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Did you use Ever Ready bike lights? Take a (badly-lit) trip down Memory Lane

Lighting tech in cycling has come a long way since the Ever Ready of the 70s and 80s. Thankfully

A few years back, we sent out a throwaway retweet of some old lights that caused an outpouring of nostalgia, and it reminded us just far much bike lights have come in the past couple of decades.

Bikes have improved dramatically since the safety bicycle was first invented, but there’s always some resistance to the introduction of new technologies. Just look at the anger electronic gears, disc brakes, 1x drivetrains, GPS cycling computers etc have caused over the years.

One technology that nobody is disputing we’re better off with is the LED light. As the excellent Sheldon Brown website reminds us, the bicycle was invented in a time when flames were the only source of artificial lighting. Can you imagine riding in the dark with a candle to illuminate your path! 

Fast forward many years and product developments, the invention of light bulbs, batteries and plastics, and we get to the British Ever Ready lights that were popular during the 1970s and 1980s - the lights in the photo at the top of this article.

The Ever Ready is probably the most iconic light from the period, and just the mention of the name is enough to send many cyclists down memory lane. The lights used standard batteries and filament bulbs and massive D cell batteries. Brightness was low, battery run time was short and, well, they were a bit rubbish to be honest. It’s clear from the many photos shared with us in this Twitter trip down memory lane that for many cyclists, these were the earlier experience of bike lights.

eveready lights1

The Eveready name first appeared way back in 1898 with the founding of the US Eveready Battery Company. This became Ever Ready in 1906, and in 1914 the British arm split from the US parent company to go it alone. 

The tungsten filament bulb was introduced in 1910 and the company concentrated on developing torches through the first half of the 20th Century. Given cycling was going through a boom at the same time, the British company began marketing its lights at cyclists with a succession of models launched over the years. The first thermoplastic moulded cases that many of you remember were launched in 1966, and made waterproof in 1970.


Let’s be clear though, they were good for the day. But I don’t think anybody is disputing the fact that really they were a bit rubbish. Today’s lights are amazing, with incredible advancements in brightness, battery runtime, rechargeable batteries, beam pattern, usability and price. John Stevenson remembers them but it's not all roses, as he recounts:

I used the last generation of Ever Ready lights a lot when I was a shop rat in the 1980s, and they were fairly dire, just like the previous versions. The light they put out was yellowish and feeble unless you fitted halogen bulbs, in which case the battery life was way too short so you had to use expensive alkaline D cells to power them. If you rode at night a lot, nickel-cadmium rechargeable batteries paid for themselves in a matter of weeks.

Even then, the vibration of simply riding bike would move the contacts around enough that they'd corrode, so you occasionally had to take sandpaper to everything to resurrect them.

Even with halogen bulbs, Ever Ready lights never really did more than signal your existence to drivers. If you wanted to see where you were going, you were largely out of luck.

These lights mounted on the bike with clamp-on plastic brackets, a design that came about because Ever Ready was under pressure from French company Wonder. Wonder's lights were lighter and better-looking than the previous Ever Ready lights, even though they used proprietary, non-standard batteries. They were popular because you could easily clamp them on the seat post or handlebar of just about any bike and didn't have to risk damaging the paint with the permanent metal clamps  of Ever Ready's lights of the 1970s.

There were two versions of Ever Ready's last bike lights and their rather wacky brackets. Version 1 had a habit of leaping out of the bracket if you hit a pothole. The light was heavy, especially with those alkaline D cells on board, and the bracket was flexible. If you hit a big enough bump (and it didn't have to be very big) the bracket would flex, the catch holding the lamp would disengage and the lamp would leap on to the road, often smashing the lens in the process.

Our mechanic Malcolm hit on the solution: a prong in the bracket and a matching hole in the lamp to stop the movement. At the next bike show he started to tell the Ever Ready folks about it and they went "you mean like this?" and produced a Version 2 prototype from under the counter.

But Version 2 still wasn't very bright. They were also ridiculously easy to steal and sufficiently bulky that carrying them off the bike was a pain. 

Rumour had it that the British Standard for bike lights was written with a great deal of input from Ever Ready, which helped keep them as the market leader even though the lights were more than a bit rubbish. 

As soon as they became widely available, everyone who needed remotely serious amounts of light switched from Ever Ready to systems based on separate lamps and battery packs from companies like BLT, Night Sun, Nite Rider and others. The first LED rear lights from Vistalite destroyed Ever Ready's rear light market overnight. When white LEDs became available there was no longer any reason to have an incandescent front light so you could be seen.

eveready lights2

Dave Atkinson also remembers the Ever Ready lights:

If you riding after dark in the 1980s then most likely you had some Ever Ready lights. They were simple enough bits of kit: grey plastic case, filament bulb, switch, and space for two D-cell batteries that weighed about as much as your front wheel. The boxy back light attached directly to the seatstay and you know what? It was ok. the bracket worked pretty well, it was bright enough for getting yourself noticed and it didn't look that stupid.

The front was like a modern reimagining of a railway oil lamp from the turn of the twentieth century, and about as much use. It attached to a pressed steel plate on a mounting point on the frame, and kicked out enough light to be see about two yards in front of you, making speeds up up to about 8mph possible before the batteries ran out after about two hours. 

Later on the rear got an edgy curved redesign, and later still both lights were redesigned again, with both using quick release brackets that were functionally pretty awful. The front got brighter but the new bar mount moved it further from the road, so the status quo was maintained in terms of actual usable illumination.

old lights1

Thankfully, bike lights have come a long way since Ever Ready, and today LED lights are the norm. We didn't leap straight from Ever Ready to LEDs though, and there have been several notable technologies that have introduced high-powered lights with rechargeable batteries that shone brightly, but not for long before LEDs really advanced and took the top spot.

Halogen lights offered a big leap in brightness. I remember the leap in performance a set of Vistalite lights (above) with a 2 watt halogen bulb provided, enabling riding on dark country roads and even off-road mountain biking. The batteries didn’t last long though.

old lights3

For a brief period, before LED lights became all-conquering, HID lights using metal halide technology were briefly popular. Who remembers the Cateye Stadium? They were much brighter than halogen lights but expensive and the run times were comically short and needed huge batteries and weighed a lot. They are more commonly used in xenon car headlights these days.

old lights2

British brand Exposure Lights was launched by USE in about 2005 and was an early adopter of LED technology. The benefits of LEDs was greater light output per watt than halogens, very small size, good runtime from a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, and Exposure managed to pack all the gubbins into a small cylinder that could attach directly to the handlebars.

- The stuff they never tell you about bike lights

Battery technology was also a bit contributor to the improvement of cycle lights, and also the small unit design that has become possible. Early lights used regular batteries, but we’ve seen lead acid, NiCad (these suffered from memory so you always had to discharge them fully), NiMH and then to the most common battery used today, lithium-ion, like you get in any smartphone or laptop. They have no memory and can be used and charged as needed.

USE Exposure Six Pack Mk9 front light-1

LED lights have continued to get brighter. Exposure’s lights increase in brightness with every model year. Its most powerful model, the Six Pack, pumps out a whopping 3,900 lumens! They’ve come a long way since the original Race model with a max output of 480 lumens, paltry by today’s standards. 

Over the years the cost of the key components has plummeted, leading to an explosion of choice with hundreds of companies offering LED lights at a wide range of prices and brightness levels to suit all riding requirements, from commuting to 24-hour mountain bike racing. 

I think it's fair to say the development of modern bicycle lights is the sort of progress that few, if any cyclists at all, would thinking is unnecessary. Riding in the dark is now safer and more enjoyable, and lights are more affordable and reliable.

Here are some more fantastic reactions to those old lights... 

What are your memories of Ever Ready lights? Let us know in the comments as always... 

David worked on the road.cc tech team from 2012-2020. Previously he was editor of Bikemagic.com and before that staff writer at RCUK. He's a seasoned cyclist of all disciplines, from road to mountain biking, touring to cyclo-cross, he only wishes he had time to ride them all. He's mildly competitive, though he'll never admit it, and is a frequent road racer but is too lazy to do really well. He currently resides in the Cotswolds, and you can now find him over on his own YouTube channel David Arthur - Just Ride Bikes

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45 comments

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pockstone | 1 year ago
0 likes

I probably   (definitely )  spent more on these lamps and batteries than I ever did on my bikes when I was young. (Road bike: Elswick Hopper drop bars, Campag Record 5 speed derailleur, steel cotter pin crankset, £5.00 off my cousin across the street. Gravel bike: Raleigh 26" wheeled roadster with no front wheel. Salvaged from the bin wagon, put the back wheel on the front, replaced it with the back wheel from a Polish Cast Iron sit up and beg that somehow found its way to me across the Iron Curtain, via my friend's neighbour. Balloon tyre and a back pedal brake made it look like a proto-Chopper, cow horn handle bars and skids aplenty... Beat you to it Marin county!)

The lamps, along with the bikes, spent all year out in our back yard, so lasted as long as you'd expect. No amount of insulating tape would stop the seat stay getting chewed up. When the new ones came out with the plastic clips they managed one journey down our cobbled back street before bouncing off and coming a cropper on the setts.

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BonerFide | 1 year ago
2 likes

Ah Ever Ready lights, wow, thought I'd put that nightmare to bed!

Had me off more than once, rattling loose off the fork side mount and going into the spokes or under the back wheel.

As others have said, pitifully poor lighting, I've got a torch the size of my little finger now that is a million times brighter and weighs nothing!

I suspect if I'd had matches and a little more bravery, I'd have had more effective and longer lasting illumination from setting fire to my hair, particularly in the 70s......

 

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K184paul | 1 year ago
0 likes

Even worse they were so unreliable and would switch off going over a pothole or even just when they felt like it. We use to fix the clamp to a toe strap and then fit them under our saddle with our spare tub so he could give them a wack when they switched off. It became like a nervous twitch looking between your legs to see light on your rear tyre then wacking the light. I went to the Harrogate cycle show in 1984 and that had a display with a vibrating table with water spray. All the lights weren't working. We all switched to wonder lights when they came out because at least they worked even though they had worse batteries

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Headwesty | 1 year ago
4 likes

Plastic Eveready Lights?  You lot don't know you're born!  Mine in the 60s were metal and rust in equal proportions.  The contacts always needed cleaning and the bulbs needed frequent replacement...

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OldRidgeback replied to Headwesty | 1 year ago
0 likes

I remember the ones from the 70s and they were pretty crap

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wtjs replied to Headwesty | 1 year ago
1 like

Plastic Eveready Lights?  You lot don't know you're born!  Mine in the 60s were metal and rust in equal proportions

I support the other sufferers on here who experienced the bloody things shooting off the fork mount when you went over a bump or a pothole. Bike lights are fantastic now-£15 for a superbright pair from Aldi!

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Cycloid | 1 year ago
1 like

I had Eveready lights attached to my bike in the 70's.But whether or not I used them is open to question. Most of the time they could not be seen by other road users.

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Sriracha replied to Cycloid | 1 year ago
2 likes
Cycloid wrote:

whether or not I used them is open to question

Indeed, Eveready lights used us, to make us buy batteries for no purpose.

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chrisonabike replied to Cycloid | 1 year ago
1 like

It's better to light a candle than curse the heavy plastic Eveready light!

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armb | 1 year ago
1 like

I was recently surprised to find my D cell NiCd still hold a charge. They aren't the ones I was using in the 80s with Ever Ready lights, but not much newer.
But I don't have lights that still use them. (I had a Specialized set with a 6v water bottle sized battery pack and halogen bulb, but I gave up looking for an LED replacement, and the contacts failed.)

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IanMSpencer | 1 year ago
2 likes

In the 60s we had the horrid metal cased NeverReady lights with the twiddly switch on the top.

When I became the proud owner of an RSW MK2 it had an inbuilt dynamo so if you pedalled fast enough you could get up to a yellow glow from the feeble orange glow of coasting along, then you just had to hope that the feeble glow of a Ford Anglia front light would be enough. Ah for the days when full beam on a car created a pleasant glow (or more usually one light pointing at the ground about 3 feet ahead of the car and the other attempting light speed transmissions with Venus).

We were glad to move on from blue, paper clad D2s to the SP2s then the snazzy orange HP2s though. By the late 70s EveryReady D2s had disappeared.

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Oldfatgit | 1 year ago
2 likes

Didn't these used to throw a cross as the central focus?
As kids, we used to pretend that these were aircraft and have light dogfights with them.
Oh to be that young and that carefree again ...

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Dingaling | 1 year ago
1 like

I missed out on something in life, even if it was rubbish. I had a dynamo on my bike and it got used most afternoons in winter to get me home from school. I don't remember it being too bad though not comparable with todays lights. I got my first car in 1968 so completely missed the joy of Ever Ready lights because I didn't start riding again until 1986 and then only in daylight. 

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espressodan | 1 year ago
3 likes

What a memory. I had the clip-in white ones and they were indeed rubbish. The written standard in the early 90's had a lot to answer for. I remember riding with a friend who has a new, brightly, reliable, long lasting cateye LED rear light. Better in every way but we still got pulled over by the police and he got a fine for not having an incandescent bulb!! Crazy that for a while Dumfries and Galloway police were actively looking for riders out at night with good, bright lights just so that they could fine them for not using crap, barely visible lights. 🙄🙄

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don simon fbpe | 1 year ago
2 likes

I never got dazzled by an Ever Ready light.

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IanGlasgow | 3 years ago
1 like

They were genuinley awful lights.
As soon as I started using my Raleigh Jeep for cycling to school I upgraded to a bottle-type dyamo. It was also rubbish but not as expesnive to run as the EverReady lights.
Got my first "racer" in 1980 - an Elswick that weighed about half a ton - and added a bottom bracket dynamo that ran on the tread. That was MUCH better - bright enough to commute to college on unlit roads and flip the light up to flash motorists who didn't dip their lights. Shame my lights went out if I stopped at a junction.

When I started cyling again in the early 2000s I was blown away by how tiny and powerful Cateye LED lights were and that they could run in tiny AA rechargeables. In retrospect they were a bit rubbish too  - big and dim compared to modern lights - but a huge advance.

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GMBasix | 3 years ago
0 likes

Early LEDs were green at the front.  I recall overestimating daylight for an autumnal assault on Jacob's Ladder from Edale to Hayfield, having to ride in complete darkness up Sheffield Rd and Rushup Edge back to Edale where I'd parked.  The green glow just about picked up the verge so I could cycle slowly in a straight line.

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GMBasix | 3 years ago
4 likes

Is there a beam comparison  test for the various Ever Readies, Wonder and Vistalite?  I need to know how retro to go.

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theSplund | 3 years ago
0 likes

Had a pair of both shown in the first two embedded tweets - both near useless, though I did mod the front 'Wonder'(?) light to remove the diffuser in order to get something that cast at least a bit more illumination than a passing bioluminescent slug might be able to produce.

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froze | 3 years ago
1 like

I can't believe you actually did an article on those lights, I thought they were LONG forgotten.  I bought one of those Ever Ready (plastic box version) brand new sometime around 1979 give or take a year, I bought it in States in Santa Barbara California at Open Air Bicycles.  I actually went to Radio Shack and bought a brighter halogen bulb for it since the original bulb was very dim, since I was young and had superb night vision, that was all the light I needed for commuting home from work in the dark.  Because it burned batteries fast I bought a pair of C (I think they were C's) rechargeable batteries (also from Radio Shack) and just kept those charged up.  I painted the light yellow in 1984 when I bought a red bike that had yellow graphics! I used that light on my bike for about 10 years when I bought a Cygolite Metro that ran off of 8 D batteries, that one too I upgraded the bulbs to halogen (I still have that light, but don't use it anymore, when modern LED lights came out that use far less battery while being far brighter).  I had that Ever Ready light until around 2000 when my daughter broke it, I gave it to her because she wanted a light to see with at night in the house, I should have given her another light!

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Type17 | 3 years ago
0 likes

I had the 70's Every Ready's in my school days and hated the battery life & costs, so I swapped with another kid at school, a Raleigh Chopper frame and my original front wheel for a Dynohub version of my wheel - I removed the batteries, changed the bulbs to 6v and wired up the Ever Readys - no more battery hassles!

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OldRidgeback | 3 years ago
4 likes

Yes, I had these. I think I've still got one or two of the angled plastic ones in the cellar. They were crap. The ones before with the rounded metal casings were even worse and had expensive and heavy batteries with a metal spring in the middle that often broke off, meaning the battery was fit for the bin even if it wasn't completely used. Bear in mind that if you left old and used batteries for a while, they'd leak and corrode the inside of the metal casing so that the light was fit for the bin too.

It's worth noting that road fatalities in the UK hit their peak in the early 1970s, at about 4 1/2 times the level of today. Cycling at night with these cruddy lights was so much more dangerous in the bad old days of the 1970s, when so many more drivers were likely to be drunk and in cars with duff brakes, steering or tyres.

Things were so much better in the olden days, not!

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Tired of the tr... | 3 years ago
2 likes

Interesting to read about these experiences. When I grew up in Germany, all bikes had dynamo lights (the law is that bikes always must have a light that is permanently attached to the frame). The dynamo delivered a power of 3W, the front bulb had 2.4W and the rear 0.6W. When the front light lost connection (which happened frequently), then the rear light would get the full power and light up really bright for a few minutes before burning out.

The lights were nowhere near as bright as modern LEDs of course, but I don't remember them as particularly dark, I often cycled home in the dark and the lit up the path quite ok. With the dynamo, battery life of course was not an issue, but you had to fiddle with the wires quite a lot as something would come lose, and then (see above) you would quickly blow out one of your bulbs.

The lights were reasonable bright at walking speed, but got really bright when you went downhills at high speed (we raced to see how bright we could make them), of course the bulbs didn't survive that for long, so everybody had a collection of spare bulbs.

The bottle dynamos tended to slip on the wheen (especially if the wheel was a bit wobbly and in wet conditions) so the lights oscillated between very bright and quite dim.

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eburtthebike | 3 years ago
2 likes

Never Readies; a tribute to the power of the capitalist system.  To keep them lit required an investment in batteries that made them pointless, even if they worked, which was at best, 50% of the time.

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Dnnnnnn replied to eburtthebike | 3 years ago
1 like

I'd have thought that the proliferation of choice, technical innovation and falling prices was a better example of capitalism's power. Unless we just weren't allowed those fantastic lights the GDR was churning out.

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wtjs | 3 years ago
4 likes

Just look at the anger electronic gears, disc brakes, single-ring drivetrains, GPS computers et all have caused over the years.

I remember thinking that indexed shifting (SIS) and autofocus lenses were unnecessary. Wrong on both! I also thought that electric car windows would be bound to fail expensively. None of mine have failed.

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CyclingInGawler | 3 years ago
3 likes

Back in around 1975 or so I took a ride into Hastings. While travelling at low speed through the traffic lights in the centre of town the front light clamp around the front fork came loose , spun the Ever Ready light into the front wheel, and down I went. No real harm done. Of course if that had happened on the way into town, down the steep hill at probably 30 mph and with an artic on my shoulder the whole way down, the outcome would have been somewhat different. Needless to say, the bracket never went back onto the front fork.

Those old battery lights weren't great in so many ways, but somehow or other they let me spend many an hour cycling around the pitch-black lanes of Romney Marsh. Ah, nostalgia's not what it used to be.

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BadgerBeaver | 3 years ago
7 likes

Batteries were ruinously expensive and weighed more than Belgium

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Dnnnnnn replied to BadgerBeaver | 1 year ago
1 like

And were the size of Wales

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Dicklexic | 3 years ago
6 likes

"Over the years the cost of the key components has plummeted and it has led to an explosion of choice, with hundreds of companies offering LED lights at a wide range of prices and brightness levels"

This has also led to an explosion of riders now gleefully zooming along shared use paths, cycle routes and roads with their 1500+ lumen plus lights blazing away, completely oblivious (ot they simply fdon't give a f#%k) to the fact that they are rendering oncoming fellow path/road users pretty much blind. Light technology improvements have certainly made night riding far more enjoyable, but in some cases it's made it more dangerous for others unfortunately.

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