 seconds with my eyes shut.
Mid-1960s, when I was in junior high, I always used a lock. The heavy duty Kryptonite bike locks were just getting introduced in the Boston area in 1970. And in 1971 my dorm magazine published a joke about a guy who kept getting his bike stolen and so got better locks - until someone cut through the bike to steal the more valuable lock.
A figure I study was a mad bicycle maven in the late 19th century, known for having the latest and greatest model on a monthly basis - quite the dashing sport. He mentions having two bicycles stolen.
ETA: IME, the old joke about all bikes weighing 30 (or 35, or 40) pounds holds true. You can have a 35-pound bike and a five-pound lock, or a 20-pound bike with a 20-pound lock.
I didn’t lock my bike as a kid in the 1960s.
But when I got to Cambridge MA, locks were essential. Thieves had progressed to using liquid nitrogen to break locks (not hard to get near MIT), and you needed at minimum a “kryptonite” lock if your bike was any good. Mine wasn’t. I used a chain and a Master lock.
In grad school in the later 1970s in upstate NY I used a loop of aircraft cable, gathered into loops at each end, along with a good lock. Someone still cut through that cable with bolt cutters (no mean feat – I would’ve gone for the shackle on the lock) and stole my bike. It was a 10-speed, but not by any means a GOOD 10-speed. They must’ve been desperate.
I got a kryptonite lock after that, and have used one ever since.
They became common as part of the whole “all bicycle/lock combinations weigh 50 pounds” rule. A 10 pound carbon nanotube and buckyball bicycle needs a 40 pound lock to secure it, a 45 pound Huffy only needs a flimsy lock and cable. In the fifties when bikes were heavy, you didn’t need a lock.