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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 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.

For Barrie Wilkinson, a retired mechanical engineering professor living in Westbank, BC, the electric bicycle has become "a perfect retirement hobby." He first acquired a turn-key imported e-bike in 2004, thinking that this might just be the ticket for the 72-year-old former smoker with arthritis to stay active and regain the enjoyment of cycling.

Wilkinson’s turn-key e-bike had many shortcomings, but it worked well enough to convince him that the electric bike had potential, and that given some time in his garage workshop he could probably make something significantly better. Six years later, Wilkinson has built over half a dozen different conversions, experimenting with hub motors, crank drives and evolving from lead acid to NiMH to lithium battery packs as newer technologies became available.

The presence of an active, passionate and helpful online community has been key for people like Wilkinson to take on this kind of project. “There's no way" he would have undertaken these e-bike projects without the support and guidance of the enthusiasts on the web, he said. While the original Power-Assist Yahoo group lives on, the community today is mostly centered on a web forum at endless-sphere.com.

With over 13,000 topic threads and some 221,000 posts, endless-sphere.com has become an exciting hub of activity for the e-bike movement. From instructions on how to build powerful e-bike packs from hacked apart powertool batteries, to challenges for making the lightest, the most powerful, the fastest or even the cheapest e-bike, it is a place that feels like a new frontier in the Wild West. Characters such as Stephane Melacon (aka, DoctorBass) tows a school bus with his souped-up e-bike. Others are modifying super-efficient radio-controlled airplane motors to run their e-bikes with just a few pounds of additional weight.

Boundaries of technology and innovation are being pushed not by well-funded research labs or big corporations, but by hundreds of individuals who see endless possibilities for pedal-assist electric bikes to transform their lives and maybe the world around them.

It's unlikely that the early electric bike inventors of the late 1800s saw their creation as some kind of clean, minimalistic and efficient alternative to a heavy automobile. Traffic congestion, greenhouse gasses, asthma, sprawling suburbs and epidemic obesity weren't in anyone's rear-view mirror, and so the motor on an early bicycle was just a blip in the march of technological progress and industrialization. But for people like Felicio Sadalla who understood the potential from different angle, there must be some delight in seeing the world finally catching up to this idea. In 2009, Brazil released its first production run of locally-made e-bikes, and Sadalla was honoured with an award and a gift of 10 modern e-bikes from an insurance company for having directed them to this idea.

E-bikes have achieved remarkable success in Europe over the past two years, with over a million units on the road, and out here in North America, a community is hard at work trying to show us what the future may have in store.