Notes & References
Cyclists were 1st to push for good roads & were pioneers of motoring
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END-NOTES

These are the notes and references to accompany the print, iPad, ePub and Kindle versions of the book. There are 1600+ entries, some of them extended, making for a whopping 108,916 words. That’s far too much detail for placing in the print – or even digital – editions of the book. With so many references to cite there would have been way too many fugly, fiddly superscript numbers on the pages.

The text in quotes and bold is the text with the note attached to it. Click on the large green text to navigate the notes in those chapters. Click on the arrow in the grey box, at the base of the page on the right, to skim back to the top of the page.

Preface

Glossary

1. When Two Tribes Were One

2. Pioneers

3. Mastodons to Motorways

4. Who Owns the Roads?

5. Speed

6. Width

7. Hardtop History

8. “What the Bicyclist Did for Roads”

9. Ripley: “the Mecca of all Good Cyclists”

10. Good Roads for America

11. America’s Forgotten Transport Network

12. Pedal Power

13. Motoring’s Bicycling Beginnings

14. Without Bicycles Motoring Might Not Exist

15. From King of the Road to Cycle Chic

Epilogue

History of roads timeline

Appendix – Motor marques with bicycling beginnings

Preface

Top quote: “Time to curb pedal power,” Daniel Meers, Gold Coast Bulletin, Australia, December 11th, 2012. http://web.archive.org/web/20130116143156/http://www.goldcoast.com.au/article/2012/12/11/443482_daniel-meers-opinion.html

Quote from Line Algoed: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25043437

Edmund King quote: http://autumn2012.theaamagazine.com/edmund-king.php

” … horse-drawn carriages … “: And not just historians. A 2014 advert for Mitsubishi UK shows the evolution of wheels as going from stone (!), to solid cart wheels, to spoked carriage wheels to motor car wheels, missing out the contribution of spoked bicycle wheels (which were used on the first motor cars). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jK0b5WHZlo

” … carriage DNA … “: Later motor cars, with more powerful engines, were sturdier and able to accommodate heavier carriage body-work. Social historian H.L. Beales said, in 1935, “Bicycles and motor-cars have an ancient lineage.”⁠ The King’s Highway Pioneers of Road Improvement, H. L. Beales, The Times, Dec 10th 1935.

” … automobile’s family tree … “: And tricycle, of course. The symbiotic relationship between cycling and motoring continues today with the likes of bicycle-maker Specialized and F1 motorsport manufacturer McClaren working together on making bicycles more aerodynamic.

“America’s foremost highway enthusiast … “: Amos G. Batchelder was described so by the Automobile Club of Oregon, 1921.

“Sturmey was editor, at the same time, of both The Cyclist and The Autocar”: According to The Cycling World Illustrated, Sturmey was very active at promoting cycling even while he was also promoting motoring. In 1896 he was lobbying MPs not to introduce a “cycle Tax” at the same time as lobbying MPs over the so-called Emancipation Act that in November of that year would allow motor cars to drive, legally, on British roads. The Cycling World Illustrated, March 25th, 1896.

” … free from fodder, free from timetables, free from rails … “: Cyclists might have been the first to awaken people to transport independent of oats and timetables, but motoring extended the concept. The early motorists (and many still today) very much despised public transport. Here’s an example from The Automobile Magazine, September 1902:

“The railway train is necessarily collectivism. A passenger train starts and reaches its destination owing to the combined volition of a large number of persons who want to travel, let us say, from New York to Boston. But in order to satisfy these volitions and make them executive they have to be marshaled and organized, and so, in a sense, shackled. A railroad train, with its engineer, brakeman and conductor and fixed places of stoppage, is a creature of strict rules, and those who travel on it must temporarily surrender their private wishes, or, a portion of them, in order to co-operate with others.

“The man who takes an automobile and drives it along the open road, is, as it were, a freeholder, also with some of the freeholder’s freedom — though, doubtless, also with some of the freeholder’s limitations and weakness and isolation. Still, the charm of freedom he stops when he likes, and he can be independent of his fellows.”

“Before Coventry and Detroit became known as motor towns, they were cycling cities”: Another reason for Detroit becoming Motortown was because it was an important producer of engineers for motor launches and other small boats. Coventry was a city with many machine-shop businesses and operators, thanks to the cycle industry. Coventry’s established cycle businesses could amortise the costs of experiments and production of the first models before returns began to flow in. Coventry became Britain’s key motor city even though Wolseley and Ford, Britain’s biggest car makers, were not based in Coventry. Singer, Rover, Daimler, and Humber were the largest motor car manufacturers in Coventry (only Daimler wasn’t a former bicycle brand, but the British company was started by cyclists). Rover, Singer, and Humber still made cycles up to the First World War. Machine tool manufacturers were also based in Coventry and sold first to cycle firms and later to motor car firms. Alfred Herbert Ltd. made milling and grinding machines, lathes, drills, a hub lapping machine, and a powered hacksaw to Coventry cycle manufacturers, and to cycle firms across Europe. “The City of Coventry: Crafts and industries: Modern industry and trade,” A History of the County of Warwick: Volume 8: The City of Coventry and Borough of Warwick, 1969.

“There was nothing inevitable about the acceptance of motoring”: From “The Motor Problem: A Road Problem,” paper read by William Rees Jeffreys at the Automobile Club, March 12th, 1903: “If you say [25 miles per hour] is for ever impossible in the towns, then you have doomed the motor-car. If you draw a ring fence round the large centres of population, and, say, that within fifteen miles of the Bank of England, and five miles of the town halls of Manchester, and every other large town, the motor-vehicle must be a crippled thing … then you have ruled out the motor-car from playing any large part in the future development of this country … A vehicle that can only travel its average speed in depopulated rural districts is quite unsuitable for the needs of the age … We want a vehicle that can run at high speeds in an out of the large towns. If the motor-car cannot fill this requirement, then something must and will be found that can – underground trams, deep-level tubes, electrified railways … or some other form of locomotion … Motor-cars will fall out of the main current of the nation’s life, or rather they will never get into it, and will touch the life of the average man as little does a … private yacht.

“Most of us, both on bicycle and on motor-car, have travelled [the Great North Road]. We have come upon short strips of road, along which we have been able to speed with enjoyment, and we have murmured grateful thanks to the surveyor and the responsible road authority. Then, with startling abruptness, we have found ourselves upon other stretches the bad condition of which has driven us almost wild with desperation, and we have called upon Heaven to deal out justice in the next world to men whom we cannot bring to book in this.”

” … popularised by the ciclovías of Bogotá, Colombia, first held in 1976″: The first modern-era car-free street events didn’t originate in 1976 in Bogotá. The first was started in 1965, in Seattle. Seattle’s Bicycle Sunday led to similar events in New York in 1967 and other North American cities. And then they fizzled out, although they are gradually being reintroduced.⁠ http://openstreetsproject.org/blog/2014/01/07/the-rise-of-open-streets/

“… transform streets back to what they originally were: public spaces, not spaces for motor cars”: The relatively new American phrase for streets-for-all is “complete streets.”

“Streets are an important part of our cities and towns. They allow children to get to school and parents to get to work. They bring together neighbors and draw visitors to neighborhood stores. These streets ought to be designed for everyone – whether young or old, on foot or on bicycle, in a car or in a bus – but too often they are designed only for speeding cars or creeping traffic jams.

“Now, in communities across the country, a movement is growing to “complete” the streets.

“Complete Streets are streets for everyone. They are designed and operated to enable safe access for all users. Pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists, and public transportation users of all ages and abilities are able to safely move along and across a complete street.” http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/complete-streets/complete-streets-fundamentals

“British rights of way expert said in 1913”: The Rambler and the Law, A. R. Moon and G. H. B. Ward, Peak & Northern Footpaths Society, 1913.

“I’m not an Arcadian, wishing for simpler times”: Rural life may have been simple but it could also be, as Thomas Hobbes wrote in The Leviathan, “nasty, brutish, and short.” Crabbe painted a similar picture:

Go, if the peaceful cot your praises share.

Go, look within, and ask if peace be there.

If peace be his, that drooping weary sire.

Or theirs, that offspring round their feeble fire;

Or hers, that matron pale, whose trembling hand

Turns on the wretched hearth the expiring brand.

From “The Village” by The Rev. George Crabbe, 1783.

Nevertheless, there are often movements back towards simplicity. In the 1970s, French historian of technology Jean Gimpel wrote that car-based transportation systems were wasteful and not likely to survive long-term. He theorised there would be a return to more benign and appropriate forms of transport – such as walking and cycling – just as there would also be a return to cotton and wool despite the supposed superiority of man-made fabrics such as nylon. His ideas were dismissed at the time but there have been many “return to” movements in recent years, stressing quality over novelty – such as artisan food and beverage concepts. “Artisanal” coffee started out as something for the cognoscenti only but the growth of Starbucks shows that such movements can also go mainstream. Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, Jean Gimpel, Penguin 1977

” … reliance on propulsion in five-seater motor vehicles … is unsustainable in a number of well-understood but ignored ways”: Although even in bicycle-friendly Amsterdam the Dutch government is set to expand the A10 motorway in the south of the city from eight lanes to 12. This mammoth infrastructure project plans to bury the road underground and create a public transport hub above. Bicycle paths are incorporated, of course. http://www.amsterdam.nl/zuidas/english/menu/zuidas-development/zuidas-areas/zuidasdok-project/

“New York City which is gradually taming the motor car …”: As well as transforming Times Square into a pedestrian zone New York City is installing cycleways and reducing speed limits across the city. Traffic signals are being adjusted to give more time to pedestrian and even on major arterials drivers are encouraged to reduce their speeds with alternating traffic signals where before there might have been a long succession of green lights a long way into the distance.

“Rule 170 in the Highway Code …”: Rule 170 refers to junctions but doesn’t define the word “junctions”. https://www.gov.uk/using-the-road-159-to-203/road-junctions-170-to-183

“Few motorists (or cyclists) know this rule exists …”: I asked, on Twitter. A few people knew of the rule, most didn’t. Of those who knew, they said they had learned of the rule only since becoming pedestrian- or cycle-advocates. That pedestrians don’t have to jump out of the way at junctions is not common knowledge.

“In America, the creation in the 1920s of the concept – and crime – of “jaywalking” … : For the history of how the motor lobby created the concept of “jaywalking, see *Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, Peter D. Norton, MIT Press, 2008. There are laws against jaywalking in the US, Singapore, Poland, Serbia, Iran, Australia and New Zealand. In most US jurisdictions, “jaywalking” is an infraction, not a misdemeanour.

“When motorists do notice cyclists it’s often because they are perceived to be “getting in the way”: Dr. Miles Elsden, the deputy chief scientific advisor at the UK’s Department for Transport, told horrified delegates at an active travel conference in July 2013 that cyclists were guilty of a number of sins including “getting in the way.” Shifting Gears, University of the West of England, July 2nd, 2013. http://info.uwe.ac.uk/events/event.aspx?id=13986 https://twitter.com/RachelAldred/status/352358863556734976/photo/1

” … the use of cars as weapons is well documented …”: Driven to Kill: Vehicles as Weapons, J. Peter Rothem University of Alberta Press, 2008. “Violence and the car”, Helmut Holzapfel, World Transport Policy & Practice, Vol. 1 No. 1, 1995. Newspaper columnists also often refer to cars as weapons. “The automobile industry does much to mask the fundamentally aggressive, heavy, brutal nature of our cars, because consumers don’t like to be reminded of it … But can we also all just recognise the innate power and danger of driving …?” Rosie Millard, The Independent, July 21st, 2014. “As we watch the slaughter of young people in the Middle East, the overwhelming feeling is one of impotence … Yet there is also, year after year, the violent and random termination of many young lives in this country. In our case the deadly weapons travel at subsonic speeds and have wheels. They are called cars.” Dominic Lawson,The Sunday Times, August 3rd, 2014.

“Violence may be rare, but verbal abuse is not”: For some people, cyclists are scofflaws. Not just some cyclists, all of them!

The sins of a few projected on to the many is one of factors that leads to the irrational hatred of cyclists. You really don’t have to go very far on the internet before finding this sort of stuff. Using search terms ‘cyclist’ and ‘road tax’ on Twitter, for instance, will bring up lots of unbidden hate, or follow @cyclehatred which is a collection of comments from Twitter users who feel it’s socially acceptable to write “get off my road” threats against cyclists and joke about knocking into, and even killing, cyclists.

Sometimes the hatred is spouted by incoherent dunderheads but there’s also plenty spouted by what appear to be, from reading their Twitter timelines, otherwise decent people.

The highly ingrained beliefs that “all cyclists run red lights” and “all cyclists ride on the sidewalk” – even though, in whataboutery fashion, motorists do the same – are part of the problem but the hatred goes deeper than that. It’s irrational prejudice, and that’s why in The Times on November 15th, 2012, Edmund King, president of the AA, said invective aimed at cyclists was a “road safety issue.”

King has long argued that motorists and cyclists are often the same people and that the ‘them and us’ mentality must be eradicated, as he writes in the foreword for this book. Animosity shown by cyclists to motorists, and by motorists to cyclists, needs to end.

King told The Times that motorist hatred of cyclists was “almost like racial discrimination, there is no good reason for it.”

King shocked audience members at an annual road safety conference when he read out some of the hate tweets collected by @cyclehatred. For many people, the existence of such irrational hatred against a group of folks who choose to be self-propelled on two wheels came as a great surprise.

But the hatred isn’t news to psychologists. In The Psychologist of September 2012, Bath University’s traffic specialist Dr. Ian Walker said he believes the hatred shown towards cyclists is a manifestation of more than just hatred against an “out group”:

“A report from the Transport Research Laboratory and University of Strathclyde a few years ago suggested that there’s some classic social psychology at work here – cyclists represent an outgroup such that the usual outgroup effects are seen, particularly overgeneralisation of negative behaviour and attributes – ‘They all ride through red lights all the time’. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that something of this sort is going on.

“However, there has to be more to it than just this. For a long time I wondered if the outgroup status of cyclists was compounded by two other known social psychological factors: norms and majority vs. minority groups. Not only are cyclists an outgroup, they’re also a minority outgroup. Moreover, they are engaging in an activity that is deemed slightly inappropriate in a culture that views driving as normative and desirable and, arguably, views cycling as anti-conventional and possibly even infantile.

“But even adding these factors into the mix does not explain all the anger that cyclists experience. It’s easy to identify other minority outgroups whose behaviour similarly challenges social norms but who do not get verbally and physically attacked like cyclists do: vegetarians, for example. So there’s clearly one or more important variables that we’ve not identified yet.”

Hatred isn’t confined to social media, of course. Shockjocks and columnists in national and local newspapers also like to take potshots at cyclists.

All of the hatred on social media and in the press matters because it’s not marginal, it’s mainstream. Pro-cycling MPs say it’s incredibly tough to get any truly transformational cycling policies out of the powers-that-be because the hatred of cyclists runs deep. When local and national politicians suggest making roads safer for cyclists, some of their colleagues say this shouldn’t happen until “cyclists stop running red lights and riding on pavements.”

The same good behaviour is not expected of motorists before infrastructure is provided. In 2011, 47 percent of cars exceeded a 30mph speed limit, while 49 percent went faster than 70mph on a motorway. 71 percent of HGVs exceeded the single carriageway 40mph limit in 2011 yet instead of being vilified and chastised for such law breaking, the British Government is to trial lifting single carriageway speed limits for HGVs.

Hatred against cyclists isn’t a recent phenomenon. In 2009, long before Twitter, Peter Zanzottera, senior consultant at transport consultancy Steer Davies Gleave, told the Scottish Parliament’s Transport Committee: “People love cycling but hate cyclists.”

http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=25&editionID=217&ArticleID=2136 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/cyclesafety/article3600928.ece

“Keith Maddox of Piedmont, Alabama, filmed himself ranting at cyclists …”: http://youtu.be/MF3HNNbQuPU And The Aniston Star, May 22nd, 2014 http://www.annistonstar.com/news/article_752b90ae-e203-11e3-beed-001a4bcf887a.html Maddox was subsequently charged with misdemeanour reckless endangerment.

“This type of unbidden hate is not limited to cyclists …”: But cyclists do seem to be a hated “out group” for many motorists. It’s rarely advisable to read the comments section of newspaper websites or YouTube.com. The hate directed at cyclists is vile, and much of it unbidden. For instance, when news stories are posted about cyclists being killed in road incidents, a great many sickos will chime in via comments sections arguing that such deaths are to be welcomed. Sadly, I am not exaggerating.

” … it is our Christian duty to … not hog the road”: To prevent conflict and increase safety, Indiana is installing “buggy lanes” on some major roads.The Indiana Department of Transportation is spending $12m adding “buggy lanes” on Cannelburg Road in Daviess County, Indiana. The lanes have been talked about for nearly 30 years. A State law in 1999 allowed for their construction and the first lanes will be in place by 2016. House Bill No. 1841 “requires the Indiana department of transportation to create and construct buggy lanes for horse drawn carriages and wagons operated by an individual. Provides that buggy lanes must be constructed adjacent to a designated highway, and the buggy lane must be dedicated solely to buggy traffic. Requires a buggy lane for each direction of buggy traffic …” http://www.in.gov/legislative/bills/1999/PDF/IN/IN1841.1.pdf http://www.justdrivepa.org/Resources/Amish%20Horse%20and%20Buggy%20Manual.pdf

” … streets belonged to people on foot, not people in motor cars … “: In the 1980s and 1990s, the UK’s Reclaim the Streets movement originated as a reaction against unbridled road building and the resulting car culture. Similar movements elsewhere in Europe used guerrilla tactics to “reclaim” motorways, with sit-down protesters using their own (usually shabby) motor vehicles to block others from progressing, at which point the people-powered party could begin. Critical Mass – an urban social movement using rolling protests about bicyclists’ right to streets – was born in in San Francisco in 1992.

” … the streets belong to the people …”: Berman was a Marxist philosopher.

“Unprotected propulsion, Shanks’s pony …”: Shanks’s pony derives from the name of the lower part of the leg between the knee and ankle, the shank, or tibia. There are several early citations in Scottish literature, albeit with nag and not pony. “He took shanks-naig, but fient may care.” Poems on Various Subjects, as Robert Fergusson, 1774. In America, the term was Shanks’s mare. “A public exhibition of the velocipede was given on the streets last evening by Mr. Clark, who managed the vehicle with considerable skill… They are a toy, and will never come into general use in competition with Shanks’ mare.” The Dubuque Daily Herald, May 1869.

” … motor-centric infrastructure … encourages motorists to travel faster, which deters pedestrians and cyclists …”: That we’ve built plenty enough roads for cars, and have not shared out the public highway fairly, is not a mainstream point of view but it’s by no means heretical. No less a figure than a former British transport minister has called for road building to be halted. Steven Norris is no lentil-chewing environmentalist: before he entered politics he worked for Ford, and ran his own profitable car dealership chain, and he was later the director general of the Road Haulage Association.⁠ Norris was Secretary of State for Transport from 1992 to 1996 and became aware of the arguments that showed building more and more roads caused more and more congestion. After a Damascene conversion, he became chairman of the National Cycling Strategy Board, quite a flip-flop. And he’s remained a road building sceptic. In 2012, in a foreword for an anti-road building report, he argued: “In 1989, the Conservative Government published the White Paper Roads for Prosperity. At its core were a series of bold assertions about the transport needs of the country. More roads were good; good for the economy, good for communities and even good for the environment. New road building was a necessity, and Roads for Prosperity promised to deliver them in spades. The reality did not turn out like that…Experience tells us clearly that a massive programme of road building won’t solve the problems the country faces. Now is the time for brave and creative decision-making, not a return to road building policies that were tried and failed in the 1990s.”⁠ From a press release to accompany the forward he wrote for Going backwards: the new roads programme, Campaign for Better Transport, October 2012 http://bettertransport.org.uk/files/RoadstoNowhereOctober2012webspreads0.pdf

Glossary

“Automobile is a Latin and Greek mash-up”: In 1899, Scientific American used the word “automobile” as an adjective, calling the Winton Motor Carriage, created by a Scottish bicycle mechanic, an “automobile carriage”⁠ in the same way that other self-propelling devices were described, such as the “automobile torpedo”.⁠ An automobile torpedo was a skiff-shaped (i.e. rowing boat shaped) motor car, usually with no doors. A Panhard et Levassor motor torpedo was driven by Chevalier René de Kyff, company director, leading figure in the world of automobiles and a former leading figure in the world of cycling. Scientific American, May 14th 1898.

“Following upon the prize given by Le Petit Journal … gaining the large money prize”: The Horseless Age, July 1897.

” … chauffeur … meant “driver of a motor car” rather than a servant who drove a motor car”: According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, the word chauffeur means stoker, from chauffer “to heat”, which in turn is from Old French, chaufer “to heat, rub with the hands to make warm” whence we get a word familiar to cyclists: chafe. Its meaning “to make sore by rubbing” was current by the 1500s.

The Online Etymology Dictionary links the word chauffeur to stoker.⁠ But, as with many words, there can be other derivations and there’s perhaps a good case for an earlier definition to be used. In June, 1918, Popular Science reported:

“It seems that the word chauffeur means ‘scorcher’. Over a century ago, some particularly brigandish brigands lived on the borderland between France and Germany. To force ransoms from their captives, these desperadoes grilled the soles of their victims’ feet before a fierce fire. So the countryfolk referred to the band as scorchers or, in French, chauffeurs.

“Not so many years back, when these same imaginative French were in need of a descriptive name for motor-car drivers, they hit upon the word chauffeur. Just how much ‘scorching’ of a more modern kind these up-to-date brigands of the road indulge in is best divulged by police records of fines for speeding.”

So, an early word for motorist – before it morphed into its current servile meaning – was chauffeur, and this was linked to a word for speeding. Some would say that’s apt.

“… one British Member of Parliament called motor cars “stinking engines of iniquity.”⁠”: Cathcart Wason, the Liberal Unionist MP for Orkney and Shetland, House of Commons, June 11th, 1903.

“The Weekly Times and Echo said its favoured name was Greaser“: The Times, May 21st 1896.

“Petrocycle, Motorfly …”: “I feel certain that the popular name will be either the Autocar or Motor Car or Carriage.” Frederick Simms, The Autocar, 1896.

“An editorial in The New York Times had cause to hesitate …”: The New York Times, January 3rd, 1899.

“This was a policy for whole bicycles.”: Sectional Road Map of Westchester County, New York and Part of Fairfield County, Conn. Showing the Good Roads, Servoss, New York, 1895.

“velocipedestrianisticalistinarianologist”: Belfast News-Letter, May 11th, 1869.

” … noun dates back to at least 1828″: Journal des Artistes, July 6th, 1828. Via Bicycle design: an illustrated history, Tony Hadland, Hans-Erhard Lessing, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2014.

“The Polish word for bicycle is rower”: Belarusian has a similar nod to the machine which “set the fashion to the world”: ровар.

“birotate chariot, a term used in Charles Pratt’s 1879 …”: The American Bicycler: A Manual for the Observer, the Learner, and the Expert, C. E. Pratt, Boston, 1879.

” … mustang of steel …”: “The bicycle ranks among those gifts of science to man, by which he is enabled to supplement his own puny powers with the exhaustic forces around him. He sits in the saddle, and all nature is but a four-footed beast to do his bidding. Why should he go a foot, while he can ride a mustang of steel, who knows his rider and never needs a lasso? The exhilaration of bicycling must be felt to be appreciated. With the wind singing in your ears, and the mind as well as body in a higher plane, there is an ecstasy of triumph over inertia, gravitation, and the other lazy ties that bind us. You are traveling! Not being traveled.” San Francisco Chronicle, 25th January, 1879. Other languages had similar terms. Hungary used drótszamár (“wire donkey” in Magyar); in Mali it was nàgàso (“iron horse” in Bambara); in German it was Drahtesel (wire donkey); in Breton marc’h-houarn (“iron horse”); and in Gaelic, earrán iarainn (“iron horse”).⁠ http://www.omniglot.com/blog/?p=710

“Penny farthing … coinage-derived term …”: The term was first spotted in Bicycle News, 7th March, 1891.

” … cycle historians and cycle collectors have softened … “: There’s an annual high-wheeler parade at the English “Pennies in the Park” event. http://penniesinthepark.co.uk

“Grand Old Ordinaries”: In French, the high-wheeler was known as the grand bi and in the Netherlands as the rijwiel.

“… automobile sales overtook bicycle sales.”: Hodges, 1994.

“Motoring historians often use the term Brass Era …”: Talking about eras and automobiles, Brave New World, the 1931 dystopian novel by the deeply cynical, speed-intoxicated Aldous Huxley, was set in London some 600 years in the future – a Henry Ford worshipping future. The Year 632 A.F. was 632 years “after Ford.” London’s Big Ben was Big Henry. Faith in Christ was replaced by Faith in Ford. Huxley supposed that motor cars were already so revered that the worship of King Car could easily evolve into a religion. Aldous Huxley believed driving very fast “provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.” He liked to partake of “the drug of speed.”

” … American term for the same sliver of pedestrian infrastructure …”: Raised sidewalks and kerbs have a long history (there were excellent sidewalks in ancient Pompeii, for instance) and, until mass motorisation, were mainly designed to keep pedestrians clear of mud and slops rather than act as a form of separation between vehicles and pedestrians. In the UK, the “pavement”, strictly speaking, is the “footway”. A footpath is a rural path, not adjoining a road.

“That’s right, in England, bicycles aren’t allowed on the pavement.”: Technically, cyclists aren’t allowed on footways. Pavement isn’t the definitive term. Also technically, motorists aren’t allowed to drive on footways but, bizarrely, they’re usually allowed to park on footways. Why? Because the offence is “riding” on the footway with a carriage – dating from the 1835 Highway Act – and being parked on the footway is no proof the car was driven there. It could have been placed there by a crane, for instance. Yeh, right.

“Way denotes moving or travelling and comes from the same Sanscrit root …”: Ways of the World, M. G. Lay, Rutgers University Press, 1992.

“… paths are for pedestrians, tracks are for horses, I built cycleways.”: http://roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/stevenage – The Imperial Dictionary of 1854 defined “way” thus: “Four species of way are known to the law :- 1. A foot-way; 2. A horse-way, which includes a foot-way; 3. A carriage-way, which includes both a horse-way and a foot-way; 4. A drift-way, for driving cattle.”

“A cobbled street is, in fact, a setted street.”: British Standard EN 1342:2001 defines a sett as a dressed block or stone greater than or equal to 50mm in depth and 50-300mm in length.

“The famous Paris–Roubaix cycle race …”: The famous pavé are setts not cobbles. The roads the race uses today are all minor ones but the race used to be held on routes nationales until, that is, these roads were surfaced with asphalt.

“The length of a cricket pitch is 66 feet, or exactly one chain.”: Gunter was also Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London. His chain became the common measuring tool for land surveyors.

“Some Americans used to spell tire with a y“: For instance, there’s this jokey paragraph from a Wisconsin cycling magazine: “While riding over the plains we were pursued by Indians and captured. One of them who had, through going to Washington several times to talk with the Great White Father, become intimately acquainted with that product of civilization known as bologna, taking the pneumatic tyres for a large and succulent variety of that edible…⁠” The Pneumatic, May 14th 1892.

“Thomson’s “aerial wheel” English patent of 1845 …”: “I claim … the application of elastic bearings round the tire of carriage wheels.”⁠ With the advent of the cycle in the 19th century, tyre came into general use in British cycling magazines. Some American cycling magazines copied this English usage while others didn’t. Thomson, British Patent 10,990, 1845.

“The bicycle … was a great emancipator of women …”: Lilias Campbell Davidson was on the staff of Bicycling News in the late 1880s and wrote for the Cyclists’ Touring Club Gazette in the 1890s. She was the founder of the Lady Cyclists’ Association, established in 1892. This had a monthly journal, the Lady Cyclists’ Association News. Davidson was also the author of the best-selling Hints to Lady Travellers of 1889 and later the Handbook for Lady Cyclists of 1896, a compilation of her articles from bicycle magazines. These books were published by Iliffe & Son, the great cycling publisher.

For many women, the Safety bicycle of the 1890s enabled escape. Escape from kith and kin, escape from the strictures of late Victorian society, escape from tight corsets and voluminous dresses (bloomers weren’t invented for bicycling but so-called ‘Rational dress’ was ideally suited to journeys awheel), and, in many cases, escape from chaperones. Later, it was the motorcar which enabled easy illicit liaisons (especially when motorcars were made more private, with side windows, a roof and, ahem, a bed of sorts) but it had been the bicycle which had given women their first true taste of freedom. Bicycles required no fare, no feed; bicycles didn’t have timetables; bicycles could speedily go – almost – anywhere.

Women could ride alone, and many did. The majority of the entries in a diary by a young Yorkshire lady, written between the years of 1894 and 1896, show that Ms. Coddington went for long bicycle rides by herself. Nothing unusual about that today but back then it was pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable.

Many in Victorian society were scandalised by the behaviour of bicycling women, and severely disliked the free-flowing costumes many of them wore, but it was clear to all in the 1890s that the bicycle was a revolutionary vehicle, in more ways than one: it changed society. Among its many other accomplishments the bicycle hastened the emancipation of women. Many suffragettes rode bicycles, and women-only clubs, such as the Unique Cycling Club of Detroit (founded in 1894, and run from the same plush clubhouse as the Detroit Wheelmen), helped foster a growing sense of what would be described later as “sisterhood”.

This particular club was perfectly respectable – the chairwoman was married to the chairman of the Detroit Wheelmen – but bicycling, as a force for social change, was also at the forefront of a different kind of female emancipation. Lesbians of the 1890s latched on to cycling as an activity blissfully in tune with their radical sensibilities.

One of the wonderful things about cycling – then and now, really – is how it’s so adaptable, for both sexes. Men and women enjoyed the freedom of bicycling but for women it was especially liberating. An 1891 article in Outing asked “where shall [women] ride?”:

“The smiling countryside holds out arms of welcome to her, the shaded grassy road, the smooth steep incline, the bumping corduroy by-ways, the canal towpaths, the lakeside drives and the stubborn stiff hill to be climbed.”

Women on bicycles broadened their horizons beyond the neighbourhoods in which they lived. Parochial records in Dorset show that from 1890, there were marriages between couples from parishes further apart than previously. Late Victorian era cycling extended peoples’ geographical reach (better roads would help in this respect), enabling couplings from outside a confined area. Cycling helped expand the gene pool.

But women had to fight for their right to ride and were often mocked for “muscling in” on a “man’s world.”

The Sporting Life of Philadelphia carried correspondence on its “cycling department” page of 24th September 1892 which showed this mockery could descend to generalised personal attacks.

“Is It Possible That No Pretty Women Ride Bicycles,” asked the newspaper, with the correspondent answering his own question (there’s no byline but it’s got to be a ‘he’) “though the [girl] riders may look healthy and happy they possess no claims on beauty whatsoever.”

In the same year, John Peterson wrote to the Morning Advertiser to complain about “Ugly girls and bicycles.”

According to he “a women pumping a bicycle is an ungainly, ungraceful spectacle. A handsome woman would as soon think of going down town in a pair of stoga boots and plug hat as to ride a bicycle publicly. The ugly girls don’t care. They are reckless.”

Perhaps this sort of editorial mockery was off-putting to some would-be women bicyclists but, clearly, not all: bicycling was wildly popular with middle class women of the 1890s.

Detroit wasn’t the only city to have a women-only cycling club. Chicago also had a chapter of the Unique Cycling Club and it had strict rules on clothing: no skirts were allowed to be worn over bloomers. “Two members who disobeyed this rule …met with a punishment they will not forget soon,” recounted a story in The Wheelman, the magazine of the League of American Wheelmen. They had their skirts ripped from them, in public, by “strong armed members.” Club member Mrs Langdon said: “The clubs rules are made to be kept and not be broken.”

Beneath a story about this tale in New York World in June 1895, there’s a list of rules about bicycling etiquette for women. No doubt the rules were commonly breached, hence the need for codification:

Don’t be a fright.

Don’t faint on the road.

Don’t wear a man’s cap.

Don’t wear tight garters.

Don’t forget your toolbag

Don’t attempt a “century.”

Don’t coast. It is dangerous.

Don’t boast of your long rides.

Don’t criticize people’s “legs.”

Don’t wear loud hued leggings.

Don’t cultivate a “bicycle face.”

Don’t refuse assistance up a hill.

Don’t wear clothes that don’t fit.

Don’t “talk bicycle” at the table

Don’t neglect a “light’s out” cry.

Don’t wear jewelry while on a tour.

Don’t race. Leave that to the scorchers.

Don’t wear laced boots. They are tiresome.

Don’t imagine everybody is looking at you.

Don’t go to church in your bicycle costume.

Don’t wear laced boots. They are tiresome.

Don’t keep your mouth open on dirty roads.

Don’t converse while in a scorching position.

Don’t go out after dark without a male escort.

Don’t contest the right of way with cable cars.

Don’t wear a garden party hat with bloomers.

Don’t wear white kid gloves. Silk is the thing.

Don’t chew gum. Exercise your jaws in private.

Don’t tempt fate by riding too near the curbstone

Don’t ask, “What do you think of my bloomers?”

Don’t use bicycle slang. Leave that to the boys.

Don’t discuss bloomers with every man you know.

Don’t think you look as pretty as every fashion plate.

Don’t go out without a needle, thread and thimble.

Don’t allow your dear little Fido to accompany you

Don’t try to have every article of your attire “match.”

Don’t let your golden hair be hanging down your back.

Don’t scratch a match on the seat of your bloomers.

Don’t appear in public until you have learned to ride well.

Don’t overdo things. Let cycling be a recreation, not a labor.

Don’t ignore the laws of the road because you are a woman.

Don’t try to ride in your brother’s clothes “to see how it feels.”

Don’t throw your legs over the handlebars and coast down hill

Don’t scream if you meet a cow. If she sees you first, she will run.

Don’t cultivate everything that is up to date because you ride a wheel.

Don’t emulate your brother’s attitude if he rides parallel with the ground.

Don’t undertake a long ride if you are not confident of performing it easily.

Don’t appear to be up on “records” and “record smashing.” That is sporty.

“Do I really think everything has a cycling-related back-story, from roads to rockets?” Rockets, hey? The nuclear bomb was made possible by a cyclist. “I thought of that while riding my bicycle,” are the supposed words of Albert Einstein when describing the origins of his Theory of Relativity, the scientific shorthand which went on to be used in a rather horrific way.

1. When Two Tribes Were One

TOP QUOTE: “The roads you travel so briskly lead out of dim antiquity, and you study the past chiefly because of its bearing on the living present and its promise for the future.” Letter to the McAlpine family by Lieut. General James Harbord, 1946, published in Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd’s 125th anniversary brochure, 1994. Quoted in The Motorway Achievement, Ron Bridle, Peter Baldwin, John Porter, Robert Baldwin, Thomas Telford, 2004,

“Five years later some of the wood blocks …”: Asphalte is the 19th century spelling for “natural asphalt.”

“This was a test of a tar-and-gravel mix patented by a Civil War cavalry general …”: William Wood Averell and DeSmeldt, see Chapter 7. However, an earlier trial of asphalt had taken place in Washington, D.C., in 1871 by N.B. Abbott. This soon failed.

“The District of Columbia’s asphalte roads formed a “wheelman’s paradise,” said …”: Bicycling World and L.A.W. Bulletin, 28 January, 1881.

“How is it possible for a man or woman to get along in that city of magnificent surfaces without a cycle of some kind?”: Bicycling World and L.A.W. Bulletin, 18th October, 1889.

“Suzanne Fischer, curator of The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan …”: http://youtu.be/c0y1KnqLNrU thehenryford.org

“For years the farmer drives behind his horse with many a bumpety-bump …”: New York Journal, January 1899, quoted in L.A.W. Bulletin, January 27th, 1899. “ The bicycle I look upon … as the pioneer of good roads. The bicycle has done more for good roads, and will do more for good roads in the future, than any other form of vehicle.” Frederick W. Wurster, Mayor of Brooklyn, March 1896.

“… permitted them to glide along almost without effort …”: The Sun, quoted in New York Journal, January 1899, quoted in L.A.W. Bulletin, January 13th, 1899.

“The critical part the bicycle played in the history of roads, automobiles, technology …”: Human power was unfashionable at the end of the 19th century. It was uncivilised, it was about to be consigned to history. George E. Latham sniffed: “The one feature which was primarily responsible for the decline of the … bicycle does not enter into the sport of automobiling. That is hard muscular exertion…” In the same issue of the magazine, newspaper magnate and pulp magazine publisher Frank A Munsey wrote that motoring, open to the elements still, was “the greatest health-giving invention of a thousand years. The cubic feet of fresh air that are literally forced into one while automobiling rehabilitate worn-out nerves and drive out worry, insomnia, and indigestion. It will renew the life and youth of the overworked man or woman, and will make the thin fat … ” Munsey’s Magazine, May, 1903.

” … chided aeronautical and automotive designer Sir Dennistoun Burney …”: “The Car of the Future,” Sir Dennistoun Burney, Auto-Motor Journal, 9th January, 1931. This opinion has been expressed numerous times. Here’s a later example: “There is no doubt that the desire to own a car is both widespread and intense. The number of people who genuinely do not desire to possess their own private means of transport must be very [low], and we think it safe to base estimates of the future on the assumption that nearly all families who, at any time, can afford to own a car (or who think they can) will in fact do so.” Traffic in Towns, Professor Sir Colin Buchanan, November, 1963.

“In part, organised cycling had a rather inglorious past … “: In February, 1894 at the national meeting of the League of American Wheelmen, members voted to bar non-whites. The motion had been tabled by William Walker Watts, a lawyer and former Confederate Colonel. The vote was 127 to 54. The Zig-Zag Cycling Club of Indianapolis, co-founded by bike shop owner and motoring pioneer Arthur C. Newby in 1890, copied the bar, which prevented local racing cyclist Marshall “Major” Taylor from joining. (Major Taylor went on to global prominence as a cycle racer.) In 1895, the 16-year-old Taylor joined the African-American See-Saw Cycling Club.

In 1999, the League of American Bicyclists – successor organisation to the League of American Wheelmen – righted the wrong.

LEAGUE OF AMERICAN BICYCLISTS

Resolution

WHEREAS, the League of American Bicyclists has members from every segment of our society and aspires to an even more diverse membership that reflects the diversity of America; and

WHEREAS, in commemoration of its return to Louisville, the site of the 1894 League of American Wheelmen convention, the League desires to acknowledge the wrong committed by that convention in approving a resolution offered by Colonel Watts to bar African-Americans from membership; and

WHEREAS, the League’s bicycle racing arm disavowed the color bar and supported the rights of African-American racers to participate in the sport, including banned member Marshall “Major” Taylor, the African-American racing phenomenon of the 1890s; and

WHEREAS, the League has not been able to find records indicating formal revocation of the membership ban;

NOW, THEREFORE, the Board of Directors of the League of American Bicyclists hereby disavows the action of the 1894 League of American Wheelmen convention, repeals the 1894 Resolution and reaffirms our commitment to diversity of membership.

In remembrance of his struggles to overcome racism and ignorance, and in recognition of his continuing contribution as a symbol of excellence in cycling and of overcoming adversity, we posthumously bestow on Major Taylor a League membership.

ADOPTED at the Annual Meeting this 5th day of June 1999, in Louisville, Kentucky

Earl F. Jones, President

David Takemoto-Weertz, Secretary

Jody Newman, Executive Director.

http://www.majortaylorassociation.org/LAB_text.htm

” … cycling eventually … had a major impact on equal rights for women …”: Hmm, that is if we exclude the still-in-existence bar on women members in the Pickwick Club, founded in 1870 and the world’s oldest extant cycling club.

” … glamorous illustrations of Gilded Age “Gibson girls”: US illustrator Charles Dana Gibson was famous at the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th for his pen-and-ink representations of upper class American socialite beauties. The front cover of Scribner’s Magazine in June 1895 featured an athletic young lady in bloomers on a bicycle.

” … bicycling had done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”: “Champion of Her Sex,” Ellie Bly, New York Sunday World, February 2nd, 1896.

“Victorian livery stables complained that their takings were much reduced …”: Since the early 1890s, livery stables complained they were being put out of business by cyclists.⁠ “The most sensible and apparently the only thing for [livery stables] to do is place themselves in a position where they can retain the business that is now fast leaving them. That position is to keep bicycles for hire … There is good demand for bicycles, they cost less than horses, harness and buggies, they don’t get the heaves or the colic, and don’t require any feed. Livery Stable magazine, 1895 (quoted in LAW Bulletin & Good Roads, June 21st, 1895).

This was exemplified by an 1897 poem in the St James’s Gazette of London that concluded “everything’s neglected but the bicycle.” The poem also references the concomitant high demand for shares in bicycle companies:

What makes the carriage builder slack.

What cheapens cob and nag and hack.

While the financiers boom and crack?

The Bicycle.⁠

A Cathechism, St. James Gazette, via *Lyra Cyclus; Or, The Bards and the Bicycle: Being a Collection of Merry and Melodious Metrical Conceits anent The Wheel, Edmond Redmond, ed., M.F. Mansfield, New York, 1897. https://archive.org/details/lyracyclusorbar00redmgoog

While livery stables may have voiced complaints, economic statistics paint a different picture. In the late Victorian period, businesses which sold and hired horses, and provided fodder and other services had never had it so good. The expansion of Britain’s railway network – almost fully mature by the end of the 1890s – led to a huge rise in the demand for horses.⁠ While trains transported people and goods efficiently over long distances, the “last mile” solution tended to be the horse.

The claim that horses were history thanks to cycling was made in the 1880s:

“There is much, no doubt, to be said in favour of the horse; he is graceful, faithful — sometimes — and productive of envy in the minds of people who do not own him ; but his day is gone, or going very fast, and he will, before long, be about as useless as our Italian greyhound. The railway engine on the iron way, and the bicycle and tricycle on the macadamised roads, has put his nose out of joint. Ere long, no doubt, other inventions will come forward, as, indeed, electricity is already doing, to push the horse away altogether. Meanwhile, the bicycle and tricycle are helping each other to do the work. Not only postmen but peers ride the metallic nag, and, defying ancient prejudices, are loud in its praise, and even royal personages have joined the ranks of bicyclists and tricyclists…” Colburn’s New Monthly, 1884, quoted in Wheel World, October, 1884.

Horse traffic could be dangerous: “The police returns show that in the year 1870 as many as 124 persons were run over and killed in the streets of London and 1,919 were maimed or injured. In the last five years, 1866-70, 533 persons have been thus killed and 7,508 maimed or injured. The 2,043 accidents in London streets in 1870 occurred in this wise: 440 by being run over by cabs, 102 by omnibuses, 245 by broughams and carriages, 636 by light carts, 158 by heavy carts, 110 by wagons and drays, 257 by vans, 10 by fire-engines, 79 by horses ridden and five by velocipedes. The Commissioner of Police reports, however, that special attention was paid during the year to measures tending to diminish the risk of pedestrians. Constables have been placed at the most crowded crossings and special pains taken to obtain the names and addresses of offenders. In the case of cabs the number plate now affixed behind the cab generally suffices for this purpose; but in the case of light carts and wagons no such clue at present exists and they often entirely escape. Of the 124 persons killed in the streets in 1870, 11 were run over by cabs, 17 by omnibuses, two by carriages, 27 by light carts, 24 by heavy carts, 20 by wagons or drays, 19 by vans, one by a fire engine, two by horses ridden and one by a velocipede.” The Times, 26th July, 1871.

“The ANWB was established in 1883 as a cycling club, before the advent of motoring.”: A little bit of cycling history – the W – is hidden-in-plain-sight within the acronym.⁠ De Kampioen, the ANWB’s house magazine since 1883, means The Champion and is published today without the Dutch definite article: Kampioen is a living link to the ANWB’s beginnings as a cycle racing organisation.

” … Austrian Jewish engineer …”: Siegfried Marcus.

“In the 1880s and 1890s Montagu père was an especially keen cyclist …”: Vanity Fair, October 8th, 1896. Who’s Who 1927, A & C Black, London, 1927.

“Montagu said: “I remember coming to this House in 1893 riding a bicycle …”: House of Commons debate, 4th August, 1903 http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1907/jul/16/motor-car-legislation

“The US Census of 1900 praised the bicycle …”: http://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html

“As a social revolutionizer it has never had an equal …”: RAVAGES OF THE BICYCLE CRAZE

It has been discovered simultaneously by the leaders in various branches of industry, business and amusement that the real cause of the hard times is not the tariff, not the currency, not the uncertainty about McKinley’s financial position, but the bicycle. Theatrical managers say they have had the poorest season for many years, and that after patient and anxious search for the cause they have found it in the bicycle craze. They say that not only do young men and maidens but older men and women save up their money in order that with it they may buy wheels. This of itself is disastrous to the theatres, but worse remains to be told; for having bought the wheels they ride them in the evening instead of going to places of amusement. They ride also on Saturday afternoons, and in Chicago a ride so universally on Sundays that the theatres, which formerly gave successful performances on that day, have discontinued them. The Sabbatarian might find encouragement in this fact were is not true that the churches are suffering almost as severely as the theatres from the same cause.

Business men are as loud in their complaints as the theatre managers. The watchmakers and jewellers say they are nearly ruined; that all pin money which the young people saved formerly with which to buy watches and jewelry now goes for bicycles; that parents, instead of presenting a boy with a watch on his twenty-first birthday, now give him a bicycle, and that all the family economy is now conducted with the object of equipping every boy and girl, as well as father and mother, with a wheel. The confectioner cries “me too” to this complaint, declaring that about all the business he does is in chewing gum, ice cream, and soft drinks, while his candies find few customers. The tobacco manufacturer says he is the worst hit of all, since few riders care to smoke on the road – for which there is reason for profound gratitude – and the journals of the trade see it is a fact that the consumption of cigars is decreasing at the rate of a million a day, the total decrease since the craze became general averaging no less than 700,000,000 a year. Instead of sitting idle and smoking most of the day, hundreds of men now ride, and smoke only when they are resting.

The tailor, the hatter, the bookseller, the shoemaker, the horse-dealer, and the riding-master, all tell similar tales of woe. The taylor says that so many men go about half the time in cheap bicycle suits that they do not wear out their good clothes half as rapidly as formerly. The hatter says so many of them where they wear cheap caps, in which there is no profit to the maker, that their hats last them twice as long as heretofore. The shoemaker says he is even worse off, for while they buy cheap shoes for the bicycle, they do not even wear these out, and they refrain from walking much in any kind of shoes whatever, so that his loss is almost total. The bookseller says people who are rushing about on wheels, days, nights, and Sundays, no longer read anything, and his business has become practically worthless. As for the horse-dealer, stable-keeper, and riding-master, it is notorious what has happened to them. They are no longer “in it” and, like the horse, are a drug in the market. Even the saloon-keeper groans, for he says that while many riders drink beer, the number who take “soft drinks” is much the larger, while the number who take “hard drinks” is constantly diminishing, which must be the case in the pursuit of a pastime which cannot be followed with an unsteady head.

Who are the gainers? An indignant “American Hatter” writes to his trade journal that the only beneficiaries are the bicycle-manufacturers, “who invest in land and government bonds, and send their families to Europe, there to spend the money that should be distributed upon this side among our own people.” He thinks Congress should come to the rescue of the hat trade and “pass a law compelling every bicycle fiend to wear a felt hat and buy at least two a season.” McKinley will, in all probability, lend a willing ear to that proposition when he gets his millennium in operation. But there are other occupations than bicycle manufacturing which prosper. Butchers and grocers are said to be doing more business than ever because of the increased appetites and rejuvenated digestions which riding has caused, and the wayside tavern-keepers of the land have awaked from a sleep of half a century almost, to find prosperity once more rolling in at their doors.

But the greatest gainer of all is the American race. An eminent physician is quoted as saying that “not within 200 years has there been any one thing which has so benefitted mankind as the invention of the bicycle,” and that “thousands upon thousands of men and women, who till within a few years never got any outdoor exercise to speak of, are now devoting half their time to healthy recreation, are strengthening and developing their bodies, and are not only reaping benefit themselves, but are preparing the way for future generations which will be born of healthy parents.” There is no doubt about this. As a people the Americans have never taken sufficient outdoor exercise. We have been a nation of dyspeptics, simply because we did not take sufficient physical exercise to develop and strengthen our bodies. The bicycle is a wonderful; builder up and purger of the system. It not only abolishes indigestion and dyspepsia, but rids the system of that curse of middle and old age, rheumatism, and thus adds enormously to the national good nature as well as to the sum of national happiness.

As a social revolutionizer it has never had an equal. It has put the human race on wheels, and thus changed completely many of the most ordinary processes and methods of social life. It is the great leveller, for not till all Americans got on bicycles was the great American principle, that every man is just as good as any other man, and generally a little better, fully realized. All are on equal terms, all are happier than ever before, and the sufferers in pocket from this universal fraternity and good will may make up their minds to the new order of things, for there will be no return to the old. The true philosopher under the new conditions was the watchmaker of the rural New York village who, when he found the demand for watches falling off, gave up dealing in them and went into the bicycle business.

New York Evening Post, June 2nd, 1896.

“In 1900, motoring enthusiast Sir Arthur Pearson, a British newspaper owner, said: “It is the cyclists who are largely at the bottom of what has already been accomplished …”: C. Arthur Pearson, Pearson’s Magazine, July 1900, reprinted in The Automobile, August 1900. Sir Cyril Arthur Pearson, 1st Baronet, GBE , British newspaper magnate and publisher. In Motoring Illustrated’s Motoring Annual and Motorists Year Book of 1903, Pearson said he was an “accomplished motorist.” He founded the mass-market Daily Express in 1900.

“John Jacob Astor, “Diamond” Jim Brady, and John D. Rockefeller, three of the richest men in the world …” http://www.bikeleague.org/content/mission-and-history

MEMBERSHIP OF L.A.W

1885: 4,739

1890: 12,500

1895: 26,140

1898: 103,293

1900: 50,572

1905: 2,874

1910: 1,240

1915: 1,023

1920: 912

“Rockefeller – the oil baron who became the world’s first billionaire – made a cycle path …”: Visitors to his grand estate were provided with bicycles and Rockefeller challenged them to keep up with him. “He left them behind,” said one biographer, “panting and lost, on mad spins through the woods.”⁠ According to the Forest Hill newsletter, Rockefeller “went so far as to study civil engineering in order to design a path that allowed him to cycle up the steep hill from Euclid Avenue to the front door of his Forest Hill home.”⁠ He was still bicycling in 1913, when he was 74, “losing people on the bicycle trail through the maze of woods.”⁠ John D. Rockefeller: Anointed with Oil, Grant Segall, Oxford University Press, 2001. Forest Hill, Newsletter of the Forest Hill Home Owners, Spring/Summer 2012 http://www.fhho.org/newslet/Spring%202012%20Newsletter.pdf “John’s Home Sweet Home,” Senior Properties Forest Hill via Role Model for a Conservationist: John D. Rockefeller’s Relationship to Nature, Dyana Z. Furmansky, 2013. http://www.rockarch.org/publications/resrep/furmansky.pdfhttps://tclf.org/landscapes/forest-hill-park

“A road that is a morass in Spring, a Sahara in Summer …”: The New York Times, 12th November, 1892.

“Let anyone drive over most American roads in the spring, with open eyes and wits …”: CountryGentleman, April, 1884. Later the same year, American Farmer wondered when roads would be as well maintained – and as well funded – as rails, but provided no plan for carrying out this desire. American Farmer, October, 1884.

“The [Good Roads] movement … was very largely promoted … by the efforts of the wheelmen …”: The New York Times, 12th November, 1892.

“… the part which the bicycle has taken in the promotion of highway improvement is acknowledged to be important …”: New York Tribune, November 4th, 1900. In 1895, writer Henry W. Fischer wrote an article about automobiles in Munsey’s Magazine. It was headlined “The Horseless Age” and enthused about the coming age of the motor car.

“The question, ‘When will the horse cease to be a necessity for traffic and pleasure in America?’ is perhaps nearer solution than the public imagines,” started Fischer.

He quoted England’s Thomas Commerford Martin, editor of Electrical Engineer, who predicted that “carriages without horses” would be fitted with bicycle technology, pneumatic tyres and ball bearings, and would be rechargeable en route via “power wires strung along our roads to which any one can hitch his electric carriage.”

Fischer also interviewed Chauncey Mitchell Depew, a lawyer for the railways: “I imagine that one fine morning we shall wake up with apparatus ready to take us to our offices by an automobile carriage … But … I cannot conceive our active Americans adapting themselves to the pursuit of pleasure in carriages moved … by any other motor but the horse,” said Depew, who later became a US Senator.

Even though this was a magazine article about the prospects for automobiles, Fischer felt he had to feature bicycles:

“It is scarcely needful to refer to the bicycle as another important factor in the displacement of the horse. The ubiquity of the wheel is more and more apparent … the mail carrier uses the bicycle to accelerate his rounds, and the country doctor finds it cheaper and more convenient than a horse and buggy. A vast capital is employed in the manufacture of these steeds of steel … Good roads follow in their wake … The bicycle is a machine whose possibilities are still far from exhausted.⁠”

“The Horseless Age,” Henry W. Fischer, Munsey’s Magazine, May, 1895.

“Pedestrians, cyclists, equestrians and motorists, all shared the usually ill-defined roads …”: According to economic historian Francis Thompson, there were about 30 million horses in America in 1902, the peak year. Farm horses consumed all the oats and hay that could be grown on about a quarter of the total crop area in America.⁠ (A horse consumes about 1.4 tons of oats and 2.4 tons of hay per year.) Add to this the crop area required to feed urban horses and “any appreciably greater numbers of horses would have been … insupportable.”⁠ (Horses in European economic history, Francis Michael Longstreth Thompson (ed.), The British Agricultural Society, 1983.)

Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner in their 2009 best seller SuperFreakonomics claimed cars came to the rescue, their speedy adoption a given. “The automobile, cheaper to own and operate than a horse-drawn vehicle was proclaimed an environmental savior. Cities around the world were able to take a deep breath – without holding their noses at last – and resume their march of progress.”

In fact, the use of horses remained common in cities for far longer than is generally accepted. For sure, horse travel declined as use of motor cars accelerated (literally) but it wasn’t a quick or even an inevitable switch.⁠ In 1873, a London stable keeper told a House of Lords Select Committee that there was a “wonderful demand for horses.”⁠ He was asked: “Do you think that the establishment of railways has very largely diminished the number of horses that are used for the carrying trade, or that it has increased it?” He replied: “I should say that it has increased it. We thought that when railways first came in that we should have nothing to do, but it has not turned out so … The horses have to work in connection with the railways; for every new railway you want fresh horses; fresh cab horses to begin with: I know one cab proprietor, for instance who used to keep 60 horses and now has 120.” House of Lords Select Committee on Horses, vol. XIV, 1873. Between 1884 and 1890, the Great Western Railway expanded its horse fleet to 1,700 animals, an increase of 80 percent. The Bishopsgate goods station, off Shoreditch High Street in London, employed 1,100 horses and 850 horse-drawn vehicles.⁠ The Birth of the British Motor Car, 1769-1897: Last Battle, 1894-97, volume 3, Nicholson T.R., Palgrave Macmillan, 1982. In 1897, London had 80,000 horses, 21,000 of which were employed by railway companies. The police estimated that 26,000 London horses were killed each year, often on the streets: “So frequently is the cry raised “‘orse dahn!’” that even the street boys are connoisseurs in the art of street slaughtering …”

In 1830, before the onset of “railway mania,” there had been 1.4 million horses in Britain. By 1902 – the peak year for the horse in Britain – the number of horses had more than doubled, to 3.5 million.⁠4

After 1902 the use of horses started to decline but horse transport remained important. Armies on both sides during the First World War relied heavily on horses. When British transport ships were sunk in the English Channel, the sea for miles around would be covered in hay.

Twelve out of every 1,000 people in Great Britain owned some kind of private horse-drawn vehicle in 1902. This compared with four per 1,000 in 1840. It was not until 1926 that the number of car owners exceeded the number of persons who had owned horse-drawn carriages in 1870.⁠

Cities at the end of the 19th century must have had some wonderful roses. Horses in British cities deposited 10 million tons of manure each year.⁠6 New York City had 200,000 horses, depositing manure at a rate of roughly 35 pounds per horse, per day. It “lined city streets like banks of snow,” claimed economist Levitt and Dubner in their 2009 best seller SuperFreakonomics.⁠7

“The world had seemingly reached the point where its largest cities could not survive without the horse but couldn’t survive with it, either,” wrote Levitt and Dubner. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner, HarperCollins Canada, 2009.

The real killer of the horse was neither the motor car, nor the bicycle, but public transport. Omnibuses and trams – what Americans know as the streetcar – were first pulled by horses but when both went horseless, via motors and electricity respectively, the game was up for quadrupeds. In both British and American cities, the first suburbs grew up, ribbon-like, beside the tram and bus routes. Later, cars accelerated urban sprawl, but they didn’t start it. Similarly, cars put the final bolt through the horse’s head but horses were already on the way out.

Police horse census, 1897. Of the 80,000 horses in London, 20,000 were employed on omnibuses; 10,000 on tramways; 15,000 by cabs; 3000 by brewers; and 21,000 by railway companies. The Automotor and Horseless Vehicle Journal, September 1897.

The evolution of horse businesses to automobile businesses, via bicycle businesses, is featured in a light-hearted book about motoring etiquette from 1935. Donald McCullough joked:

1. JNO. FETLOCK

Shoeing Smith

2. JNO. FETLOCK

Blacksmith

Bicycle Repaired

3. JOHN FETLOCK

Cycle & Motor Repairer

4. J. FETLOCK & SON

Motor Agent

5. J. FETLOCK & SONS

Motor Engineers

Petrol & Oil⁠

You Have Been Warned, Fougasse & McCullough, Methuen & Co. Ltd. London, 1935.

Thompson said horse-flesh was essential to rail companies: “Without carriages and carts the railways would have been like stranded whales, giants unable to use their strength, for these were the only means of getting people and goods right to the doors of houses, where they wanted to be.”⁠2

The Automobile Magazine, May, 1900. Horses in European economic history, Francis Michael Longstreth Thompson (ed.), The British Agricultural Society, 1983.

Horses in European economic history, Francis Michael Longstreth Thompson (ed.), The British Agricultural Society, 1983.

In the 1850s, London had 20,000-24,000 horses each dropping 30 pounds of dung on the thoroughfares of London each day, close to 100 tons a day. London Labour and the London Poor. Henry Mayhew, Charles Griffin and Co., 1864. Victorian England: The Horsedrawn society, F.M.L. Thompson, Bedford College, University of London, 1970.

“A 35-minute 1906 film of San Francisco, shot from a moving trolley-car …”: A trip down Market Street before the fire http://www.loc.gov/item/00694408 The film was shot just four days before the great earthquake and resulting fire that devastated the city.

“One of the motor cars appears ten times …”: Library of Congress note: “An interesting feature of the film is the apparent abundance of automobiles. However, a careful tracking of automobile traffic shows that almost all of the autos seen circle around the camera/cable car many times (one ten times). This traffic was apparently staged by the producer to give Market Street the appearance of a prosperous modern boulevard with many automobiles. In fact, in 1905 the automobile was still something of a novelty in San Francisco.”

“… in 1903, many MPs spoke against the greater road rights being demanded by motoring interests …”: Hansard, June 11th, 1903. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1903/jun/11/the-speed-of-motor-cars

“Parliament’s most pro-automobile MP, Scott Montagu …”: Scott Montagu, later Lord Montagu, learned his road craft on a bicycle. He also commissioned the original Spirit of Ecstasy mascot for the Rolls-Royce marque.

“Those who designed them and laid them out never thought of motor-cars …”: Those who design and lay out modern roads don’t think about motor cars, either. Civil engineers retrofit existing roads, and design new ones, to withstand use by trucks. Even less-travelled suburban streets have to be built tough enough to cope with fire engines and heavy goods vehicles. The usual equation rolled out to test whether a road will be able to accommodate trucks is that of the “fourth power”. Tests in 1962 by the American Association of State Highway Officials found that the damaging effect of axle weights on roads was approximately proportional to the fourth power of the axle load. In short, the bigger the truck, the greater the likelihood of road damage. Motor cars, mopeds, motor bikes and bicycles are all much, much lighter than trucks so civil engineers don’t have to take any of them into consideration when designing roads. If a road is tough enough for a truck, it’s tough enough for any vehicle.

“… wrote the engine designer Rudolf Diesel, in 1905 …” For Love of the Automobile. Looking Back into the History of Our Desires, Wolfgang Sachs, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992. Original: Die Liebe zum Automobil, Wolfgang Sachs, Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1984.

The satirical magazine *Punch* poked fun at this sense of entitlement from the newest users of the road”: “The Motorcrat,” Mr. Punch Awheel, the Humours of Motoring and Cycling, Punch Library of Humour, Educational Book Company, 1905.

“What, then, was special about the state of affairs in Britain after 1896?” asked Nicholson”: The Birth of the British Motor Car, 1769-1897: Last Battle, 1894-97, volume 3, T.R. Nicholson, Palgrave Macmillan, 1982.

“Hiram Percy Maxim, writing in 1936 …”: Horseless Carriage Days, Hiram Percy Maxim, Harper and Bros, New York, 1936.

“Economists Beatrice and Sidney Webb said in 1913: “What the bicyclist did for roads …”: The Story of the King’s Highway, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, 1913.

“Writing about the 1890s, Nicholson claimed, somewhat scandalously …”: The Birth of the British Motor Car, 1769-1897: Last Battle, 1894-97, volume 3, T.R. Nicholson, Palgrave Macmillan, 1982.

Gardner Dexter Hiscox damned the bicycle, John-the-Baptist fashion”: Horseless vehicle, automobiles, motor cycles, Gardner Dexter Hiscox, Henley, New York, 1900. It could be argued that, for all the supposed “superiority” of automobiles over bicycles, an apples and oranges argument, neither have changed radically. Motor cars still have four wheels, a chassis, a drive train and an outer shell – today’s motor cars may be faster, more powerful, and sleeker than those of the early 1900s but they have not evolved to the same amazing degree as, say, aeroplanes. The majority of bicycles, too, remain surprisingly similar to those developed in the 1880s. There have been many technological advances in bicycles in the last 20 years, some of them developed jointly with automotive companies, a transfer of technologies in reverse.⁠ Speclalized Bicycles has worked with McLaren, the F1 motorsport company. In the 1990s, aero bike designer Mike Burrows worked with Lotus Sport to create the monocoque composite-frame bicycle which Chris Boardman powered to gold at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. The “superman” position on this bicycle was later banned by the Union Cycliste Internationale, the world governing body for cycling. The UCI has put the brakes on many potentially transformative bicycle technologies, including recumbent bicycles (which were banned from competitions in 1934).

2. Pioneers

” … beneath fluttering red flags emblazoned with swastikas, a stone monument was unveiled in Mannheim …”: Such was Carl Benz’s renown, members of England’s Veteran Car Club had travelled hundreds of miles to be there and, perhaps, were uncomfortable with the Nazi salutes that accompanied the monument’s unveiling.⁠ The Advertiser, Adelaide, April 29th, 1933; “Nazis Honor Benz, the Auto Pioneer; Hitler’s Promise to Promote the Industry is Emphasized at Mannheim Statue Unveiling”, The New York Times, April 17th, 1933.

” … bas-relief of a middle-aged Benz standing beside a pin-sharp representation of the “world’s first motor car.”: Benz used “Carl” on his patents, both in type and in his signature. Many German sources also use Carl and not Karl, including the Automuseum Dr. Carl Benz in Ladenburg, nine miles from Mannheim. http://www.automuseum-ladenburg.de The official spelling in Germany was Carl until a Prussian ordinance of 1903 changed it. So, for instance, the city of Carlsruhe became Karlsruhe. Benz named his companies without prename, Benz & Co., except his last one, C. Benz & Soehne, but then this was likely a snub towards Prussia. Many other sources use Karl. If you want to read more there’s a very lively discussion in the editor’s notes on the Wikipedia entry for Karl Benz: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AKarlBenz#EnglishtranslationsoftheGermantitlesinCarlBenz.28copiedfromUsertalk:LeaNder.29

” … exact facsimile of Benz’s first vehicle: it has tricycle wheels.”: The Nazi monument used Carl, not Karl. Photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CarlBenzDenkmalMannheim.jpg This machine is a reconstruction, created in 1903 for the Deutsches Museum. The original prototype had long since been broken up for spares.

“Hitler was said to have had a “special fondness and respect” for the Benz Patent-Motorwagen…”: Automobile Quarterly, Princeton Institute for Historic Research, Volume XXIV, First Quarter, 1986.

“Marcus was an Austrian engineer who some believe had a working gasoline automobile …”: And Daimler, of course. Some historians believe Marcus had produced a hand-cart with an engine on it in 1870. In 1888 he produced a more mature automobile and most historians believe the 1870 vehicle was the one actually produced in 1888. Much of the evidence for the 1870 vehicle is circumstantial. However, the downgrading of Marcus by the Nazis was very much real.

” … it’s highly likely that the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda ordered German encyclopaedias to wipe out all reference to the cycle origins of the Motorwagen …”: The reference by Professor Hans-Erhard Lessing is from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 18th, 2012. The Nazis also removed statues of Marcus from Vienna and, it must be admitted, did a brilliant job of erasing him from history. Few now consider him the “Father of the motor car” although he was known as this until the 1920s, especially in Austria where there were statues of him (all were smashed by the Nazis). In July 1940 Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda sent a letter to the directors of Daimler-Benz-A.G. telling them that the publishers of Germany’s two most important encyclopedias, the Meyers Lexikon and the Grosse Brockhaus, had been told to excise the name of Siegfried Marcus from the entry on the invention of the motor car, and beef up the roles of Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz. There was no need to spell out the fact Marcus was Jewish, the phrase “German engineers” said enough.

Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda,

Berlin W8, 4 July 1940

Wilhelmsplatz 8-9

To the management of Daimler-Benz A.G. Stuttgart-Untertürkheim

Subject: true inventor of the automobile

In your letter dated 30 May 1940 Dr.Wo / Fa.

The Bibliographic Institute and the publisher F.A. Brockhaus have been advised that in future Meyers Lexikon, and the Grosse Brockhaus are not to refer to Siegfried Marcus, but the two German engineers Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz as the creators of the modern automobile.

“Benz – A good friend of mine paid me a visit …”: Wilhelm Walther, whom Benz knew from the local rowing club. Walther became agent of the first German velocipede manufacturer founded in Stuttgart in 1868.

” … had returned to Mannheim with the same enthusiasm for the vehicle as mine …”: The velocipede owned by Benz was acquired from Erste Deutsche Velocipeden-Fabrik Mueller&Binder (First German Bicycle Maker: Mueller & Binder).

“I soon found out that actually everybody would have liked to ride it.”: Allgemeine Automobil-Zeitung, Vienna, April 18th, 1909. The interview was conducted by Adolf Schmal, a motoring journalist who had been a cycle racing champion and would therefore have been interested in Benz’s bicycling beginnings.

” … it’s known Benz was a rider for longer than just a few months …”: The so-called autobiography Lebensfahrt eines deutschen Erfinders. Erinnerungen eines Achtzigjährigen, Carl Benz, Leipzig, 1925 was mostly written in the first person by Volk, a geography teacher. Generations of motoring historians have treated the book as though written by Benz himself. While Volk had family access to Benz, he lived two hours away by train and, as he relied on newspaper interviews, it’s possible he didn’t interview Benz himself. The book was a rush job for a publisher. Volk drew on two earlier interviews of Benz, changing the wording and suppressing Benz’s true opinions, e.g. Benz was against fast cars and racing. The publisher’s contract was with Volk, not with Benz. At the time of writing, Benz was probably not well enough to proof read or ratify Volk’s book.

Professor Lessing has described Benz as an “enthusiastic cyclist …”: Das Fahrrad – Vater von Auto und Motorrad, H. E. Lessing, Bollschweiler-Mertins-Renda (eds), Rueckenwind – Fahrradgeschichte, Bielefeld, 2011.

” … highly likely that Benz owned at least one pedal-powered tricycle before he made his motorised one.”: In a letter to Deutsches Museum accompanying the reconstructed 1893 Motorwagen, Benz & Co director Josef Brecht said that Benz had pulled a pedal tricycle with two seated people via a spring balance in order to determine the force and power required for the gas engine. Addendum to letter of September 9th, 1905: “His previous experiments and measurements of the resistance against movement of tricycles on good country roads showed a required force of 40 kgm/sec2 for a tricycle loaded with two persons.” Das Fahrrad – Vater von Auto und Motorrad, H.E.Lessing, Bollschweiler-Mertins-Renda (eds), Rueckenwind – Fahrradgeschichte, Bielefeld, 2011.

“Benz’s “acute interest in the then-booming bicycling movement …”: Automobile Quarterly, Princeton Institute for Historic Research, Volume XXIV, First Quarter, 1986.

“Esslinger was involved with a Mannheim business owned by Jewish engineer Max Kaspar Rose.”: Maschinenhandlung Max Rose & Cie. Rose, too, would be written out of the motor car’s history by the Nazis. Max Rose was the witness on the famous US patent for the Benz Motorwagen.

” … House of Bicycles in Frankfurt, Germany’s largest cycle shop …”: Kleyer’s Safety bikes were branded Adler, German for Eagle. Kleyer would go on to produce the Adler brand of automobile, which became the third best selling car brand in Germany.

” … which manufactured stationary internal combustion engines of Benz’s design …”: Rheinische Gasmotoren-Fabrik Benz & Cie

“A newspaper … called it a “Motoren-Velociped”: Neue Badische Landeszeitung, June 4th, 1886.

“Max Rauck … claimed that Benz fashioned his 1886 chassis with no external influences …”: “This is a good fib!” said Professor Lessing in Das Fahrrad – Vater von Auto und Motorrad, H. E. Lessing, Bollschweiler-Mertins-Renda (eds), Rueckenwind – Fahrradgeschichte, Bielefeld, 2011.

Max Rauck received order no. 1145 from the then Daimler-Benz Aktiengesellschaft on December 9th, 1936. The company’s Board of Management stated in the order that Rauck had been commissioned “to collect and sort through our historical written and pictorial material in order to set up and manage a historical archive.” http://media.daimler.com/dcmedia/0-921-614822-1-1439204-1-0-0-0-0-0-0-614318-0-1-0-0-0-0-0.html

“Wilfrid Bade … trumpeted Germany’s significant contributions to motoring history without once mentioning cycling.”: Das Auto erobert die Welt. Biographie des Kraftwagens (The car conquered the world. Biography of the motor vehicle), Willfide Bade, Zeitgeschichte-Verlag, Berlin 1938.

“St. John C. Nixon claimed that the “Benz car had a chassis-frame made up of boiler tubes …”: The Autocar, May 5th, 1933

“ … every part of [the first Benz vehicle] had to be designed out of his own head and made with his own hands …”: Three pointed star: The Story of Mercedes-Benz Cars and Their Racing Successes, David Scott-Moncrieff with St. John Nixon and Clarence Paget, Cassell & Company Ltd., London, 1955.

” … they deliberately downplayed cycling’s part in motoring’s birth narrative …”: The Benz Motorwagen was patented in January 1896. The patent number – 37,435 – is said to be imprinted on the mind of every German school child. The Motorwagen was also granted patents in England (5789), France (175.027) and the US (385,087). In German, the vehicle was described as “Vehicle with gas-engine drive.” The US patent described it as a “Self-propelling vehicle.” The specification is very clear that the Benz vehicle is based on cycle technology. “Figure 1 is a side elevation of a tricycle fitted with my said improvements,” said Benz in the US patent. What was new, he claimed, was attaching a motor. “The combination of a vehicle – such as a tricycle – with a motor…” Benz didn’t go into any great detail about the engine. It seemed almost any engine would do. Griffith Borgeson in Automobile Quarterly in 1986 said “Adapting an existing power plant to an existing vehicle is not “‘inventing the automobile.’” https://www.google.com/patents/US385087?dq=ininventor:%22Gael+Benz%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=03XrUoa7G-HF7Ab_nIHQBw&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAA

” … he had seen the original Benz tricycle in the flesh.”: While Bonneville saw a genuine Benz Motorwagen it was, in fact, labelled as a Roger vehicle and is the car either bought or commissioned by Emile Roger, the Parisian agent for Benz engines in France, and who also had interests in bicycle manufacturing.

” … new tricycle-with-motor-attached for French cycle magazine … “ Sport Vélocipédique, December 6th, 1889. Bonneville, like many other cycling journalists, became a motoring journalist and was highly qualified to document the merging worlds of cycling and motoring, which he covered in a book called The Motor King.⁠ Le moteur-roi. Origines de l’automobile, Louis Bonneville, Editions S.N.E.E.P, Paris, 1949. Bonneville’s book was published after the war and after his death. It was written as a critical response to the Berlin Auto Show of 1936 which lauded German inventions above those of France.

” … Queen Victoria ordered a pair, and asked for them to be delivered by Starley himself …”: Henceforth they were known as Royal Salvos.

“The Sociable tricycle … was well known in Germany in the 1880s …”: There were long articles on the tricycle market in the mass-market illustrated newspaper Illustrirte Zeitung, Leipzig, October 7th and 14th, 1882. Illustrations also include exploded diagrams of a differential axle, patented by James Starley, and essential to the Benz Motorwagen and other early automobiles.

“Griffith Borgeson, described by the Society of Automotive Engineers as one of the world’s pre-eminent automotive historians …”: The Society of Automotive Engineers said Borgeson was one of the world’s preeminent automotive historians on the blurb for The Last Great Miller: The Four Wheel Drive Indy Car, Griffith Borgeson, Society of Automotive Engineers, Pennsylvania 2000. “Wilful smothering of the truth” was from Automobile Quarterly, Princeton Institute for Historic Research, Volume XXIV, First Quarter, 1986. The facts about motoring’s cycling beginnings can be found, tucked away, in a few places. The website of the Deutsches Museum in Munich is clear on the vehicle’s cycling credentials: “Benz obtained some parts for his first Motorwagen from a bicycle factory: the wheels, the solid rubber tyres, the spokes, the bearings, the front wheel fork and even the frame tubing.”⁠ Munich’s Deutsches Museum has had the reconstructed Benz Motorwagen of 1886 since 1905. http://www.deutsches-museum.de/en/information/young-people/inventors-trail/mobility/benz/

“A later iteration of Benz’s Motorwagen …”: London’s Science Museum owns one of these.

“In 1893, Benz introduced the Viktoria … Again, sales were poor.”: Benz delivered 69 cars in 1893, fifteen were sold in Germany and 42 in Paris via Emile Roger. Automobile Quarterly, Princeton Institute for Historic Research, Volume XXIV, First Quarter, 1986.

“driving gear for velocipedes”: US Patent 386,798, July 31st, 1888. http://www.google.com/patents/US386798

“The city of Mannheim, which famously gave the world the first bicycle, can therefore be proud two of the most modern means of transport came from within its walls.”: In fact, Karl Von Drais was from Karlsruhe. http://www.deutsches-museum.de/sammlungen/ausgewaehlte-objekte/meisterwerke-v/laufmaschine/

” … quadricycle, was renamed the Stahlradwagen …”: The Daimler Velocipede’s steel frame was made by cycle manufacturer Neckarsulmer Fahrradfabriken at Neckarsulm which also supplied the cycle-style wheels.

“Hitler had been had been a lowly bicycle messenger …”: http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2009/12/09/german-wwi-military-archive-reveals-‘bike-messenger’-hitler’s-first-service-record/

“One record showed [Hitler] had been a Radfahrer, a cyclist …”: This record was written in Suetterlin script, a form of old German, taught in German schools from 1915 to 1941.

“Hitler may have preferred to have been motorised …”: Hitler’s love of motor cars is well known. He pushed through the provision of the autobahn system against the advice of his own Ministry of Transport (which, while liking the idea of motorways, thought railways were more efficient). And he felt motor cars – once made cheaply enough, like Ford’s Model T – would extinguish class distinctions. The ordinary citizen, once motorised, would have no need of bicycles. Opening the 1934 Berlin Motor Show, Hitler said of automobiles: “It is distressing to known that millions of honest, diligent, and able people, whose lives offer them limited opportunity, are denied the use of a mode of transportation that would, especially on Sundays and holidays, grant them a joy hitherto withheld from them.”

” … we will have to de-Nazify automobile history.”: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 18th, 2012.

” … Starley’s Rover Safety, the bicycle that according to company adverts “set the fashion to the world.”: Historians have not yet traced the source for this famous quote. It appeared on Rover Safety adverts and is presumed to be a magazine quote. Cycling is the usual attribution.

” … Theodore Roosevelt was stopped for speeding by two policemen on bicycles …”: The New York Times, 22nd June, 1905.

” … flanked by policemen on bicycles. Columbia bicycles …”: The New York Times, 22nd August, 1902. The next biggest company in town was gun and precision tool maker Pratt and Whitney, which went on to become the famous aeronautics manufacturer. At the time Pratt and Witney made, among many other things, bicycle parts manufacturing machines. Columbia still makes bicycles but these are low-end models from the Far East and are sold into American supermarkets, in low numbers, by a furniture supply company.⁠ http://columbiamfginc.com

“Lance Armstrong was voted in as number one … mountain bike innovators Gary Fisher and Joe Breeze were 11th and 14th respectively …”: League Celebrates 125 Years With Top 25 Influencers In American Cycling History

1. Lance Armstrong (born 1971)

2. The Schwinn Family (company founded 1895)

3. Colonel Albert A. Pope (1843-1909)

4. Charles Pratt (1845-1898)

5. Greg LeMond (born 1961)

6. Tullio Campagnolo (1901-1983)

7. Shimano Family (company founded 1921)

8. Major Taylor (1878-1932)

9. Pierre Lallement (1843-1891)

10. Jim Oberstar (born 1934)

11. Gary Fisher (born 1950)

12. Phyllis Harmon (born 1917)

13. Mike Sinyard (born 1950)

14. Joe Breeze (born 1953)

15. Dan Burden (born 1943)

16. Paul Dudley White (1886-1973)

17. Burke Family (company founded in 1976)

18. Keith Kingbay (1918-1995)

19. Georgena Terry (born 1950)

20. John Forester (born 1929)

21. Gary Klein (company founded 1975)

22. Earl Blumenauer (born 1948)

23. Juli Furtado (born 1967)

24. Horace Huffman (1885-1945)

25. Robert Rodale (1930-1990)

http://www.bicyclenewswire.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.showrelease&cid=46&id=132 Many assume Pope’s factories turned out the majority of bicycles in pre-1900 America when, in fact, during the 1890s boom years, his factories were producing only about one out of every eight bicycles.⁠1 Why do many make these assumptions about Pope? Because he was a great promoter, a larger-than-life character and never hid any lights under any bushels. The “big four” bicycle suppliers in America in the 19th century were H. A. Lozier and Company; Overman; Gormully & Jeffery; and the Pope Manufacturing Company. Peddling Bicycles to America: The Rise of an Industry, Bruce D. Epperson, McFarland, 2010.

“It was a deliberately crafted and stage-managed creation, and the Colonel was its impresario …”: Peddling Bicycles to America: The Rise of an Industry, Bruce D. Epperson, McFarland, 2010.

“Pope was a portly fellow …”: The reference to Pope as “Colonel Bounce” was made by Charles Pratt in his famous “A Wheel Around the Hub” article in Scribner’s Monthly, February, 1880. Photographs of Pope taken at this time show him to be stout but not what we would consider “fat”. In this magazine there’s also perhaps the first reference to a variant of the “your-wheels-are-going-around” joke shouted at cyclists from that day to this: “ …the irrepressible small boy shied his cap at the gleaming spokes and cried, ‘Mister, your little wheel’s loose!’”

“Pope responded: “Advertising! Big advertising! Bigger advertising!”: My Autobiography, S. S. McClure, Frederick A. Stokes, 1914. Bicycling World, May 16th, 1903.

” … Pope gave them all kinds, and billions of words were printed about the bicycle …”: Bicycling World, December 18th, 1902.

“A display of five English high-wheeler bicycles caught Pope’s eye”: One Hundred Years of American Commerce, ed. Chauncey M. Depew, Haynes, 1895.

“When, in May [1878] Col. A. A. Pope rode circuitously from the station to the office of [Weed Sewing Machine Company] on a bicycle of English make…”: Hartford, Conn., as a manufacturing, business and commercial center; with brief sketches of its history, attractions, leading industries, and institutions, Hartford Board of Trade, 1889.

“Columbia was chosen because there was talk in America …”: This was duly staged in Chicago but in 1893. To save face a dedication ceremony was held in October 1892.

“Sales weren’t meteoric at first but momentum built up …”: In 1884, Hartford’s most famous resident, Mark Twain, bought a Columbia high-wheeler: “I went down and bought a … bicycle. The Expert came home with me to instruct me. We chose the back yard, for the sake of privacy, and went to work. The Expert explained the thing’s points briefly, then he got on its back and rode around a little, to show me how easy it was to do … During the eight days I took a daily lesson an hour and a half … Of course I had trouble mounting the machine, entirely on my own responsibility, with no encouraging moral support from the outside … In place of this I had some other support. This was a boy, who was perched on a gate-post munching a hunk of maple sugar. He was full of interest and comment. The first time I failed and went down he said that if he was me he would dress up in pillows, that’s what he would do … My slow and lumbering gait filled the boy to the chin with scorn, and he sung out, “My, but don’t he rip along!” …Labor as I might, the machine came almost to a standstill every little while. At such times the boy would say: “That’s it! take a rest – there ain’t no hurry. They can’t hold the funeral without YOU.” Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.⁠” “Taming the bicycle” was written in 1884 but not published until after Twain’s death. It appeared in the anthology What is Man of 1917. Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Clemens.

“He became one of the leading lights in what became the Good Roads movement.”: This was modelled on the Roads Improvement Association of England, founded in 1886 by CTC and NCU. Pope had joined the CTC in 1880 as an overseas member.

“Urban historian Clay McShane describes the shift as an …”: Down the Asphalt Path, Clay McShane, Columbia University Press, 1994.

“In 1892, Pope wrote a five-page article in the influential magazine …:” The Forum was one of the most respected journals in America. Pulitzer prize winning historian Frank Luther Mott wrote, in 1957: “It would be difficult to find a better exposition of the more serious interests of the American mind in the decade of 1886 to 1896 than is afforded by the first twenty volumes of the Forum…The Progress of science and industry, education in its many phases, religious controversy, and movements in literature and the fine arts gave variety to Forum content.”

“So far as I could use and extend my influence …”: “An Industrial Revolution by Good Roads,” Albert A. Pope, The Forum, March 1892.

“This came to nothing, but four years later it was probably Pope …”: Scribner’s Magazine, June 18th, 1895.

“Pope’s electric cars were the best-selling automobiles of the 1890s …”: Between 1897 and 1899, Pope Manufacturing Company produced 500 electric and 40 petrol-powered motor vehicles – it was the largest manufacturer of electric vehicles by some margin.

“Maxim, I believe this horseless-carriage business …”: Horseless Carriage Days, Hiram Maxim.

“However, motoring historians have jumped on the fact that Pope …”: “Hartford, the Birthplace of the Automobile,” Herman Cuntz, Hartford Times, September 17th, 1947.

“The Pope Manufacturing Company began its work in the motor carriage field in January, 1895 …”: The Horseless Age, April, 1897. Pope’s automobile interests were extensive: his plants in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Indiana and Ohio – some of them former, and existing, bicycle factories – made motor cars branded with the names Pope-Hartford, Pope-Toledo, Pope-Tribune, Pope-Robinson, Pope-Waverly and, of course, Columbia.

“That his name was part of Sturmey–Archer gears is a product of company politics …”: Sturmey’s name is now recognised as the first half of Sturmey–Archer but the three-speed epicyclic gear he’s supposed to have had a share in inventing wasn’t his. In 1900, Sturmey designed his own small car, the Voiturette. This used an epicyclic gearbox and a bicycle version of the hub gear was patented by Sturmey in August 1901 (“Improvements in or relating to Variable Speed Gears for Bicycles and other Machinery,” United Kingdom Patent No. 16,221. Sturmey, J. J. H. 13th August 1901). This was 11 days after James Archer filed a patent for a similar epicyclic gear on behalf of William Reilly, a Manchester engineer who had earlier signed a restrictive contract with a former employer, the manufacturer of a basic hub gear he had designed in 1896. In 1901, Raleigh bought a number of hub gear patents, including Archer’s (which was really Reilly’s) and Sturmey’s. Raleigh was originally going to make Sturmey’s hub gear but it was found that the Reilly one was the better of the two. To save Sturmey’s blushes, and to create a more marketable product (Sturmey was one of the most famous cycle engineers of his day), Raleigh relegated Reilly to the sidelines and instead promoted Sturmey and Archer, neither of whom had anything to do with the hub gear their names became attached to. Reilly was paid a royalty of 1 percent of all sales and became a director of Raleigh’s Three Speed Gear Syndicate, but is only rarely acknowledged as the actual inventor of the famous Sturmey–Archer hub gear. Sturmey, for his part, never let on that the hub he said he designed wasn’t his.

Ironically, Sturmey continued to develop his bicycle gears (at the same time as working on automotive inventions) and, in 1922, patented a much-improved five-speed hub gear (Patent 118, 178). It was never turned into a commercial product.

“The Cyclist became the leading cycling magazine …”: Sturmey was strong on technical issues but he was also good at PR. One of his initiatives to paint cyclists in a positive light was a magazine-organised campaign to raise funds for a lifeboat. This lifeboat was duly launched in December 1887 and was named “The Cyclist.” It was based in the port of Hartlepool and in 1896 it was reported it had “done good service, and the cyclists of the United Kingdom have paid the [annual] expenses … Over 6,000 individual subscribers supported [Henry Sturmey’s] fund. The movement was discussed in the press, and the public spirit of the rapidly increasing army of wheelmen was commended in many quarters.”⁠ Cycling, edited by the Right Hon. the Earl of Albemarle and G. Lacy Hillier, Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes, fifth ed. 1896.

“Sturmey … drove from John o’Groats to Land’s End …”: He was accompanied by a mechanic, Richard Ashley. The journey was published in a lavishly illustrated book. On an autocar through the length & breadth of the land. Being notes on a tour of 1,600 miles, from John-o’-Groat’s to Land’s End, London, and Coventry, Henry Sturmey, Iliffe, Sons & Sturmey, 1898.

“Sturmey’s clear and obvious bias estranged him from Iliffe and Son …”: He had been one of the directors of Iliffe, Sons, Sturmey Ltd.

“The Petrol Age, a four-part celebration of motorsport on British sate