Bicycle - The History (Review)

The History

By David V. Herlihy. Yale University Press. 470 pp. $35.00

Reviewed by COLMAN MCCARTHY

Except for the literature of golf, produced by everyone from the lyrical John Updike and laugh-a-minute P. G Wodehouse to the master reporter Michael Bamberger, the literature of bicycling is unrivaled. Shelves sag with the freewheeling and free-spirited words of Reed Whittemore, Gene McCarthy, Leo Tolstoy, Iris Murdoch, Henry Miller, D. H Lawrence and William Saroyan, to cite a few. If anything is lacking in this cascade of essays and poems, it is the history of the machine itself.

Help has come, in detail so fulsome that the reader’s head, helmeted or not for crashes, is supplied with information the equal of a cross-continental ride on a Raleigh 3-speed. David V. Herlihy, whose physical legwork as a member of the Harvard Cycling Club in the 1970s, soon led him to the intellectual kind as a historian, traces the bicycle to the early 19th century of Europe. It was more of a contraption than a machine. Before it was called a bicycle, the early human-powered vehicle was labeled a velocipede—velox pedes, swift of foot. Forward motion came from two feet shoving off against the ground, not from pushing pedals attached mechanically to a chain linked to the rear wheel.

This form of kick propulsion wasn’t exactly smooth riding, either physically or politically. “The velocipede,” Herlihy writes, “was ridiculed in the press, harassed on the road, and legislated off the smooth sidewalks.” (p. 47) Owing to a few European entrepreneurs who thought the two-wheeler had marketplace potential, plus a random customer or two who bought them, the velocipedes hung on.

Rear drive and chain propelled bicycles were still decades away, not to be patented until 1866 by the Frenchman Pierre Lallement. It was in France also that Pierre Michaux, a blacksmith tinkering at his workplace near the Champs-Elysees, put pedals on a velocipede. Parisians took to the mechanical horse, savoring it like a new Bordeaux wine. The boulevards of Paris were now commandeered by joyriders, with hardly a one of them realizing that they were in on the creation of the bicycle movement that is now worldwide with as many as one billion of the machines in use. Whether ridden originally by the fun-loving rich seeking recreation or the poor who couldn’t afford a horse, the bicycle was about to become king of the road.

By 1890, Americans were atop 150,000 bicycles. Stephen Crane, an admirer, extolled: “The bicycle has everything.” Not everyone agreed. Herlihy reports that The Woman’s Rescue League of Washington D.C. “claimed that the activity prevented women from having children, promoted immodest attire, and encouraged improper liaisons with the opposite sex.” (p. 267) The grouching had little effect, with women accounting for about one-third of the nation’s cyclists. Instead, another problem loomed: motorized travel. Henry Ford’s Model T, rolled off the assembly in 1908. Within 12 years, sales would reach 750,000. The king of the road was dethroned.

While reading these pages, and immensely enjoying Herlihy’s able blend of history

and storytelling I had to ask myself whether my pleasure came from being a bicycle commuter for the past 30 years. I’ll concede that a non-bicyclist might weary after a few hundred pages and reading the arcana about the differences in the 1930s between the Schwinn Aerocycle and the Shelby Air-Flow and Monark’s aluminum-alloy Silver King. Or that a 1930 study in Copenhagen found that one third of the Danes were getting around town on bicycles. Or that in West Germany of 1972 urban bicycle use was eight percent but by 1995 it had jumped to 12 percent. Or that the Touring Club of France in 1903 had nearly 80,000 members. Or that an 1898 law in New York forbid bicycle racers from riding more than 12 hours a day. Or that in 1908 Winston Churchill recommended that explorers in the jungles of Africa use bicycles.

I was delighted to get all this skinny—lots of facts to ponder during the commutes--but I’m not sure how it might go down with those outside the cycling community. Herlihy provides 15 chapters. But a 16th was needed—on bicycle crashes. Having been hospitalized twice, and banged up a half-dozen other times, plus all the uncounted close calls, I’m curious on the cause of the mayhem—how much of it, for example, comes from cyclist error, roadway potholes, uncivil motorists, bicycle design or the absence of bike lanes?

That aside, Herlihy deserves praise for his exhaustive research. I imagine that once he began poking and digging into the archives—starting with newspapers and magazines in the early 1800s--he kept finding more and more information and then, like a downhill racer, the thrill of it all took over. I’m glad he invited us along for the ride.

Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace, and commutes by bicycle to seven of the eight schools where he teaches.