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

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.

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......

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

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...

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.

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.)

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.

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 ...

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. 

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. 🙄🙄

I never got dazzled by an Ever Ready light.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Batteries were ruinously expensive and weighed more than Belgium

"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.