This is just a quick note that Bicycle Quarterly's article on the development of the first Campagnolo parallelogram derailleur, the Gran Sport, now is available on our web site as a sample article. The article was published in 2003, but it still is the only comprehensive article that combined research by famous Campagnolo collector Hiroshi Ichikawa with original sources from the 1940s and 1950s from France to piece together the history of how Tullio Campagnolo's company developed this ground-breaking derailleur, with photos of each version and drawings by Daniel Rebour.
The Gran Sport set the mold for virtually all modern derailleurs, which use similar inverted parallelogams and attach to the rear dropout. A companion article in the same issue of Bicycle Quarterly looked at the big lines of development from the first parallelogram derailleurs to today's indexed derailleurs, highlighting the contributions of Nivex, Campagnolo, Simplex and Suntour.
To read the two articles, go to
http://www.vintagebicyclepress.com/
and scroll down to the third entry.
As an aside, Vintage Bicycle Press now accepts PayPal in addition to credit cards and checks.
Jan Heine
Editor
Bicycle Quarterly
2116 Western Ave.
Seattle WA 98121
http://www.vintagebicyclepress.com