Lucas Cycle Lighting 1878-1962: a new book by Peter Card

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Press release

Modern day cyclists might well be surprised to learn that bicyclists and tricyclists of an age before the general introduction of battery and dynamo lighting had to spend a significant amount of time preparing a candle, oil or acetylene gas-powered lamp before they could commence an evening ride. Yet this was exactly what our forebears had to contend with almost from the arrival of the vélocipède in the mid-1860s.

The invention and popularising of the bicycle was one of the many revolutions that affected the way people lived in the 19th century. Riding bicycles and tricycles for pleasure became a pastime enjoyed by thousands of energetic men and women for as long as the daylight lasted. After dark, it was quite foolhardy to ride on unlit roads with stones and potholes ready to upend the unsuspecting cyclist, so the bicycle and tricycle lamp had to be invented.

Of the many manufacturers of lighting for bicycles, this book concentrates on just one company, Joseph Lucas of Birmingham. Venturing into the design and construction of lighting for the ordinary bicycle in 1878 was but a small sideline of this "domestic utensil and lamp manufacturing company" working from their newly constructed factory, the Tom Bowling Lamp Works, in the Hockley district of north Birmingham. The unexpected development of road transport during the late Victorian period slowly proved a dominant influence and by the turn of the century Lucas transport lighting had practically ousted all other products from their Birmingham factories.

There were eight different mediums associated with cycle lighting: oil, kerosene, wax, Benzene, candle, acetylene gas, battery and dynamo, each having been introduced to the market before 1900. This book describes and illustrates many of Lucas’s wide variety of lamps, as well as relating fascinating stories of business ethics and design dead-ends; it also includes many examples of the litigious venom with which competitors often treated each other.

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