Like it or not, this is Jason Toon with yet another Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell. Fitness and I have an on-again, off-again relationship: as soon as I get on an exercise bike, I want to get off again. When I stumbled across an old ad for a funny-looking thing called a LifeCycle, I wondered if there might be a story in it…

Online marketplaces are littered with the skeletal remains of countless neglected dreams. I’m talking, of course, about exercise bikes. Every few years, a new trademarked stationary cycling craze sweeps the land: Peloton a few years ago, SoulCycle a little while before that, Spinning back there somewhere. Each brings their own generation of tech frills and cultural cache. Each briefly spikes enthusiasm and sales among legions of converts who quickly remember that they kind of hate it. The bikes that go nowhere are so often the fitness resolution that goes nowhere.

Whose fault is this? Or, to accentuate the positive, who gets the credit for helping all those people who do stick with their pedal-powered regimens?

Nobody knows who first had the idea for a stationary cycle: they date way back to the 18th century. But we do know who first put sensors on one of those bikes to tell you how fast you’re going and how many calories you’ve burned. Who first came up with programmed routines for specific fitness goals. Who was the originator not only of the trendy techno-bikes but the very concept of workout equipment that also measures your workout: the backbone of the modern gym.

He was a chemist born in Idaho in 1915. By the time he invented his high-tech LifeCycle, Keene Paul Dimick had already done two careers’ worth of high-profile, innovative things. And those things tell a story about America in the mid-20th century.

Gee, I wonder what decade this is from.

The strawberry code

Near as I can tell online, Dimick first pops up in the public eye in the 1950s as a chemist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Albany, California. The USDA assigned Dimick the job of investigating the volatile flavour compounds of a major local crop, strawberries. Chemically speaking, what makes strawberries taste the way they do? He wasn’t getting anywhere until he read an article about a new process called gas chromatography.

I’m getting dangerously out of my depth here, but essentially, a gas chromatograph takes a sample of whatever you’re testing, vaporizes it, and mixes it with an inert gas that separates the various chemical compounds in the sample so they can be identified individually. (Please correct me in the forum thread, but I think that’s the general idea.)

Dimick thought the process sounded promising not only for his project but for the food industry in general. Remember, this was the 1950s, the age of “better living through chemistry” and an exploding population. Big food companies were chasing how to cheaply mimic natural flavors without the unpredictable and costly messiness of nature. If you could figure out exactly what synthetic chemicals add up to strawberry flavoring, candy makers would never need to touch another real strawberry.

Unfortunately, gas chromatographs were impossible to get. The few companies producing them were tiny, or out of business, or on the other side of the world. So Dimick found some plans and built his own. He presented his results in 1956: he’d cracked the strawberry code.

Then he went into his garage with his brother-in-law and they built five more gas chromatographs. They called their model the Aerograph and all five sold immediately to Dimick’s peers in the food industry. It wasn’t long before Dimick said goodbye to the USDA. He was in the chromatograph business now.

And business was good. By 1962 they were selling $3 million worth of Aerographs a year. By 1965, that was $8.5 million. The following year, the company was acquired for $12 million. The food industry’s craving for cheap artificial flavors had made this scientist so rich, he never had to work again. Keene Dimick had certainly found better living through chemistry.

Days of wine and dumbbells

Even though he was past 50 by then, Dimick was evidently not immune to the bacchanalian bohemianism wafting from hippie meccas like nearby San Francisco. He turned his attention to his 65-acre vineyard in Napa Valley. Was it a reaction to all those long days closed up in stuffy laboratories? After a career concocting chemical caricatures of real flavors, did Dimick long to dig his fingers into the rich brown earth and summon its natural bounty?

Well, maybe. What we do know is that this restless polymath somehow hooked up with another technically-minded go-getter transforming an industry. Robert Mondavi founded his namesake winery the same year that Dimick sold his chromatograph company. Among other innovations, Mondavi was the driving force behind New World wines being labeled by varietal rather than location.

Dimick grew one varietal of grapes that was in high demand by Mondavi, and would soon become the quintessential California white: Chardonnay. The two made a deal, and Dimick’s grapes were thus part of the wine that, more than any other, established the California wine industry commercially. Once again, the chemist from Idaho found himself right at the crest of a wave in America’s changing culture.

But it wasn’t all hedonism and self-indulgence. Dimick was an early enthusiast of another burgeoning trend of the coming Me Decade: physical fitness.

They called me MAD at the Institute!

Now that fitness is a megabillion-dollar industry towered over by some of the most inescapable brands on Earth, it’s almost impossible to conceive of how marginal it was through the 1960s. In movies and TV shows, pumped-up fitness freaks were objects of ridicule, or at least arm’s-length fascination: sure, they were healthier, but also, just… odd.

Mass-market fitness centers were almost nonexistent. Aside from a few eccentric musclemen heaving dumbbells in dusty boxing gyms, exercise was basically something that kids did in school. The average suburbanite would no more run on a treadmill than they would give up smoking or read Das Kapital. Of course, a lot more of the population had jobs where they got plenty of physical exercise. And everybody ate a lot less sugar than today. The concept of consciously working out grew in direct proportion to its necessity.

Anyway, in semi-retirement, Keene Dimick spent a lot of time on his exercise bike. But his scientific brain wasn’t satisfied with the inexact science of analog workouts. Something was missing.

Lifecycle happens

“Mr. Dimick is a scientist and the machine is a scientific wonder,” said the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat on May 22, 1969. “It has different levels of effort, gauges to keep the pace steady and a device that measures your pulse while you are working at it.”

This piece, a small-town local-color blurb, is the earliest mention I can find of the “bicycle-like contrivance” Dimick called the Lifecycle. It says Dimick was just starting up production of the bikes at a plant in nearby Concord. And then…

…nothing much happened. At least not right away. It seems Dimick sold some Lifecycles to universities and other institutions with a specialized interest in measuring fitness data. Some of his business and scientific colleagues bought them. He developed his original designs further to offer more sophisticated measuring capability, and pre-programmed workouts. Dimick’s Lifecycle never quite took off with the public - but crucially, no imitators caught up with the Lifecycle.

So, in 1977, Dimick sold the rights to the Lifecycle to a fitness center owner named Ray Wilson and an entrepreneur named Augie Nieto. By now, commercial gyms were becoming a thing: still small by today’s standards, but they were out there. Nieto sent free Lifecycles to the 50 biggest commercial gyms in America and tirelessly hustled them in person, sure that the leotard-and-legwarmer crowd would discover the brilliance of Dimick’s invention.

The original. Is it just me or is this way cooler looking than anything in any gym today?

(To be continued HERE.)