Almost anyone who has spent time on the online e-bike forums, especially in the early 2000s, will have heard or come across Joshua Goldberg, one of the most prolific posters and an enigmatic character who has been scheming and dealing in e-bike parts from his Toronto apartment for two decades now.
Joshua Goldberg is a recumbent bicycle devotee and self-proclaimed mechanical klutz, but that didn't stop him. In the late 1980s he rigged up a two horsepower Bosch electric motor to spin the front wheel of his Peugeot to help him bike with his daughter in a trailer.
His motivation was, he said, part laziness and, in a larger part, dislike of cars in general, having lost several close family members to motor vehicle accidents. The recumbent bicycle with an electric assist attached just made sense. So when commercial kits such as the ZAP and Currie came out in the 1990s, Goldberg became a key Canadian dealer, serving mostly recumbent riders across the continent.
It's not too surprising that recumbent bicycle riders made up a disproportionate number of early experimenters in electric assist technology. It’s a community already used to thinking outside the box and it seems intuitive that they would pursue what are clearly superior technologies, regardless of what was happening in the mainstream culture. But even within this niche community, the idea of an electric motor helping a bike created divisions: some embraced it while others derided the whole concept of motorized assistance as akin to cheating or riding a motorbike.
Barrie Wilkinson
The constant squabble on the recumbent forums led Goldberg to found a new site, the Yahoo "Power-Assist" group, where all topics related to electric drives on bikes and trikes were welcome. This flourished, and for many years was the central hub of the do-it-yourself electric bike movement. With few sources for pre-built e-bikes in North America, most people who caught wind of the idea found out about the availability of kits through the Internet and got drawn into this community.
For some, getting one's hands dirty by refitting and modifying their bicycle to fit a motor and battery was a required part of the process since there was no easy off-the-shelf fix. For others, the whole process of building a homemade e-bike was an obsession in and of itself.
