What kind of bearings did early bikes have? Early bearing/chain lube?
 

Anyone know what kind of hub bearings the earliest bikes had? How about early Tour de France bikes?

What was used for lube in the hubs and on the chains when chains became part of bikes?

Both ball bearings and chain drive predate bicycles. So from the beginning, or at least since the advent of the modern safety bicycle, over a century ago, the basics haven't changed that much, though they've evolved considerably.

Also, from the beginning, ball bearings were greased and chains oiled. like bikes, the lubes have also evolved, but are basically the same.

Lanolin/wax based grease was used for ball bearings and chains as well as plain bearings. I read this many years ago as I set out on a journey to discover a magic chain lube alternative. Never did find it.

"Sperm oil" from the head of the sperm whale was a high grade liquid wax lubricant used on sewing machines and bicycles. Fortunately it was replaced by dinosaur oil. Tallow is an animal derived lubricant that was widely used in stream engines and is still used by plumbers and electricians. Tree hugging vegans can use canola/rapeseed oil, that is the base of a number of modern biodegradable lubricants (but be careful it's not genetically modified).

It is too bad that the internet wasn't around back then so we could argue if whale semen or lanolin was better.

For those that wax, I heard that unicorn ear wax is at the top of the heap.

The first patent for ball bearings in bicycles was issued in 1862. Albert Pope of Columbia Bicycles introduced ball bearings in most of their products as early as 1880. Precision bearing balls; however, were still a few decades in the future. I think it's safe to opine that the bicycle industry played a huge part in bearing technology during the industrial revolution.

Spermaceti from the great white beast.

Another victim of spermicide.

A few days ago, I cleaned out the top of the seat tube for post insertion via the old trick of using an automotive brake cylinder hone; I was too lazy to go to the garage for some Mobil 1, so I used extra-light olive oil as it was handy. And the bike wasn't even Italian!

Can (Canada) + o (oil) + la (low acid)
(Source)
IIRC, I learned this from THIS interesting book.

Except he didn’t die, Ahab did.

Crazy book. Ahab hated the whale so much he forgot about collecting more spermaceti and whale blubber and going home.

They generally used plain bearings, just like nearly all wheels had through all of history up to that point. "Plain" means that there are no rolling elements such as balls or rollers: as the shaft or wheel spun, it simply rubs against the opposing element.

This wasn't because folks were ignorant: engineers at the time were entirely aware of rolling-element bearings, and had been since ancient times. But rolling-element bearings require that those rolling elements be made in substantial numbers to very precise and consistent size and shape. And this made them very expensive to make until well into the industrial revolution.
Furthermore, rolling-element bearings have to resist their loads on very narrow point (in the case of ball) or line (in the case of roller) areas of contact. This means that the bearings need to have very high strength and hardness, or they need to be very large. Ideally, they should also have at least some corrosion resistance. In the year 2023 where we can buy oodles of nearly-perfectly-made balls of 52100 Chrome Steel for pennies, this might not sound like a big deal, but once again: two hundred years ago, it's going to be adding meaningful cost to the assembly.

Plain bearings are an elegant way to achieve good tolerance to high loads, which works even when your materials and manufacturing aren't totally up to snuff. They big drawback is, unsurprisingly, that they suffer from very high friction, particularly when they're not perfectly clean and well-lubricated.
While the potential for extreme friction under poor lubrication was an annoyance on early bicycles, it was an especially big problem for trains. Trains took much longer than bicycles to transition away from plain bearings due to their extreme loads, but these same extreme loads meant that the worst-case scenarios for plain bearings were extremely bad. The railroad operators needed to be very diligent in maintaining oil-soaked material within the boxes that housed the wheel axles; if a bearing ran dry under high load, it could overheat catastrophically (a "hot box" failure) and potentially cause a deadly derailment. Railroad workers were expected to watch trains as they went by, to keep an eye out for any wheels that were smoking or on fire.

By the beginning of the 20th century, bicycles had largely transitioned to ball bearings for their hubs.

John Harrison invented the caged roller bearing in the mid-1740 while working on the problem of accurate timekeeping for ocean navigation. Ball bearings were first patented in 1794.

Wikipedia offers: Jules Suriray designed the first radial style ball bearing in 1869 which was fitted to the winning bicycle ridden by James Moore in the world's first bicycle race, Paris-Rouen, in November 1869.

There was a debate in the first decade of Sturmey-Archer's history (1902) as to whether the planet gears should ride on ball bearings or plain bearings. Plain bearings won out, but not before the argument cost William Reilley his job at SA. [Note: I've read claims about efficiency gains if ball bearings are used for the planet gears (I'm looking at you, Rohloff.) If true, single-stage, non-compound three-speed hubs would be over 100% efficient if they switched back to ball bearings!]

Fun fact: 3inOne oil debuted in 1894 as a bicycle chain lubricant, promising to clean, lubricate and rust-proof. You can still buy it; it's one of the oldest cycling products on the market.

That “low acid” refers to low erucic acid which is a C22 monosaturated fatty acid. Erucic acid is damaging to the cardiac muscle of animals and imparts a bitter taste to meat of animals fed the oil. **** seed (aka “canola” seed) oil is derived from one of the many cultivars of the Brassicaceae, or mustard, family. It’s kind of amazing how we have varied the lowly mustard plant in to so many different plants.

One note on using vegetable oils for lubrication. All of them are some kind of fatty acid and most of them are unsaturated…i.e. have a one to several carbon-carbon double bonds in them. That double bond and the fatty acid nature of the oil makes it reactive when exposed to air. The fatty acid nature also makes them digestible and yummy to all kinds of organisms.

Petroleum derived oils have no fatty acid character nor much unsaturation so they are much more stable when exposed to air. And they have little flavor making them less yummy as well as longer lasting.

I just rear it. Fascinating account of those great animals and their biology. But, man, Melville is in love with his words! No way I'll plow through it again. (Or read any other Melville.)

Biodegradable lubricants - good or bad? Discuss. :-)

Mustard plants! Mizuna, green, red. I go to the farmer's market each week and buy two bunches of that and kale (which comes in just as many forms). Dandelions, mint ... The dark green veggies.. I call it goat food.

Never been much for canola oil. Read "The Omega Diet" 20 years ago at the behest of my GP. The piece that stuck in my brain was the ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6. 1:3 seems to be ideal. Canola oil is 1:3. But if you are overwhelmed with Omega 6 (many staple American foods), you cannot get to 1:3 by consuming 1:3 foods. It takes foods more concentrated on Omega 6; the oily fish, flax seed. Food source that do not contain Omega 6

That 1:3. The author is from Crete. Went to Stanford for grad work in biology. Couldn't believe how bad dorm food was and how much worse he felt than when he ate the simple foods of Crete. So he decided his focus and thesis would be on finding what it was the the world's healthiest people's diet had in common. So, first: the healthiest people. Those of his native island and those of the fishing villages of northern Japan. But their diets had nothing in common! The Cretes - lots of wild or near wild vegetables. (That "goat food".) The goats that also ate those greens. The Japanese - seafood. Lots of it. Lots of fish and marine mammal fat. Almost nothing grown on land. (They basically lived on big rocks. But they did eat a lot of kelp and other seaweed.) Nothing in common until the author noticed while their fat intake was wildly different in both total amount and percentage of diet, they both consumed very high percentages of Omega 3 to their small amount of Omega 6. That 1:3.

I also consume large amounts of olive oil which contains no Omegas at all. Simply because it's good stuff. My body likes it. It's a joy to cook with. My skin likes it. Smells good. Wood likes it. (Knife handles, cutting boards ...)

It's a user issue. If you clean and re-oil regularly, biodegradable lubes are just fine. But if the bike sits 5 or 10 years and you wheel it out, jump on and ride a century - do you still have grease in your bearings? :)

Olive oil does last a long time. Centuries, even millennia properly stored and maybe years exposed to air. (Probably past best taste but my bike's taste buds aren't so good.) My bikes haven't seen much olive oil but it's been used. I"d use it without thought if I were touring in the third world and that was the only option.

We had an Alimak representative who loved some type of veggie based spray lubricant. I don’t remember the brand, only that it smelled really good and turned gummy and fouled quickly. Much sooner than the generic chain lube with mollyb.

Not even close to as good as their petroleum based equivalents.

Probably better than no lubricant at all.

Almost everything biodegrades eventually.

Dickens was way worse.
Read Oliver Twist as a teenager and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Read a Tale of Two Cities a few years later and only got 3 pages in and ADHDd out and couldn’t concentrate through all the wordiness.

Dostyevski also more wordy than Melville by a long shot.

Who do you think Moby Dick is an allegory of?

I read it last year, great book. But those words were like somebody did a brake check on the highway. I just starting glossing over them as much as I could.

Tried to read Tale of Two Cities. Same, same.

I actually like A Tale of Two Cities better than Oliver Twist. Both are waaaaay better than Great Expectations. I had to read that in junior high and never got what the point was.

It took me 5 years to slog my way through Moby Dick and I never could figure out how they got the movies they did out of the book. I read The Odyssey and Iliad while on a couple of tours and, again, don’t see how they got the movies they have out of those books either.

I used to do an experiment at work that took roughly 4 hours and I had to record data every 2 minutes (and monitor pressure in the vessel while controlling out flow). I read War and Peace while doing that. It was extremely wordy but is a pretty good story. Sergei Bondarchuk did an adaptation of the book in the 60s that could be the most expensive movie ever made ($9.2 million in 1961 to 1966). It’s a 7 hour monster of a subtitled film and I’ve watched it twice. It’s almost word for word to the novel and contains some of the most spectacular battle scenes ever! Worth every minute.