Bicycling

Last edited Tue Oct 27, 2015, 07:31 PM - Edit history (1)

When I am wearing a brim, I tend to make sure the brim of the hat or the helmet take most of the rain. When I was basic training, the Army was still issuing the Vietnam era Baseball cap. I hated that hat, hard to keep on your head and the brim sat to high above the eyes to keep anything out of the eye.

Now, when the BDU uniform came out in 1981 (Yes it came out under Reagan, but designed under Carter) it brought with it what many people call a "Ranger Hat". It was a much better hat, it sat lower on the head and would stay on your head in moderate wind (something that was NOT true of the Vietnam Era Baseball cap) and do to its design the brim was closer to the eyes, thus blocking sun on sunny days and rain on rainy days. I use it to this day (through the hats I wear today are NOT army color, I find khaki a better color, on the grounds being Khaki, it reflects most light and thus keeps some of the heat of the sun off you in the summer time, remember White reflects sunlight, black absorb sunlight and the original BDUs had a lot of black in them, and we tended to roast in them on hot days, since the 1990s the Army has slowly removed most of the black from their battle uniforms for that reason).

Till I started to wear bicycle helmets in the 1990s, I wore BDU hats more for the brim then anything else (the brim not only can be used to deflect rain from your eyes and eyeglasses, it can be used to reflect oncoming car headlights). My first few bicycle helmets had no brim, so I wore the BDU hat under the helmet, thus I had a brim.

Between using Fenders on my bike, and having a large brim on my helmet I rarely get rain on my glasses (and I have worn glasses since Grade School). Now in recent years I have gone to wearing a full face bicycle helmet. The problem with the full face is in winter when I am breathing heavily going up a grade to my home, the heat from my breath tends to be driven by the full face helmet to my glasses, which then fogs up. In a conventional bicycle helmet the breath goes forward and NOT to my glasses and thus rarely do my glasses fog up when using conventional bicycle helmets.

I like the full face, for studies have shown 40% of all head injuries involve the jaw bone and that is protected in a full face helmet, but NOT in a conventional bicycle helmet. On the flats and going down hill, I have no problem with the full face, but going up a steep grade )a 10% grade for one block) when temperatures are just above freezing or lower, I notice my glasses fogging up. I end up just stopping and cleaning my glasses at the top of the grade.

If I avoid steep grades, the speed of the bike and my breathing prevents my glasses fogging up. It is the increase breathing AND slower pace going up those grades that my glasses fog up when wearing a full face helmet.

My point is a full brim and wearing the brim in such a way that rain or snow do NOT hit your glasses is the best way to handle rain and snow and glasses.

People forget that windshield wipers were only invented n 1903, but were hand powered till 1919 (and it was vacuum powered, electric windshield wipers was a 1960s introduction).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscreen_wiper

Today, most vehicle windshield wipers are electric. Older vehicles could have electric, vacuum, hand or air powered wipers. Air power wipers were popular on trucks with air breaks such as the US Army M356 series of trucks. The US Army M35 2 1/2 ton trucks used air power wipers, I am unfamiliar with the upgrades to the M35s made in the 1990s, which included converting them to automatic transmissions but I am familiar with both the gas and diesel powered versions of the M35 with manual transmissions. The 1990 era upgrade may have included conversion to electric wipers. The original M35 had air powered wipers, with backup manual mechanism, but NO washer, an upgrade may have included not only replacement of the Air driven wipers but the addition of a washer for the front windshield.

In the days BEFORE the interstates and other limited access highway, many truckers (and car drivers) opt for visors over their windshields to keep the rain off the windshields. At speeds less then 20 mph, these visors were adequate (thus quite popular in urban areas in the 1920s and 1930s through most people in Urban area did not embrace the motor vehicle till after WWII). In the 1930s you started to see the first roads actually built for high speed travel as oppose to paving old cover wagon roads, and at that point the visor was found NOT to provide adequate protection from the rain (one result of this is that most states started to require windshield wipers in the 1930s).

My point is a visor (or hat brim or helmet brim) can provide adequate eye protection from the rain and snow if speeds are kept below 20 mph AND you keep your head down. That was true of motor vehicles before their sped up in the 1930s and true of bicycling today.

Remember US 30, the FIRST TRANSCONTINENTAL PAVED HIGHWAY was only finally fully paved in 1935. Till then (and even afterwards), unless you lived in an Urban Area (and most Americans ONLY started to do that in the 1920 Census) you more then not had to travel on a dirt road:

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/highwayhistory/lincoln.cfm

In the Pittsburgh Area, urban areas tended to force Streetcars to maintain the streets the streetcars were on. In such agreement, the 11 feet the streetcars used had to be maintained by them, the other 5 feet, to get two eight foot lanes, were to be maintained by the municipality the streetcars were operating in. In the west end of Pittsburgh the older suburbs in the 1920s to 1950s period never maintained them, thus you had a paved 11 foot section of pavement with 2 1/2 feet of unimproved road between the streetcar tracks and its pavement and the sidewalk. I bring this up to show how slow most roads were pre about 1940. Yes, you had some paved super highways in the 1920s (the "Parkway" Movement started in that period. at first a Parkway was a road through a park, but starting in the 1920s became highways) but as a whole most roads pre 1940 remained dirt roads for use by horse drawn wagons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkway

Here is a photo of the Streetcar right of way paved, but the rest of the street unpaved:



http://www.trinitysheraden.com/StreetCars05.htm

A Photo of how the ROAD and STREETCAR RIGHT OF WAY should have looked like, the extra 2 1/2 feet on both sides of the tracks paved:



Just a comment on why Visors were competitive with Wipers till you finally had what we would call ROADS and that is not till after WWII.