DISRAELI GEARS
Chemineau
See also: Chemineau documents
Country: France
Le Chemineau is the brand of Joanny Panel, one of the great early derailleur innovators. Le Chemineau translates roughly as ‘the tramp’ in the sense of a penniless wanderer. The following information is largely drawn from ‘The Dancing Chain’.
Joanny Panel was a friend of Paul de Vivie, who was better known by his pen-name ‘Vélocio’. Velocio, is generally considered to be the father of the derailleur and was the leader a small group of French cyclists who were actively involved in experimenting with derailleurs to facilitate cycle touring.
Panel worked at Rivolier Père et Fils, a gun maker in St Étienne who had started to make bicycles. Here Albert Raimond (who was also a friend of Velocio and went on to found the Cyclo company) was in charge of bicycle manufacture. Unlike many of the other early derailleur innovators Panel and Raimond had experience of how bicycle manufacturing worked.
In 1911 Joanny Panel left Rivolier Père et Fils to set up his own Le Chemineau company, also in St Étienne, manufacturing good quality touring bicycles. In 1912 he patented a design for his Le Chemineau derailleur. This was a development on one of Velocio’s designs and the design was patented with Velocio’s blessing. You can make a strong argument that the Le Chemineau derailleur was the first genuine modern commercial derailleur and that the Le Chemineau bicycle was the first genuine modern commercial derailleur bicycle.
The Le Chemineau derailleur was a low-normal, pull-chain, twin pulley, chainstay mounting design that greatly influenced many of the designs of the following decades. It continued in production in a basically similar form until 1949.
Although Joanny Panel did offer Le Chemineau derailleurs with fitting brackets, and did, for a while, specifically make a L’Izoard derailleur that was designed to be retro fitted, his first priority was to sell Le Chemineau derailleurs as part of Le Chemineau bicycles. Because of this he left open the market for derailleurs that could be retro fitted to existing bicycles, or indeed fitted as original equipment to other manufacturers models. Albert Raimond stepped into this gap with his Cyclo derailleur. As ever in the bicycle trade, this led to a bitter feud. Although the Cyclo derailleur worked with a helical mechanism, Joanny Panel harboured a burning hatred of Albert Raimond because he considered that he had stolen his ideas.
Panel was an accomplished rider, as was one of his employees, Benoit Faure. Both competed in the Tour de France, and used Le Chemineau bicycles fitted with the Le Chemineau derailleur. Through these, and other antics, Joanny Panel, a larger than life character, did much to establish derailleur gearing as a viable mainstream alternative to epicyclic hub gears.
I believe that Joanny Panel finally sold the Le Chemineau business in 1958.
