Who invented it?
The World of Sports Science, a reference work reproduced on Encyclopedia.com, credits Paul de Vivie with the first working derailleur and says such systems were developed mainly in France in the early 1900s. It gives no year, and it is the only source for this in our research, so the attribution is unconfirmed.
Thirty-four years of waiting
VeloNews, in a history published on 23 June 2017, says the 1937 Tour de France was the first to allow derailleurs, about 34 years after the mechanism was invented.
VeloNews gives two earlier episodes, each from that article alone and so unconfirmed:
- 1912. Joanny Panel rode the Tour in the individual class, the isoles, on a derailleur he had developed himself. It is the only earlier Tour use the article mentions.
- 1913. Henri Desgrange, the editor of L'Auto, which ran the race, made riders ride the 470 km stage from Brest to La Rochelle on fixed gears even though gear systems existed.
The 1937 Tour
Which derailleur?
The Tour organiser's own websites could not be read for our research, so this account rests on Universalis and the press. The French encyclopedia Universalis, in its account of the 1937 race, says the bicycles used a three-speed Super Champion derailleur. The make is given differently elsewhere:
- Universalis calls it a Super Champion.
- VeloNews calls it the "Vittoria Super Champion", which it says Oscar Egg later modernised.
Who was running the race?
A search summary of Wikipedia says derailleurs came in after Desgrange had stepped back from running the Tour. Universalis's stage-by-stage account does not fit that neatly: it still shows Desgrange making race decisions in 1937, such as cancelling the remaining team time trials. The Wikipedia version is unconfirmed.
How the race was won
Universalis describes the 1937 Tour in detail. Gino Bartali won stage 7 to Grenoble and took the yellow jersey, then crashed on stage 8 and later abandoned. Roger Lapebie took the lead after stage 16, from Pau to Bordeaux, and kept it to Paris, after Sylvere Maes and the Belgian team left the race following that stage, having been booed by the crowd at the Bordeaux velodrome.
After 1937
VeloNews traces how shifting changed once gears were allowed. It says Bartali won the 1938 Tour on a Vittoria Margherita, which needed a light pedal backwards to shift, and that Simplex's Champion du Monde, designed by Lucien Juy, was the first derailleur that did not.
The same article gives several other dates, which rest on that one press source and were not checked against the makers' own records:
| Year | What VeloNews says happened |
|---|---|
| 1930 | Tullio Campagnolo's quick-release |
| 1949 | Fausto Coppi wins the Tour on a Simplex derailleur |
| 1950 | Hugo Koblet wins the Giro on a Campagnolo Gran Sport |
| 1980s | Shimano's indexed shifting (SIS) and shifters built into the brake levers make changing gear easier |
| 1992 | The first electronic derailleur, Mavic's Mektronic |
What the sources leave open
The research behind this page could not settle three things: the year of the first working derailleur, the exact make used in 1937, and who was in charge when the rule changed. Each is given above with the sources on each side. How gears and drivetrains work today is on groupsets and drivetrains, the founding of the Tour on how the Grand Tours began, and the dates in the timeline.