Four Wheels Worse

 “Two Wheels Good – the History and Mystery of the Bicycle” by Jody Rosen, 2022

If you are a bicyclist this book is for you.  It is an engaging look at the history and issues surrounding the two-wheeled ‘flying’ wonder, from the early 1800s to today. The feeling of riding early bicycles was likened to flying, and even the Wright Brothers started out running a bike shop.  Reading the book gives the interest and practice of cycling some depth and dignity.  Artists and writers like Twain, de Beauvoir, Picasso, Duchamp, Weiwei and Miller wrote about or painted the bicycle.  It will hit home – at least it did for me. The book tells the story in personal visits to various places too, as a reporter might do.

The themes that surround the bicycle are still up to date.  Many of the calumnies thrown against bicycles by car drivers were also hurled at them by horse men back in the late 1890s.  In the 1880s thugs sometimes attacked bike riders and carriages ran over or blocked bikers.  I remember a Republican columnist in the Twin Cities Metro threatening bicyclists with his giant pickup when the first big wave of riding came on in the 1990s.  Today more people ride bicycles around the world than any other form of transport.

The history has been argued about, but Rosen nails it to a German, Drais, who in 1817 developed the ‘laufmaschine’ or in French, the velocipede, the first two-wheeled version without pedals. “Bi-cycle” means ‘two circles’ from the Latin.  It had poor brakes, metal or wood tires and was powered by pushing it forward with both feet.  This is similar to those young children you see nowadays pushing a tiny non-pedal bike while learning to balance. Yet going downhill was akin to flying, without the clodding hooves and heaving back of a thundering horse.  Upper-class Victorian dandies adopted the velocipede, but were loudly derided by the press of the time as sweaty, dirty and dangerous.  It was followed by the heavy iron ‘boneshaker’ using a no-coasting fixed chain drive, and the ridiculous ‘penny farthing’ with the huge front wheel designed to go farther on every pedal turn.  

In 1885, J.K. Stanley developed the ‘safety bike’ from these predecessors – essentially the same design we see today – handlebars, brakes, two equal tires, a diamond frame, ball-bearings and a chain drive located in the middle of the bike that allowed coasting.  In 1887 a tinkering Scotsman, Dunlap, developed the rubber tire. This basic design has remained unchanged, though with many variations. The U.S. Christians at the time, as usual, called the safety bicycle satanic and an agent of the devil.  In 2016 Iran’s leader, Khamenei, issued a fatwa banning biking in public.  Yet it was taken up in the 1890s as a huge mania by millions, who enjoyed its low cost, quietness and freedom.  Women took to it wearing bloomers, the pants of the day. It was a form of physical liberation for women and part of a feminist explosion. Sanitary experts took to it, as it got rid of the horse manure on the streets. Road builders took to it, as it presaged the smoother roads that cars would eventually drive on. And children?  Well, yeah!  But the established press was not amused, especially when marriages broke down due to women enjoying cycling over house-hold drudgery. 

Eventually the bicycle outnumbered the expensive and finicky horse, only to be slowly replaced in the early 1900s by the automobile - at least in the U.S. and Europe.  In China under Mao and Deng the sturdy black ‘Flying Pigeon’ bicycle became the transport of choice  - this before the modern turn to automobiles. In 2013 Chinese firms sold 20 million cars, the most in history of any country.  Yet in crowded Dahka, Bangladesh Rosen saw pedal-driven rickshaws still dominated the streets. In the 1870 Franco-Prussian war and the 1899 Boer War, bicycle soldiers were stealthy ambushers, able to be quickly transported across battlefields.  The NVA and Viet Cong used bicycles to transport everything down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Rosen does a chapter on trick biking, focusing on the daring Scotsman Angus MacAskill riding his various BMX’s in the modern day.  He has another somewhat stupid chapter on sex and bicycle ‘porn’ – yes, a thin reed.  The bicycle seat was ostensibly an erotic frottage device for women, and so objectionable to conservatives.  He has a chapter on winter riding, keying in on “Klondike” bikes and their uses during the Klondike gold rush, riding through snow, ice, storms and cold.  Without mentioning Minneapolis, he highlights polar Spitsbergen, Norway in Svalbard, and how it is normal to ride in the winter there, sometimes using fat tire bikes.  Rosen himself rides in winter in NYC.  Then a chapter on mountain biking in Bhutan, a theocratic, royalist outpost in the Himalayan Mountains, which he visits to interview various personages and their experiences in the ‘Tour of the Dragon’ race in Bhutan.  

A street vendor in Hanoi

Rosen discusses stationary bikes, where legend has it that the RMS Titanic went down while two men were continuing to ride them below-decks.  However, other than for in-house exercise, stationary bikes have been adapted as power sources – most famously generating D.C. current at Occupy Wall Street sites to power phones, computers and lights.  They have been adapted to generate electric power to run lathes and drills, chop vegetables, open cans, make food, pump water and whatever else you can hook up, especially in communes or rural areas in the global South. Even the International Space Station has one. 

Rosen looks into the first mass long distance ride in 1976 by thousands covering the 4,200 mile distance between coastal Oregon and coastal Virginia, going through Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and Virginia.  Other rides from North to South America and a ‘Southern Tier Trek’ from southern California to northern Florida are mentioned. Rosen investigates the role of bicycles as ‘beasts of burden’ carrying hundreds of pounds of goods or people, by visiting Dahka and its ‘rickshahwallahs’ and Beijing in China.  Commercial freight cycling continues throughout the world on a vast scale in South and East Asia, in Africa and Latin America.  China has 40-60 million working tricycles alone.  Cargo biking has spread to the U.S. and Europe.  In 1996, before the turn to cars, China had 1.5 bicycles per household and a recent mass ride shows that youth are riding bicycles again.

Rosen includes his own history biking in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Morningside Heights and more.  His first ride, his first accident, his parade of bikes, his work as a bike messenger, the ubiquity of stolen bikes and the ‘dèrive’ joy of riding through the streets. This all brings out a reader’s own experiences. I myself learned to ride at 6 going in circles around a basement in Duluth.  My friends and I bought a Schwinn “Sting Ray” bike with a banana seat and a fat slick on the back, doing wheelies for blocks.  My first adult bike was a ‘girls’ 5-speed I pulled out of a creek and refurbished.  I too rode long distances back in the 1960s.  ‘Watery’ bike graveyards he also covers, especially bikes dumped in a canal in Paris.  This reminds us of the array of bike-share bikes and scooters destroyed or dumped in rivers by destructive vandals in our present day.  He envisions himself someday as “a humble but dignified … old man on a bicycle.” All of this resonates with the memories of most bicyclists. 

Rosen ends with the development of the first ‘critical mass’ ride in 1992 in San Francisco and the battle between the car culture and environmentalism.  This is an old topic but still relevant in almost every city.  The ‘politics’ of the bicycle is evident in the flood of bikes involved in the Tiananmen rebellions in China.  Earth Days across the world also feature mass bicycle rides.  He notes that the NYPD and other police forces see bicycle riders as subversives ruining the streetscape.  Back at the 2008 RNC Convention in St. Paul, police rounded up suspicious and anarchist bike riders as a matter of course. Cities like Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Paris have led the way in bicycle-based transport. Rosen calls the recent rise of e-bikes one of the biggest advances in bicycling since the 1890s and he might be right.  

What Rosen leaves out - not even a mention - is the scooter, moped and motorcycle.  Much of what can be said for the bicycle can also be said for these more muscular two-wheelers.  Bicycles and the e-bike can be feeder ramps to bigger, motorized versions.  On the streets of the third world motorized tuk-tuks, rickshaws, scooters and motorcycles far outnumber cars.  Many are now being built with electric motors.  They are used cross country and in-country, as work vehicles, as commuting methods, as traveling two-wheelers. The blindness to them seems intentional.

Rosen mentions the environmental costs of rubber, metal and labor involved in biking, so it’s not a pure ‘green’ or ‘virtuous’ technology as some pretend. Yet its impact is far less than the car, SUV, truck or pickup. A fun and interesting book about a commonplace item that everyone is acquainted with. Worth reading if you are a bicyclist … and even if you are not or want to be one.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Bikers Unite,”  “Motorcyclist Rant,” “The Bikeriders,” “Shop Class as Soulcraft,”  “The Trials of Traffic,” “Traffi-Can’t,”  “The End of Tourism?”

Red Frog / November 26, 2024