The Foolish Scorchers, the Dramatic Ending

4. And when the gate arose again,

Those scorchers had good luck;

Though it becomes not tongue nor pen,

To tell just how they struck.

(I don't get it, do you?)

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 12 July 1896.

The Foolish Scorchers, Part III

3. But like a hail-stone from on high,

That seeks the mother earth,

That gate descended from the sky,

And caught them in the girth.

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 12 July 1896

The Foolish Scorchers, Part II

2. As they swept on they gayly laughed,

And thought by sudden spurt.

To clear the toll-gate like a shot,

And do the keeper "dirt."

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 12 July 1896

The Foolish Scorchers

A scorcher and his bloomered mate,

Each mounted on a "bike,"

Bore down upon an old toll-gate

That stretched across the pike.

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 12 July 1896

The View from the Sidewalk

Or, why Americans were once-upon-a-time in love with the bicycle, and why they should be again.

The argument that bicycles are not a viable form of transportation in our auto-oriented culture is predicated on one basic assumption: bicycles are car replacements. As such, they compare rather unfavorably: they can’t carry as much, they’re slower, they require more effort (there are at least twice as many good counter-arguments, but I don’t think I need to enumerate them here).

In all of this, we should keep in mind that bicycles, at the moment of their innovation, were not viewed as car replacements because there were no cars.  When bicycles came into widespread use, they were an alternative to walking, streetcars, horses, and horse-drawn vehicles.

Imagine that, by some quirk of fate, that all of the necessary technological convergences required to innovate the automobile never happened. The car was never invented, it never entered our culture, it never occurred to anyone. It’s a stretch, but bear with me.

Without our cars and buses, what options would we have for daily transportation? The lack of possibilities is somewhat startling. Walking becomes the cheapest and most accessible mode of travel. Horses are expensive to buy and maintain, and streetcars can only run on tracks, and thus cannot go everywhere. For a great deal of our daily travel, we’re left with only our own two feet to get around.

Imagine then, what an impact the bicycle would have on a pedestrian culture. Suddenly, our possibilities for independent travel seem endless. We might think something like this, which appeared in the New York Times in 1881:

“The Future of the Bicycle,” 26 June 1881

“Upon the conditions of practice and fairly good roads the bicycle is a practicable and practical vehicle….  Its superior efficiency as compared with walking is also strictly under physical laws. It converts reciprocal into rotary motion…. The movement in walking is continuous only in one sense, being broken every time the foot strikes the ground; the wheel, on the contrary, has an uninterrupted motion…. The special heat and fatigue of the feet, noticeable most in warm weather, are also avoided, and the swifter motion produces a little breeze for cooling…. At first, the riding is itself the end sought, and the satisfactions and physical benefits therefrom are ample justification for seeking that end.  But the strictest utility is reached when, having to go somewhere, one chooses the bicycle as the efficient instrument for going.”

Incidentally, and apropos of my earlier post about the state of our roads, the article goes on to conclude that increased advocacy for “very smooth roads” with be “one of the most valuable offices of the bicycle in America.”

If there’s a point here, it’s this: when you consider all of the modes of transportation available to you, stop thinking about it from only one point of view. Instead of comparing bicycles to cars, compare them to walking, which is pretty much the only option left to us if we take the automobile out of the equation. With rising fuel costs, crumbling infrastructure, and continuing economic downturn, a lot of people are finding that they’re using their car less, or that they simply can’t afford to drive or own a car at all. In fact, there are a lot of people, most of them hidden from those of us in a comfortably middle-class position, who are not a part of America’s car culture because they simply can’t own a car. These are the people we need to get on bicycles, because for them, for all intents and purposes, it’s still 1881.

The Greatest Safety

SOURCE: New York Times, 20 June 1891

The View from a Moment, 1945

In 1945, the Schwinn Company, then at its zenith, produced a 50th Anniversary book to commemorate its first half-century in business. It was an interesting moment for the American bicycle industry. The first bicycle boom of the 1890s and early 1900s had died away by the 1920s, when the automobile became the new must-have item for middle class families. Although not quite yet relegated to the toy chest, the bicycle during the 1920s became an accessory, rather than a mode of transportation.

By the 1930s, as the excerpt below points out, more adults returned to the bicycle as a useful vehicle during the Great Depression. In 1945, with the war either just over, or soon ended (there is no indication when in 1945 the book was printed), the future of American transportational bicycling was by no means certain. The era of expressways and freeways and urban centers hacked-up with on- and off-ramps and overpasses was still to come. There was, in the moment this book was produced, a real potential for the bicycle to return to the center, or at least closer to the center, of American life.

At the same time, Schwinn and other manufacturers knew that the juvenile market was their largest and most consistent. Driving a car was already seen as a badge of adulthood, and bicycling was becoming widely regarded, as the excerpt also points out, as a sort of apprenticeship for the greater responsibility of driving a car.

What emerges is a curious combination of optimism about the future of bicycling in America (it is a Schwinn publication, after all), and a sort of grudging acceptance that the first real age of the bicycle has well and truly ended in America.

From 50 Years of Schwinn-Built Bicycles: The Story of the Bicycle and its Contributions to Our Way of Life. Chicago, IL: Arnold, Schwinn, and Co., 1945.

"The bicycle with the big basket has long been a familiar sight in our streets.  This short distance delivery is inexpensive; it requires no motor fuel; its tires last so long they are discarded because of age deterioration more often than because of wear. The investment in the cycle is small and with reasonable care it lasts indefinitely...

The bicycle is the transportation of our children and our youth... It is cheap, pleasant, safe and healthy transportation. But for the youngster, it is far more than that. Every normal boy and girl wants a bicycle... In our age of mechanization, mechanical devices have a constantly increasing interest for our children, and nothing satisfies that interest so much as the bicycle... It teaches children the rules of traffic control and safety and conditions them for the greater responsibility of driving a motor car later on...

The great depression of the 30's brought a re-awakening of adult interest in cycling, born perhaps of a desire for simpler, saner living after the strain of the frantic 20's. That interest has grown constantly and bids fair to become an important factor in adult recreation and transportation. Factory yards, like school yards, have ever-increasing numbers of bicycles, during work hours. Workers who live within cycling distance of their work, are beginning to realize the folly of driving their motor cars comparatively short distances to and from work, and subjecting them to deterioration brought about by standing out in the dust and baking heat of summer...

Cycling for health will do much toward relieving the nervous tension of modern living and overcome the debilitating effects arising from the convenience of modern, mechanized transportation, both public and private...."

Comedic Interlude, 3 of 3

The Bicycle in the Role of "Home Exerciser" -- 3rd of 3 in a series.

7. "Now it is plumb and everything is well."

8. "But he has had enough exercise for one day and it's too late to go out."

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 20 June 1897

Comedic Interlude, 2 of 3

The Bicycle in the Role of a "Home Exerciser" --2nd of 3 in a series

4. "The saddle must be lowered."

5. "While I am about it I might oil the chain."

6. "Harder to replace than I thought."

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 20 June 1897

Comedic Interlude, 1 of 3

The Bicycle in the Role of a "Home Exerciser" -- 1st of 3 in a series:

1. "Now I'm ready for over the hills and far away."

2. "I ought to have done this pumping last night."

3. "Are all the nuts tight?"

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 20 June 1897

Snapshot from Bicycle

"Sixth--Fall scene. Snapshot from bicycle while running swiftly. Unsuccessful. Too realistic for amateur. Decides not to photograph any more for thirty or forty years."

A lot of bicycle bloggers and friends on Flickr favor the "panda" photograph, or a snapshot taken while riding your bicycle, which includes you and/or your bicycle in the shot. Now, it's usually all I can do to keep upright and in a relatively straight line while riding, so I've never attempted, and probably won't attempt, any panda portraits anytime soon. They're neat to look at, but boy-howdy, seems like an accident just itchin' to happen. Incidentally, I love this cartoon because of the convergence of two kinds of revolutionary technology: bicycle and snapshot camera (that box at the bottom of the frame). Seems folks set about finding new ways to fall off of bicycles and/or break cameras almost immediately after their invention. 

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 30 September 1900

On Maintaining Silence

I don't do a lot of deep thinking while I'm riding. Some people use riding time to think about other things, but I find it enough just to experience the physical sensations of moving through space on a bicycle. I also think about the street ahead of me, traffic, the route I'm taking, the scenery (if I can look away from traffic), and I'm always tuned-in to my bicycle. This last is especially important for me, since all of my bikes are older than I am, and tend to develop little eccentricities. It's good to know which noises are okay, and which are new and potentially alarming.

So far, my "new" daily ride, which is almost 55 years old, is a super-star. He's quiet, smooth, and comfortable. So quiet, in fact (knock wood), that I've started thinking about the noise levels around me, instead of worrying about the noise levels beneath me. What I noticed, more than anything, is how bloody loud our auto culture is. Car alarms, horns, bad transmissions, brakes, squealing tires, car stereos, and just regular engine noise comprise a huge percentage of the daily noise we encounter as we travel about.

A friend of mine recently posted a video of film footage from Barcelona circa 1908. The camera was mounted on a streetcar and recorded its progress through the city. There are a lot of bicycles, a lot more pedestrians, as well as some horse-drawn carts. While there is no audio with the clip, we can imagine that the primary noise, aside from the streetcar itself, was human-generated. Conversation, music, laughter, shouting, even arguments, would have risen above the noise of horses' hooves, and the clanging of the streetcar. The reason there would have been so much human noise is two-fold: first, the people were actually in the streets, instead of inside cars; and two, there was no roar of traffic to drown them out.

Now, unlike a lot of bike bloggers, I'm not anti-car. We have a car. I'm not going to get into the relative virtues or evils of driving vs. bicycling, I think it's a waste of time; but I will say that this question of noise -- or rather, silence -- is the one thing that turns me off the most about cars. A silent form of transportation, or nearly silent, which actually places human bodies in the open, frees up a vast amount of aural space in the world. Imagine how we might connect to each other, to our communities, to ourselves, if we didn't feel like it was all we could do just to keep our heads above the noise.

By the way, except in rare cases, I'm going to try to keep my posts here as link-free as possible. If you want the link to the Barcelona video, just ask, and I'll provide it in the comments.

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 16 May 1897

Travel Abroad

Heavens! I must be riding in China.

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 9 September 1906

But the pig jumped

A panel from a newspaper comic from the 1890s. The punchline has something to do with a "scorcher" (a fast or reckless rider in the parlance of the times) trying to make a pig jump, and as you might imagine, the pig jumps the wrong way. Not exactly complex humor, but I do enjoy this particular panel. I've been looking at early cycling cartoons, trying to work up a thesis about how the advent of the automobile affected popular perceptions of bicycling. Very interesting, I should have something to share on the subject before long. Until then, I've got a few more of these in the queue, just for fun.

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 24 August 1895