Hello; As a boy in the 50's my first bicycle was a fixed gear type. That was all anyone around the area had. My second bike was a three speed "english bike". I do not know how the term came about. My friends still had the fixed gear bicycles. We rode everywhere on our bikes, sometimes on quite long journeys, but all over our town that was later determined to be a meteor crater. When a group of us would set out on a journey, my three speed was a clear improvement over the single speeds. Hills were not the big struggle they had been before. I had before needed to stand up on the pedals and strain to get a single speed up hills. My knees would not take this strain now days. With the three speed the hills were much easier to climb and I was not spent and out of breath. On flat sections I was not spinning the pedals like crazy any more. Having lived thru the time of single speeds being all their was to multi geared bikes, I do not plan to go back. On my current rides I go thru the gears a lot every time.
