It's All About the Bike
Read It's All About the Bike Online
Authors: Robert Penn
The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels
ROBERT PENN
2 Drop Bars, Not Bombs: Steering System
4 The Lateral Truth, So Help Me God: Wheels
Not in Vain the Distance Beckons
Who climbs with toil, wheresoe'er,
Shall find wings waiting there.
(Henry Charles Beeching, âGoing Down Hill on a Bicycle: A Boy's Song')
âMeet the future,' Butch Cassidy says, showing Etta Place where to sit on the handlebars of his bicycle. By the time B. J. Thomas is singing âRaindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head' to Burt Bacharach's melancholy tune, Butch and Etta are off, pedalling out of the farmyard down a dusty track.
It's one of the best-known musical interludes in cinema. The song won an Academy Award. When
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
was released in 1969, the poster featured the pair on the bicycle. For the record, Paul Newman performed the bike tricks himself. The interlude is a pivotal moment in the film: it's not just the law hunting down the ageing gunslingers; the future â symbolized by the bicycle â is chasing them too. As the scene at their farm-hideaway ends, Butch sends the newfangled machine downhill, riderless, into a ditch: âThe future's all yours, you lousy bicycle,' he shouts. Prostrate in the stream, the wheels âtick, tick, tick' to a halt. Butch and Sundance's time in the West is up. They're off to Bolivia, to try and re-make the past.
William Goldman based his original screenplay â which also
won an Academy Award â on the lives of Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, a notorious pair of train robbers and members of the Wild Bunch. They fled Wyoming for Argentina in 1901. A period of extraordinary change was over, not only in the Wild West but across the entire Western World.
For many in the 1890s the future came too fast. The decade saw the first international telephone links, the âscramble for Africa', the foundation of Britain's Labour Party, the rationalization and codification of global sports and the first modern Olympiad. Heroin, radium and radioactivity in uranium were discovered. The Waldorf-Astoria in New York and the Paris Ritz opened. Durkheim invented sociology. Landmarks of social thought included rights for workers and old-age pensions. The Rockefellers and Vanderbilts amassed unprecedented amounts of private wealth. X-rays and cinematography were born. Verdi, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Cézanne, Gauguin, Monet, William Morris, Munch, Rodin, Chekhov, Ibsen, Henry James, W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy were at the height of their creative powers. It was a remarkable decade â the capstone of the Victorian era.
At the heart of it all was the bicycle. In 1890, there were an estimated 150,000 cyclists in the USA: a bicycle cost roughly half the annual salary of a factory worker. By 1895, the cost was a few weeks' wages and there were a million new cyclists each year.
The style of bicycle that Butch and Etta rode was called the âsafety'. It was the first modern bicycle, and the culmination of a long and elusive quest for a human-powered vehicle. It was âinvented' in England in 1885. When the pneumatic tyre was added three years later, making the machine comfortable, the first golden age of the bicycle began. As Victor Hugo wrote: âAn invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.' The âgospel of the wheel' spread so quickly that the
masses wondered how something so simple could have remained unknown for so long.
Bicycle manufacturing emerged from its roots as a cottage industry to become big, big business. Bicycles were mass-produced on assembly lines for the first time; the design process was separated from production; specialized factories supplied standardized components. One-third of all patents registered at the US Patent Office in the 1890s were bicycle-related. In fact, the bicycle had its own dedicated patent building in Washington, DC.
At the 1895 Stanley bicycle show in London, the annual industry event, 200 firms displayed 3,000 models.
The Cycle
magazine reported 800,000 bicycles manufactured in Britain that year. Many locksmiths, gunsmiths and anyone with metallurgy skills abandoned their trades and went to work in bicycle factories. In 1896, the peak year for production, 300 firms in the USA made 1.2 million bicycles, making it one of the largest industries in the country. The biggest firm, Columbia, with 2,000 employees at the Hartford works in Connecticut, boasted of making a bicycle a minute.
By the end of the decade, the bicycle had become a utilitarian form of personal transport for millions â the people's nag. For the first time in history, the working class became mobile. As they could now commute, crowded tenements emptied, suburbs expanded and the geography of cities changed. In the countryside, the bicycle helped to widen the gene pool: birth records in Britain from the 1890s show how surnames began to appear far away from the rural locality with which they had been strongly associated for centuries. Everywhere, the bicycle was a catalyst for campaigns to improve roads, literally paving the way for the motor car.
The health benefits of the bicycle met with an appetite for self-improvement that characterized the age: the same workers who
pedalled to the factories and the pits founded gymnastic clubs and choirs, libraries and literary societies. At the weekends, they cycled together in clubs. Amateur and professional racing exploded. Cycle racing at tracks or velodromes became the number one American spectator sport. Arthur A. Zimmerman, one of the world's first international sports stars, won over 1,000 races on three continents as an amateur, and then as a pro, including gold medals at the first world cycling championships in Chicago in 1893. In Europe, road racing became hugely popular. Long-lived âClassic' races such as LiègeâBastogneâLiège and Paris-Roubaix were staged for the first time, in 1892 and 1896 respectively. The Tour de France was inaugurated in 1903.
Americans in particular became captivated by the idea of speed during the Gay '90s: speed was thought to be a mark of civilization. Through transportation and communication, Americans came to associate speed with the unification of their vast country. On a bicycle, they could actualize it. By the end of 1893, track racers surpassed 35 mph. The bicycle eclipsed the trotting horse to become the fastest thing on the road. Technological innovation made the bicycle ever lighter and faster as the decade progressed. In 1891, Monty Holbein set the world 24-hour track record of 577 km (361 miles) at London's Herne Hill velodrome: six years later, the cigar-smoking Dutchman, Mathieu Cordang, rode 400 km (250 miles) further.
A typical bicycle was fixed-wheel (no gears or freewheel), with a steel frame, slightly dropped bars, a leather saddle and usually no brakes (you braked by back-pedalling). Roadsters commonly weighed around 33 lb; racers were under 22 lb â pretty much the weight of the finest road-racing bicycles today. On 30 June 1899, Charles Murphy became the most famous cyclist in America when he rode a mile in 57.45 seconds, paced by a locomotive on the Long Island railroad, on planks laid between the rails.
The bicycle met with the demand of
fin de siècle
society for independence and mobility. The safety introduced whole new groups to two wheels: the old and young (juvenile models were marketed from the early 1890s), the short and the unfit, men and women. For the first time, anyone could ride a bike. Mass production and the burgeoning second-hand market meant that the majority of people could afford one. As the contemporary American author Stephen Crane wrote: âEverything is bicycle.'
Perhaps the greatest impact of the bicycle was in breaking down hitherto rigid class and gender barriers. There was a democracy to the bicycle that society was powerless to resist. H. G. Wells, described by one biographer as the âwriter laureate of cyclists', used the bicycle in several novels to illustrate the dramatic social changes taking place in Britain. In
The Wheels of Chance,
published at the height of the boom in 1896, the protagonist, Hoopdriver, a lower-middle-class draper's assistant, goes on a cycling holiday and meets a young, upper-middle-class woman who has left home to flaunt âher freedom â on a bicycle, in country places'. Wells satirizes the British class structure and shows how the bicycle was eroding it. On the road, Hoopdriver and the lady are equals. The dress, clubs, codes, manners and morals that society had put in place to reinforce the existing hierarchy simply didn't exist when one was cycling down a country lane in Sussex.
The novelist John Galsworthy wrote:
The bicycle . . . has been responsible for more movement in manners and morals than anything since Charles the Second . . . Under its influence, wholly or in part, have blossomed weekends, strong nerves, strong legs, strong language . . . equality of sex, good digestion and professional occupation â in four words, the emancipation of women.
The bicycle coincided with, rather than instigated, the feminist movement. It was, nonetheless, a turning point in the long war for women's suffrage. Bicycle manufacturers, of course, wanted women to ride. They had been making ladies' models since the earliest prototype bicycle in 1819. The safety bicycle changed everything, though. Cycling became the first popular athletic pursuit for women. By 1893, nearly every manufacturer was producing a ladies' model.
In September 1893 Tessie Reynolds caused a national sensation when she rode from Brighton to London and back on a man's bicycle, wearing ârational dress' â a long jacket over a pair of baggy pantaloons cropped and cinched below the knee. It was a turning point in the acceptance of practical clothes for women, most of whom still cycled in voluminous skirts, corsets, petticoats, long-sleeved shirts and jackets with tight neckbands. Later, when the suffragettes' campaign of civil disobedience reached its height in 1912, the incident was seen as a milestone.
In June 1894 Annie Londonderry set off from Boston with some spare clothes and a pearl-handled revolver, to cycle round the world. Witty, clever, charismatic â the Becky Sharp of her age â she deliberately took up the mantle of women's equality. She was a paragon of âNew Woman', an American term for the modern woman who behaved as an equal to men. The bicycle, dubbed the âfreedom machine' by historian Robert A. Smith, empowered âNew Woman'.
