Bicycles, like books, can be read, by those who love them.  No two are the same, even two of the same make and model.  Each and every bike made and sold has an impact on those who people who use it and in turn, gets some part of their personality copied onto it, so each bike tells a different story.  While some of the tales are about the bikes' owners, others are about the period during which the bike was made.  A bike sold in India during the sixties would in all probability be very different from a bike made and sold in Sweden, during the same period.  Linköping being a city with a major university, it sees a lot of students and hence a lot of bicycles and each one of these bicycles has a story to tell, if there is somebody who cares to listen.

Finding abandoned bikes in Linköping is not at all uncommon, as many students buy their bicycles used;  when it breaks down, it's often cheaper to buy another used bike than to procure the parts and get it fixed.  It's cheaper if one does the fixing oneself, but a lot of students don't seem to relish working on bikes, hence the abandoned bikes.  I saw an abandoned DBS (Den Beste Sykkel, or literally, 'The Best Bicycle') and a Crescent, both popular bikes from the seventies, near the Central Station.

Both bikes seemed to be single-speed bikes at first glance, but when I got closer, I saw that it had what was evidently a gear cable and then I saw a strange looking chain coming out of the rear wheel's hub!

I looked it up on the internet and only then came to know about technology that's been around since 1903, called the 'Sturmey-Archer Hub Gear!  Unlike the derailleur systems which have gear wheels exposed to the system, the Sturmey-Archer system has the gears and the lubricant enclosed in a sealed hub.  These are generally three-speed gearboxes with modern variants having as many as seven gears. This made perfect sense for a country like Sweden, where snow and salt corrode all exposed elements quite badly.  This however never gained popularity in India, where cost must often have been the real design-decision factor. In fact, most Indian bikes are simply single-speed, as that translates into lower manufacturing and maintenance costs.  When I spoke to my dad,  he mentioned that the Raleigh from England sold a few models which indeed had these hub gears, but they had been quite rare and were only used by the affluent and adventurous types, including some money-lenders, who used the bike's faster speeds to catch up with defaulters! :D Here's a video that explains how the Sturmey-Archer hub works: