Bicycles and Bicycling

Bicycles and Bicycling. The “dandy horse” or “swift‐walker,” powered by its rider pushing against the ground, gained popularity in East Coast cities around 1819 but was soon banned from sidewalks as dangerous to pedestrians. Pedal power was introduced to the United States at the 1868 New York Athletic Games in the form of the French‐developed “velocipede,” with a metal frame, rubber tires, and front‐wheel pedals. It, too, enjoyed a brief vogue but was then banned from many roads. The Bostonian Albert Pope introduced steel frames; brakes; and, by the 1880s, front wheels up to six feet high. “High wheelers” were thus faster than their ancestors and even more dependent on pavement. Approximately 100,000 were on the road in 1887.

The “safety” bicycle, first manufactured in the United States by Pope in 1889, featured same‐sized wheels, the rear one connected to pedals under the rider by a chain; ball bearings; and pneumatic tires (invented by the Scotsman John Dunlop). These bikes could move twice as fast as a horse and carriage and were relatively affordable. More than four million Americans owned safeties by 1896, making the 1890s bicycling's golden age. So pervasive was the 1890s craze that the government opened a separate patent office just for bicycle‐related innovations. While bike manufacturers, repairers, and accessory‐makers thrived, and playwrights and songwriters celebrated the bicycle, everyone from tailors to barkeepers complained of declining business as their customers took up cycling. Even church attendance was said to have dropped. Despite warnings of moral depravity and such maladies as “bicycle hump” and “bicycle twitch,” cyclists of all ages and classes took to the roads. Promoted by feminists such as Frances Willard, the bicycle allowed women independent mobility and gave them reason to wear bloomers rather than sweeping skirts.

After the first recorded bicycle races in East Coast cities in the 1860s and 1870s, amateur and professional road and especially track racing quickly became favorite spectator sports. In 1899, drafting behind a train, Charles M. Murphy biked the world's first subminute mile. The athletic color line was broken that year by the African American Marshall “Major” Taylor, who won the world championship. In the 1920s, velodrome races—where men rode continuously for six days, stopping only when absolutely necessary for physical or mechanical reasons—drew tens of thousands of fans. The American Bicycle League's national championships first included women in 1937, but by then public interest in competitive cycling had waned, not to be renewed until U.S. cyclists performed well at the 1971 Pan American games. The first Americans competed in the grueling Tour de France in 1981, but it was Greg LeMond's 1983 world‐championship victory that brought competitive cycling back into the public imagination. Lance Armstrong, racing for the U.S. Postal Service team after recovering from nearly fatal testicular cancer, became the first American on a U.S. team to win the Tour de France in 1999. With a follow‐up victory in 2000, Armstrong and his team further boosted the popularity and visibility of competitive cycling.

Advances in bicycle technology in the golden age contributed, ironically, to the machine's decline. Techniques pioneered by bike manufacturers such as the assembly line, planned obsolescence, and marketing incentives were readily adopted by the automotive industry. Bicycle organizations, notably the League of American Wheelmen (now Bicyclists), founded in 1880, supported the “good roads” movement that quite literally paved the way for automobiles. Responding to the bicycle craze, New York City passed the nation's first comprehensive traffic code in 1897, requiring, for example, that cyclists use hand signals; by 1909, partly because of stricter regulations, cyclists had almost disappeared from roadways and the automobile's “golden age” was under way. As the century wore on, most highways were built without provision for nonautomotive transportation, and bicycling ceased to be perceived as a serious endeavor.

Mountain bikes, invented in the West in the 1970s and mass‐marketed beginning in the 1980s, are probably the United States' greatest recent contribution to cycling; Americans dominated competition, and the bikes broadened cycling's appeal. By the 1990s, numerous types of specialized bikes existed, but just 1 percent of all trips made in the United States involved bikes. Still, according to one estimate, nearly half of all adult Americans had bicycled at least once in 1990. Because of bicycling's health and environmental benefits, numerous grassroots organizations and some government agencies were working as the twentieth century ended to make roads and attitudes friendlier toward cyclists.
See also Mass Production; Sports: Amateur Sports and Recreation.

Bibliography

Frances Willard , A Wheel within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, 1895; reprint, 1997.
Marshall “Major” Taylor , The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World: The Story of a Colored Boy's Indomitable Courage and Success against Great Odds, 1928; reprint, 1972.
Robert A. Smith , A Social History of the Bicycle: Its Early Life and Times in America, 1972; revised edition, Merry Wheels and Spokes of Steel: A Social History of the Bicycle, 1995.
Peter Nye , Hearts of Lions: The Story of American Bicycle Racing, 1988.
Clay McShane , Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City, 1994, esp. pp. 54–56 and 116–118.
David B. Perry , Bike Cult: The Ultimate Guide to Human‐Powered Vehicles, 1995.
Frank J. Bertho , The Birth of Dirt: Origins of Mountain Biking, 1999.

Hannah Borgeson