. They were invented by ordinary guys who loved to take their bikes off the road and ride hard on steep dirt tracks. Since Diamondback bikes hadn’t been invented yet, they had to modify the bikes they had with the few tools they had at their disposal.
Road and racing bikes were no good for their purposes because they had such skinny tires. Those tires are designed to reduce traction, while their bikes needed even more. The bikes they worked with were fat tired street bikes.
Those racing bikes did have state of the art derailleurs, though. They took the derailleurs from their racing bikes and adapted them to their fat tired bicycles to make a hybrid bike that had a lot of gears, but fat tires.
Next they went to work on the handlebars. They started off just sticking a flat bar of steel on the bike, because they wanted a lower profile and could really push the bike on the hills. However, they needed to lean back for traction, so they added ends to the handlebars so they could change their hand position and pull back on the handlebars when they needed to.
Still not satisfied with their hybrid designs, these young inventors started designing and making custom frames from scratch. They started using lighter weight metals and made radical changes to the frame designs. It wasn’t long before people took notice of their bikes and started ordering them from the makers.
These small time bicycle designers eventually became some of the biggest selling brands of mountain bikes. Even after the Schwinn mountain bike and others like it came on the market, these smaller bike makers continued to thrive. Today, they are still some of the best selling MBs.
All that remained to be invented was a helmet that was both cool looking and functional. A black helmet made for playing football just wasn’t right for blazing down single track mountain trails. Helmet designers went to work and now there are dozens of lightweight helmets that look good and do their job as well.
Nobody can write the mountain bike off as a passing fad anymore. They are clearly here to stay and outsell most other types of bikes. Even though they were originally designed for riding offroad, they are seen on city streets everywhere. They have come a long way and now are high tech machines with up to 24 gears and sophisticated breaking systems.
Although they haven’t had as important an impact on our lives as the PC, MBs have a similar proud history. Both of these revolutionary inventions began as backyard dreams. Thanks to great ideas and hard work, they became testaments to what great ideas and determination can accomplish.
May 19th, 2010
ivan 
