Roughly 130 years ago, New Yorker August Schrader and his able son, George, applied to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to protect the ownership of their new invention. It was a valve.
"This invention," they wrote, "relates most particularly to air valves of the class wherein a positive closure is made by screwing the valve against the seat, and the invention aims to provide an improved valve of this character which can be tightly closed when desired, and positively and completely opened by ordinary manipulation."
That's right, the Schrader tire valve was born. It was, and is, a thing of enduring beauty and utility. Its simple, robust mechanism spring-loads a closure in a brass stem. It has for many generations allowed the world's bicyclists — and, yes, car owners, motorcyclists and truck drivers — to inflate their tires efficiently and without incident.
As inventions go, it is not quite as big a deal as the wheel itself. But on a scale of pure ubiquity, the Schrader valve is certainly up there with Velcro, non-detaching beverage can pop-tops, and the pneumatic tire itself.
Yet, somehow, some ridiculous percentage of the bicycling world ended up with a piece of junk called a Presta valve, through which they must, with annoying difficulty, inflate their tires. It is everything that the Schrader valve is not — complicated, fickle and fragile. It is also French, by the way.
This is important now because, willy-nilly, the bicycle industry appears to be entering a more reality-based era that could, with any luck, one day relegate the Presta valve to the same trash heap as tubular, "sew-up" tires.
The problem goes back to a time when the bike industry assumed that riders wanted either an upright, cruising, frump-cycle, or they wanted a racing bike. (This was a time when people had only one bike.) So there were a lot of people commuting and generally riding around town on uncomfortably designed frames with thin, hard tires. The case for the Presta valve was that it was a lighter valve that required a smaller hole that better fit narrow racing rims.
It is the rare present-day cyclist who is concerned about the weight of inner tube valves — or is using flimsy, pencil-thin rims. But Prestas persist. And the aggravation is profound and global. The valve stem lock nuts too often unscrew during inflation, flying off into the landscape, never to be found again. Presta tubes require a special adapter to inflate with a gas station pump — and, believe me, the adapters do not always work. Touring riders will tell you that in much of America, Walmarts are the only local bike shops, and they carry only Schrader tubes, not Presta.
