I suppose 20-30yrs of a universal standard of 26″ MTB wheels has had the effect of lulling a good portion of bikers of a certain age into thinking this, yet a quick peruse of wheel sizes over the years paints quite a complex picture (with thanks to the late and venerable Sheldon Brown)

I … like big rims and I can-not lie.

No, 26″ (559) is about as close to a standard as we got.

Standard for what?
Eg BMX are generally 20″ Road tubs are generally 622, MTB 559. etc
To suggest that 622 or 650 B is standard is pushingthings a bit as they are both new and I bet if you looked at every MTb sold this year 559 would still be dominant.

To suggest that 622 or 650 B is standard is pushingthings a bit as they are both new and I bet if you looked at every MTb sold this year 559 would still be dominant.

Sorry, that’s rubbish.
Probably the most consistent common sizes were 700C and 650B, one was the standard racing rim size, the other was the European standard touring rim, and pretty much the universal wheel size used on all adult cycles.
There were two others, the Moulton wheel, and 20″ wheels on shoppers and the like.
The only reason mountain bikes have 26″ rims, which isn’t really ideal, is because the Americans used old Schwinn Stingray ‘clunkers’ for hammering down mountain fire-roads because they were plentiful and cheap.
A 650B wheel is much better, it gives a bigger rolling circumference which improved rolling ability over rough surfaces, without the liability of the extra rotating mass that a 700C MTB wheel carries.
My first grown-up bike, bought second-hand for my eleventh birthday*, was a BSA Star Rider, which had 27×1?”, 650B wheels, motorbike ‘cow horn’ bars, and Avon CX knobblies with SA 3-speed.
It got ridden up the woods, all round the local lanes, basically what we called ‘dirt-tracking’.
Sound familiars?
*Which would have been 1965, preceding MTB’s by twenty-odd years. 😉
[b]Edit[/b] Correction, the most common tyre/wheel size was 650A, not B, it was used all over Europe, America and Japan, as I’ve just discovered. If only Schwinn had decided to use a wheel size that was already almost universal, we’d all be riding 650A wheeled mountain bikes.

650B (584mm; 26 x 1 1/2″) wheels and tires have recently become all the fashion. This is partly due to their utility for country or urban bike riding. However, the primary reason is due to Grant Peterson and Jan Heine’s promotion of the size on Rivbike.com and in Bicycle Quarterly, respectively. Indeed, both men had to source tires from other countries because they simply were not available in the USA. Grant paid for new tire molds and commissioned Panaracer to make the first modern 650B tires. Japanese bike enthusiasts, being Francophiles, love the 650B size because it is French. The growing popularity of Randoneering in the USA has made 650B popular within their niche. Prior to this renaissance, 650B was primarily only seen in France or on rare bikes brought over here. 650A is 100 times more common, world-wide than 650B. 650A is common in Japan, the USA and England. It is often used as the wheel size for smaller people. For example: in Japan, 650A is still the men’s utility/city bike wheel size while the women use 540mm (24 x 1 3/8″). Prior to the late 1990s reintroduction of the 650B size there were few bikes marketed in the USA with 650B wheels.

The 650 range is the perfect combination of tire width and weight for long distances over varied surfaces (and now it is the new mountian bike size as well, see below). While we support the use of 650B for general everyday cycling, we wish that Jan and Grant would have studied their history a little better. If they had, they would have discovered that a near identical size (indeed 3 other sizes) were already widely used! The nearly identical size 650A (a.k.a. 26 x 1 3/8; 26 x 1 5/8″; 590mm) is still widely used and available from most manufactuers. 650A (590mm) rims are 3mm in radius larger than 650B (584mm). It is nearly impossible to build a bike for one size without it being compatible with the other! However, most 650B tires are too fat for most 650A bikes. If you could time travel back to the late 1980s you would witness the bicycle industry discontinue the production of bicycles with 27″ (630mm) wheels in favor of the nearly identical size 700C (622mm). In fact, both sizes use the same inner tube. They are that close. 650A and 650B are even closer!

A 650B wheel is much better

There are far too many kittens in the world, so whenever the population gets unmanageable, a new wheel size is released.

27″ 1/4 is where it’s at for the universal size!