The Bike Bible
WITH MOST TECHNOLOGIES, ONE CAN look back and point to a certain period when development was at its most feverish. Who wouldn’t want to have lived in Detroit in the 1910s or Silicon Valley in the 1970s? Today’s cars and computers may run much more smoothly, but the thrill of seeing them take shape is long gone.
In bicycling, the era of greatest change was the 1880s and 1890s. Each week seemed to bring some new wrinkle that promised to make the basic design cheaper, safer, or easier to use, some of them truly helpful and some destined to be forgotten. In the mid-1880s came the greatest advance of all, the perfection of chain drive. By the end of the century the diamond frame, freewheeling, and pneumatic tires had been added, along with higher and lower gears for those who needed them. These innovations, combined with advances in metalworking and fabrication, produced a bicycle that was within nearly everyone’s skill and price range.
And then it stopped. The standard model turned out to be eminently sturdy and serviceable, with no more big problems to overcome, and soon afterward motorcycles and automobiles put an end to the craze. The industry became mature and has remained so ever since. To be sure, materials and manufacturing processes have undergone continual improvement, and specialty products such as mountain and racing bikes, along with exotica like recumbent models, continue to develop. But the common bicycle of today is not much different from one of a century ago. This explains why David V. Herlihy, in his Bicycle: The History (Yale University Press, 470 pages, $35.00), devotes nearly 300 pages to the nineteenth century and a mere 100 to the period since.
Herlihy (one of whose early articles on bicycle history appeared in Invention & Technology in 1992) has spent the last 15 years delving into company archives and faded letters held by descendants of the industry’s pioneers in the United States, Britain, France, and elsewhere, along with rare books, periodicals, and scholarly studies. His book traces the bicycle’s evolution, beginning with the draisine, or velocipede, of the late 1810s. This device, basically a wheeled platform that allowed gentlemen to walk while seated, was a short-lived fad, and for the next several decades wheeled vehicles propelled by their riders were almost unheard of.
Not until the 1860s was the idea of a velocipede revived, this time with pedals. As the size of the front wheel grew, increasing the cycle’s efficiency along with its danger and inconvenience, riding became a craze in America and Europe. Toward the end of the century the modern bicycle emerged, and since then it has basically been a story of marketing, styling, incremental improvements, and clever accessories.
In Herlihy’s able telling, many aspects of the story are reminiscent of latter-day technologies. Patent litigation retarded the growth of the industry; consumers were advised to shun expensive early models and wait until prices dropped and the technology was improved; leading companies failed suddenly after assuming that the boom would last forever. Throughout the text, readers will find fascinating nuggets. For example, one popular French bicycle of the late 1860s had a frame made of cast iron, which was cheaper than wrought iron but unfortunately proved “prone to catastrophic failure.” Herlihy’s book exhibits the rare combination of absolute scholarly rigor with an easily readable style, and it will appeal to anyone interested in the history of bicycling.
