Sometimes a tiny box has an interesting and complicated history that is tied to the history of the bicycle..

A couple of years ago, this little red box popped up when I was searching Fleabay. The reason it peaked my interest was the “Denver Colorado” on the box. I knew it was a patch kit from the description but I was not familiar with A.L. Deane.



The box has extensive instructions on the outside of the package and…



…a syringe mechanism inside (ignore the master link).



I placed the kit in a cabinet and forgot about it until I was talking to someone about patch kits. After I located it again, I discovered that the syringe comes apart.



It’s a cool bit of bicycle kit but I didn’t know anything about it and an initial search a couple of years ago revealed nothing. That changed when I found the right search terms and the right place to look. A Google search lead to the Colorado Historical Newspaper Collection (CHNC) which lead me down a fun rabbit hole.

A.L. Deane was a hardware company that initially was an agent for Hall’s Safe and Lock, Co. From what I can find they also sold hardware. In 1893, they provided vault doors for the Colorado State Capitol building (a contract worth $5200 or about 180,000 in today’s dollars). In 1894, they started selling Fenton safety cycles. In 1895, they took delivery of 1000 bikes from Crawford Manufacturing which was “the largest contract ever placed in the far West for ‘96 wheels yet made by any factory.” Deane had the exclusive agency for Crawford bikes in Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. They even had ads in the tiny Four Corners town of Mancos.

According to the June 28, 1896 Rocky Mountain News, they cordially invited “all gentlemen past 50 years of age who ride a wheel” to meet at their shop to organize a club to be known as the Half Century Wheel Club.According to “The Cycling West”, May 6, 1897, A.L. Deane has sold all of its “sundries and supplies” and went to bicycles (but keeping the safes) entirely.

As an aside, reading newspapers from the late 1800s is shows just how large the bike boom was in that era. The newspapers have pages and pages of bicycle ads as well as listings of dozens of shops selling bikes at around $50 ($1900 in 2024 dollars!!!!!) There were even bicycle specific newspapers…The Cycling West…that seemed to be at least weekly.

Enough preamble.Back to the little red box. Around 1897, A.L. Deane developed the Lightning Repair kit. It seems to have been an instant hit as the Cycling West March 25, 1897 edition mentioned that

In June, 1897, the Cycling West ran this add.



In the November 25, 1897 edition of Cycling West, they reported

In the February 3,1898 edition, Cycling West reported that Deane made “heavy shipment of Lightning repair tools to St. Petersburg, Russia…This admirable little appliance [is] achieving an international reputation which is well deserved.”

But all was not well. On February 13, 1898, the sheriff of Arapahoe county seized the business for a $10,000 (about $380,000 in 2024 dollars) debt owed to the First National Bank of Colorado. However, A.L. Deane had previously borrowed money from a Mrs. Follett, according to the April 30, 1898 Rocky Mountain News

She had prior claim and the bank sued her, alleging that she was perpetrating fraud by having connections of some kind with A.L. Deane. The suit would go through the courts for the next 22 years until it was resolved in Mrs. Follett’s favor.

Meanwhile, in 1898 the manager of A.L. Deane for the previous 16 years, opened a shop that sold bicycles and safes, of which he was familiar, according to the 4/3/1898 Rocky Mountain News.

Quite a story for a tiny red box.

Cool story. I don't have anything to add, mainly just responding so this post won't look like an orphan with zero responses.

This is a great story (and yes, I am deliberately giving it a well-deserved thread bump).

Funny you should mention Mancos. My mom was from the four corners area, several home towns including Cortez and Shiprock, and my grandparents are buried in Lebanon. My mom and dad spent a summer in Dolores in the mid-2000's, in a travel trailer. She had a cousin in Mancos they would visit often. They had an ambition to do it again or maybe in Durango. But his bum ticker by then couldn't hack the altitude.

So this is for single-tube tires? Which were more or less like a garden hose, right? With the tube vulcanized to the interior and the tread to the exterior. So this would inject glue inside the puncture and air would push it through the hole. Seemingly thixotropic, maybe solvent, and not liquid latex. You have to wonder if the cement had fillers so as not just all extrude out the hole, and how you'd clean the syringe.

One of my kids went to Ft. Lewis for college and lived there for a while. We spent a lot of time in Durango. My dad and mom lived kind of 4 corners adjacent over near Alamosa for about 15 years.

I’m not sure how many applications it could be. It would hold about 10mL of adhesive and, I suspect, it was probably rubber cement. The tire has to have a tube but, from this and instructions I’ve read, they didn’t seem to remove the remove the tire and tube, they just punched through like a plug in threadless tires. I’ve seen other syringe systems that had much more glue in them. I’m not sure how the syringe would be cleaned. Mine is free of residue. The box also says at the bottom to “Use only the Lightning Cement which is red”. That seems to indicate that the syringe was refillable.

The coolest part of this story was the amount of old newspaper articles that are bicycle related from the lated from the late 1800s. There were hundreds of citations which were mostly ads for bicycles and bicycle gear.

The single-tube tires were used much the same way as a tubular, glued on with no beads. But it was all vulcanized into one unit, not a tire carcass sewn up around a latex tube.

Found this for example. Plugs like the ones presently used on tubeless tires. This also shows the tape as mentioned on the tin's instructions

thanks for this thread very cool

Thank you for posting that. I’d actually found that article and have a screenshot of it. I also have a Wald rubber band tool, new in the box.




Mine is from 1923.

An interesting observation is that the Scientific American article is from 1896 and is about bicycle tire repair. If you think about it, bicycles once occupied the kind of space something like artificial intelligence does today.

I don't think it's carried filled, rather you fill it with cement at the time of each use

Interesting that the 'mushroom plug pushed through piercing tube' idea goes back to the 19th century! They still sell the same thing today:

I've used these in car tires and they work very well. Haven't used the bike tire version yet.

That could be. The extra parts in the box have nothing to do with the patch kit and the syringe only takes up a small part of the box.

Great story!

Here's some interesting history of the bike and tyre industry of the 1890s in North America.
When were 700c wheels introduced or become common?

Now this is proper C&V content. Good investigative work and thanks for sharing!