input dimensions to a one dimensional convolutional network in keras

The reason why it look like this is that Keras designer intended to make 1-dimensional convolutional framework to be interpreted as a framework to deal with sequences. To fully understand the difference - try to imagine that you have a sequence of a multiple feature vectors. Then your output will be at least two dimensional - where first dimension is connected with time and other dimensions are connected with features. 1-dimensional convolutional framework was designed to in some way bold this time dimension and try to find the reoccuring patterns in data - rather than performing a classical multidimensional convolutional transformation.

In your case you must simply reshape your data to have shape (dataset_size, 101, 1) - because you have only one feature. It could be easly done using numpy.reshape function. To understand what does a new step mean - you must understand that you are doing the convolution over time - so you change the temporal structure of your data - which lead to new time-connected structure. In order to get your data to a format which is suitable for dense / static layers use keras.layers.flatten layer - the same as in classic convolutional case.

UPDATE: As I mentioned before - the first dimension of input is connected with time. So the difference between (1, 101) and (101, 1) lies in that in first case you have one time step with 101 features and in second - 101 timesteps with 1 feature. The problem which you mentioned after your first change has its origin in making pooling with size 2 on such input. Having only one timestep - you cannot pool any value on a time window of size 2 - simply because there is not enough timesteps to do that.