The History of Bicycle Gearing: From Freewheel to Electronic Shifting

On 11 November 1927, on the Croce d’Aune pass in northern Italy, the Gran Premio della Vittoria race was in full swing. Tullio Campagnolo, twenty-six years old and approaching the summit, needed to change his gear ratio before the descent. In those days, that meant removing the rear wheel entirely, flipping it around, and reinstalling it with the other sprocket — each side of the hub carrying a different size. His hands, already numb from the mountain wind, could not loosen the wing nut.

That moment refused to leave him. “Bisogna cambià qualcosa de drio” — something has to change back there. Within a few years, Campagnolo had designed a mechanism by which a single lever, turned with one finger, allowed the rear wheel to be released in an instant. Every bicycle wheel in the world carries his invention today: the quick-release skewer.^[1]

The story is one of cycling’s most frequently told founding myths. One caveat, however, is worth noting. Bicycle historian Jan Heine has questioned whether the episode is factual at all. His research suggests that a race held in snow at Croce d’Aune took place in 1925, not 1927, and that no record places Campagnolo as a notable competitor on 11 November 1927.^[2] The anecdote, in other words, may be a creation myth polished by the Campagnolo brand over successive decades. That said, the quick-release was invented, and it did change the bicycle world — those facts stand regardless of the legend surrounding them.

The Starting Point — Freewheels and Internal Hub Gears

Before variable gearing can be discussed, one earlier step must be taken. For gearing to matter at all, the pedals must not be permanently coupled to the rear wheel.

Early bicycles fixed pedals directly to the wheel. Stopping the pedals meant stopping the wheel; on a descent, releasing the feet sent the pedals spinning uncontrollably. The solution was the freewheel — a device housed inside the hub that allows the rear wheel to continue rotating when the rider stops pedalling. It achieves this through a ratchet mechanism that transmits force in only one direction. From the 1860s onwards, various inventors attempted similar designs, and the freewheel became standard during the bicycle boom of the late nineteenth century.^[3]

Once the freewheel had freed the pedals from constant engagement, the next challenge was adapting the gear ratio to gradient and speed. The earliest solution did not involve an external derailleur at all; it hid the gears inside the wheel hub.

In 1902, the Sturmey-Archer company of Nottingham, England, introduced a three-speed internally geared hub. The firm bore the names of Henry Sturmey and James Archer, though Frank Bowden’s financial support was also essential to its development. The mechanism placed a planetary gear set — a configuration in which several smaller gears orbit a central gear, producing different rotation ratios — inside the rear hub itself. A single lever near the handlebars could select among three speeds without the rider ever removing the wheel.^[4]

The hub gear proved a commercial success, remaining the commuter standard in Britain for decades. Its limitation appeared in mountainous terrain, where three ratios were simply not enough range.

One Man’s Crusade — Paul de Vivie (Vélocio)

While the Sturmey-Archer hub was finding its market, a bicycle-shop owner in Saint-Étienne, France, was thinking in an entirely different direction. His name was Paul de Vivie (1853–1930); his pen name was Vélocio.

In 1887, de Vivie founded the cycling journal Le Cycliste and used it as a pulpit to advocate for multi-speed gearing. The argument was straightforward: a single fixed ratio cannot handle flat roads, climbs, and descents with any efficiency — least of all in the Alps.^[5]

De Vivie did not stop at advocacy. Between 1902 and 1905, he fitted experimental derailleur systems to his own bicycles and published his findings in Le Cycliste, series by series, including practical gear-ratio recommendations for readers who wanted to cross the Alpine passes themselves.^[5] A derailleur, in this context, is any mechanism that deflects the chain laterally from one sprocket to another of different size, thereby altering the gear ratio.

His so-called “Seven Commandments of Vélocio” are still quoted among long-distance touring cyclists today. Their essence was pacing: eat little but drink often, never hurry, start in the cool and rest in the heat. De Vivie saw variable gearing not as a substitute for physical condition, but as a tool for spending physical reserves wisely. His journal helped establish French cycling-tourism culture, and his gear-ratio experiments became practical reference material for European drivetrain designers in the years that followed. In 1930, he was struck by a tram while manoeuvring his bicycle out of its path. He was seventy-six.

De Vivie’s most prominent opponent was a man whose name is inseparable from the race he created: Henri Desgrange, founder of the Tour de France.

The 1937 Tour de France — The Derailleur Controversy

Desgrange, who had launched the Tour in 1903, was among the most vocal opponents of the derailleur. His words have been quoted ever since.

“Variable gears are only for people over forty-five. Isn’t it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the aid of a derailleur?”^[6]

This was not mere technological conservatism. For Desgrange, the Tour de France existed to test the absolute limits of human will and physical endurance. Mechanical assistance that narrowed the gap between the strong and the less strong diminished the contest’s meaning. His opposition to the derailleur was, at its core, a philosophical position on what bicycle racing should be.^[6]

Desgrange stepped down as Tour director in 1935, passing the role to Jacques Goddet due to failing health, and died in 1940. Two years after his departure, in 1937, the new management officially permitted derailleurs in the race — thirty-four years after the Tour’s founding. That year’s winner, Roger Lapébie, used his derailleur to decisive advantage on the mountain stages.^[6]

Desgrange’s concern was not entirely without basis. The introduction of variable gearing gradually shifted the character of racing. Strategy came to revolve not around sheer muscular output but around gear selection and cadence management. The era of grinding through mountain passes on a single ratio was over; riders could now distribute their effort intelligently across a stage by matching their gear to gradient and fatigue.

Campagnolo — The Age of Italian Craftsmanship

Returning to Tullio Campagnolo: if the quick-release skewer (patented 1930) simplified wheel changes, his more enduring technical legacy lay in derailleur design itself.^[1]

His first derailleur of the 1940s, the Cambio Corsa, required simultaneous operation of two levers to shift the chain to a neighbouring sprocket. The mechanism was complex and demanding, but it was genuinely innovative for its time.

The true breakthrough came in 1949, when the Gran Sport derailleur was unveiled at the Milan Trade Fair. It was the first derailleur to apply the parallelogram mechanism in a fully resolved way. A parallelogram — a four-sided figure whose opposite sides are parallel — moves as a unit when pushed, maintaining consistent geometry. Applied to derailleur design, this meant the mechanism could traverse the full width of the cassette (the cluster of sprockets fitted to the rear hub) while keeping a constant distance from each sprocket.^[7] Every rear derailleur produced today traces its fundamental geometry to the Gran Sport.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, Campagnolo’s components dominated professional road racing. Italian artisanship and precision machining delivered a combination of performance and aesthetic refinement that no rival could match.

The Challenge from East Asia — Shimano and SunTour

The company that broke Campagnolo’s dominance came not from across the Atlantic but from across the Pacific.

Shimano was founded in 1921 by Shimano Shozaburo in Sakai, near Osaka, Japan, initially as a manufacturer of freewheels. The firm was a modest bicycle-parts supplier for decades before entering the derailleur market in 1956.^[8]

In practice, however, the company that most dramatically disrupted the Japanese bicycle-components market during the 1960s and 1970s was not Shimano but SunTour (Sannko Seiki / 三光精機). In 1964, SunTour patented the slant parallelogram derailleur. The standard parallelogram design performed best when the chain ran through the middle of the cassette; towards either extreme, the distance between the derailleur’s guide pulley and the sprocket varied, causing imprecise shifts. SunTour’s solution was to tilt the entire parallelogram slightly, so that the mechanism followed the natural arc of the cassette as it traversed from the smallest to the largest sprocket.^[9]

Contemporary consumer assessments were unambiguous: SunTour shifted more easily and more accurately than anything else available — technically superior to Campagnolo as a shifting mechanism.^[9]

SunTour’s ascendancy did not last. In 1984, the core slant-parallelogram patent expired. Shimano moved immediately.

SunTour’s decline was not a defeat of its technology. It is, in fact, a study in market paradox. SunTour had identified Shimano’s plans to build an indexed shifting system atop the now-public slant-parallelogram geometry, yet it was slow to respond. Its own indexed system, AccuShift, did not appear until 1987 — two years after Shimano’s SIS. AccuShift was technically competitive, but by then dealers and consumers had already fixed their mental model: indexed shifting meant Shimano.

The shift of the American bicycle market toward mountain bikes through the 1980s compounded the problem. SunTour, built around road components, failed to convert its technical strengths into a credible MTB product line. Shimano assembled an MTB component lineup rapidly and absorbed the new demand. In 1995, SunTour’s parent company, Maeda Industries, filed for bankruptcy.^[9]

Superior technology does not automatically win markets. Shimano’s victory owed something to the slant parallelogram’s geometry, but at least as much to its strategy of locking customers into an integrated system — brake levers, cables, derailleurs, and cassette pitch all calibrated to one another — and to its timing in capturing the mountain-bike boom.

1984–1990 — The Indexed-Shifting Revolution

Shimano’s patience in waiting for the SunTour patent to expire was not merely about avoiding infringement. The company intended to build an entirely new experience on top of that geometry.

In 1984 (some sources give 1985), Shimano introduced SIS (Shimano Index System) as part of the Dura-Ace 7400 groupset. SIS introduced positive detents to the shift lever: pull it once, and the chain moves exactly one sprocket, accompanied by a definitive click.^[10]

Until that point, derailleur bicycles had been shifted by friction: the rider moved the lever incrementally, relying on tactile feedback to judge when the chain had settled correctly on the intended sprocket. Experienced riders managed it well enough, but for beginners it was opaque, and even seasoned cyclists made errors under vibration or fatigue — a fast descent, for instance.

SIS transferred that judgment from the rider’s hands to the mechanism itself. One click, one gear. Nothing more was required.

In 1990, Shimano took the next step with STI (Shimano Total Integration) — the integration of brake lever and shift lever into a single unit. Previously, gear changes required reaching for a separate shifter on the down tube or stem. STI allowed the rider to shift by pushing the brake lever laterally or pulling a smaller lever behind it, all without releasing the handlebars.^[10]

Releasing a hand from the bars at speed costs aerodynamic position and balance, particularly through corners or on descents. STI removed that constraint entirely, making it possible to brake and shift simultaneously.

Campagnolo replied in 1992 with Ergopower — a different ergonomic solution, but the same ambition: unite braking and shifting in one hand.

The commercial consequence of this integration was a closed ecosystem. Shimano brake levers are calibrated to Shimano cable pull; Shimano derailleurs are indexed to Shimano cassette pitch. Beginning a build with one brand’s levers makes mixing components from another brand technically awkward. The component-ecosystem lock-in that now defines the industry was set in place during these years.

Electronic Shifting — Pioneering Failure and Eventual Success

Once the integration of braking and shifting was complete, the logical next question arose: what if the derailleur were moved not by a cable under mechanical tension, but by an electrical signal?

In 1992, the French wheel manufacturer Mavic unveiled the Zap system — the first attempt at electronic shifting. At the time, battery technology was too bulky and heavy. Mavic’s engineers chose to avoid a battery-driven motor altogether, using the kinetic energy of the drivetrain itself to actuate the derailleur — an approach that proved unreliable. A second attempt, the wireless Mektronic system, followed in 1999 and also failed.^[11]

Mavic had simply arrived too early. The technology had to wait for the miniaturisation and energy density of lithium-ion batteries that arrived in the 2000s.

In 2009, Shimano Di2 (Dura-Ace 7970) reached the market as a wired electronic shifting system and was adopted rapidly by professional riders. A light press of the lever sends a signal to a small motor in the derailleur, which moves it to the precise position. The variables that plague mechanical shifting — cable stretch from temperature change, housing compression, gradual deformation under load — were eliminated.^[11]

In 2015, SRAM launched eTap, opening the era of wireless electronic shifting. There is no cable of any kind between the shift lever and the derailleur. A press of the lever transmits a wireless signal directly. The cableless bicycle had become a practical reality.^[11]

A Return to Simplicity — The 1x Drivetrain

For decades, the direction of drivetrain development was toward greater complexity: more sprockets in the cassette, and more chainrings at the front — from one to two, then three. In 2012, a counter-current emerged.

SRAM launched the XX1 mountain-bike groupset, introducing the 1x (one-by) configuration to serious competition use. The concept eliminates the front derailleur entirely, retaining only a single chainring while dramatically widening the range of the rear cassette. The first XX1 used a 10–42T cassette; subsequent developments extended that to 10–50T and eventually 10–52T.^[12]

Without a front derailleur, the system became simpler to operate, lighter, and far less prone to dropping the chain. The concept spread from mountain biking into gravel riding and cyclocross, and has since made inroads on road bikes as well.

A certain irony presents itself here. The Sturmey-Archer three-speed hub of 1902 also pursued a kind of exterior simplicity, concealing all its mechanical complexity inside the hub where it was invisible to the rider. The 1x drivetrain achieves simplicity differently — by removing a component entirely. The trajectory of the technology has been, in one sense, a long arc from complication back toward clean interface.

Among English-speaking cyclists — particularly in the United States, where the mountain-bike revolution of the 1980s reshaped the entire industry — the Shimano versus SunTour story occupies an instructive place. American consumers and independent bike dealers were the primary audience for both companies’ products during the critical years of the late 1970s and 1980s. The consensus that emerged in the American trade press was that SunTour’s shifting quality was genuinely superior, a view echoed by respected observers such as Sheldon Brown, whose technical writing remains a reference point for mechanics today. The paradox — that the better technology lost — became a case study that the bicycle industry did not forget when evaluating how Shimano subsequently built its component ecosystem.

Desgrange’s question has never been resolved. Where exactly is the line between winning by muscular strength and winning by mechanical assistance? In an era when electronic shifting, power meters, and aerodynamic framesets are standard tools of professional competition, the weight of that question has if anything increased. The history of bicycle gearing is not simply a record of improving components. It is a century-long argument about how far human beings are willing to let machines carry them — and how far they should be.