Customer Reviews

A social history of the bicycle, its early life and times in America,

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The bicycle is now thought of as a toy by most people but in the late 19th century they were the impetus for social change. Robert Smith takes us to a world very few know existed; the world of 19th century high technology and social upheaval due to a seemingly inoccuous machine: The bicycle. At a time when the horse was the fastest thing on the road, a man (or woman, heaven forbid) on a bicyle was like today's high-end sportscar. Business people from piano-makers to bar owners villified the bicycle for taking away their business (piano-makers because the bicyles were bought in place of pianos, bar owners because cyclists in training would not drink alcohol!). Women found new freedom on the bicycle, in both athleticism and in fashion: Bloomers were invented to allow women to ride bicycles with modesty intact. A typical spring day would find thousands of cyclists riding the roads around the major cities. Roads were graded for this purpose, road signs were put up to guide them, maps were made to help them on their way, and restaraunts established to feed them. Does this sound familiar today? Robert Smith has opened a door to a fascinating past that everyone should know about.

I've read several books on the history of bicycles, and I would recommend this as the best. This book contains an incredible amount of detailed information on the development and social/historical impact of bicycling, while being very entertaining to read. It's a shame that it's been allowed to go out of print.

Was this book reprinted in 1995 as ISBN: 0809511045?

I think the great achievement of Smith is to shift our attention away from the artifact of bicycles as they changed over time, and to the use of bicycles. He really hit the upswing in interest in cycling at a sweet time, with bicycle sales in the US doubling from 7 million to 14 million between 1970 and the year of publication, 1972, and purchases of adult bicycles shifting from 1/5 of all bikes sold to most of all bikes sold.

Perhaps because Smith draws mostly on newspaper and popular magazine articles, the stories about bicycling are juicy, funny, frequently wrapped around a kernel of conflict. He has a bold interpretion for everything, but none of it is documented with footnotes for particular facts. The list of sources (pp. 257-259) features many key publications. However, I've read a couple hundred newspaper articles from the NY Times and Washington Post and Scientific American about the velocipede mania (1868-1869) and 1890s bicycle era, and find it impossible to trust them as a basis for generalizing about the experience of cyclists generally.

For an entertaining and thought-provoking trip through the era, Smith provides a great read. I believe he sifted through hundreds, if not thousands, of popular articles. I don't, however, believe that newspapers are good sources of information about legal developments concerning the infamous anti-bicycle ordinances (Sunday-riding laws, for example), and that it's not helpful to generalize from a sensational "big town" newspaper story about small town America to the experience of cycling into rural places. Law generates lots of published words, and legal documents are a good place to find information; local ordinances, statutes and case opinions provide lots of words that are far more authoritative than newspaper articles.

One thing historians of bicycle-riding have yet to document is the use of bicycles. This cannot really be inferred from the often-quoted production figures collected by the U.S. Census in 1890 and 1900, though it might be inferred from the number, location and capitalization of bicycle repair shops. I can't imagine a way to capture the number of vehicle miles traveled, except by the current technique of sampling cyclists and asking them to report their activities. I've heard that some urban places have people who have stood on street corners to count cyclists commuting to work, and then use that count to infer a total population of cyclists.