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SPEAKER_06: This is Jody Rosen. And I'm the author of Two Wheels Good, the History and Mystery of the Bicycle.
SPEAKER_03: The early version of the bicycle, known as the Running Machine, debuted around 1817, which Jody says is weirdly late.
SPEAKER_06: By the time that Running Machine or Laufe Machina comes along, we're 15 years into the era of the steam locomotive.
SPEAKER_03: When the bicycle started to look like the machine that we know today, it was 1885. In that same year, 1885, Carl Benz invented his first motor wagon.
SPEAKER_06: So the automotive age is stirring at the same moment that we finally get a perfect bicycle. It took many centuries for kind of fate and, you know, trial and error to bring us the machine itself. So in that sense, I think it's one of those devices that both feels inevitable and whose history kind of belies that inevitability. It just feels like, why wasn't there a bicycle that a Pharaoh or like a Roman was pedaling around on?
SPEAKER_03: Jody says the reason the late arrival feels wrong to lots of people is because the bike feels so natural, like something that's always been with us.
SPEAKER_06: The thing to my mind that makes the bicycle such a beautiful and unique machine is this fact that the rider is both the passenger of the machine and the engine. And that's actually kind of a strange idea to be both a rider of a machine and a component of a machine. But at those moments when you're kind of on your best rides, you kind of become one with the bike in some sort of Zen sense. You become inseparable from it. And there's this kind of incredible, you know, fusion or communion that a human has with a machine, which is actually a kind of an uncanny phenomenon. It's sort of a little weird and eerie.
SPEAKER_03: Today we're going to talk with Jody about the evolution of the bicycle and how it became a cultural phenomenon in the late 1800s. Then a symbol of protest and a lightning rod for political controversy. And we'll find out what is next for the bike in a world built for cars. So Jody, the bicycle is a pretty simple machine, but it took decades of experiments and tinkering to get the bike that we know today. Could you take us through some of the evolution of the bike? So the running machine or the Laufmachina, as it was called in German in this period, was invented round about 1817 by a guy named Karl von Dreis, who was a minor German nobleman in the city of Mannheim.
SPEAKER_06: He came from some family wealth, but he really was a kind of a tinkerer and a dreamer who was always experimenting with inventing different types of devices. And one of the things he was very interested in was the problem of travel. That is the question of how you could move across land without a horse. So he made many efforts over a period of years to invent various types of machines, things he even called automobiles. But his most successful was this thing called the running machine. And the crucial breakthrough he made was to take two wheels and line them up in a kind of row, one after the other. That was not to attach them to an axle and put them one across from the other, separated by an axle, but to actually line one up in front of the other and connect them with a kind of a bar, which a sort of saddle, as he called it. And the rider straddled his or her, in this period mostly his, weight across the device and propelled it with a kind of scooting or skating motion by literally running. That is by pushing off the pavement to propel the device. And this thing crucially did not have pedals. It was a pedalless bike and very quickly it began to spread across the continent and then over the English Channel into England. And there was sort of various short-lived crazes for this bicycle during this period. And then that leads us to one of the next sort of punctuations in this sort of evolution, the bone shaker, which came along in the 1860s.
SPEAKER_03: What was the big change that happened with the bone shaker?
SPEAKER_06: The big change for the bone shaker is that we got pedals and these pedals, it was a direct drive device. So the pedals were attached directly to the front wheel of the bike. And this was, on the one hand, it was a very important breakthrough that the thing would work better if it was a pedal driven device as opposed to one that you used your feet to scoot along the ground. But it was kind of an inefficient setup. And they called it the bone shaker because it was extremely uncomfortable to ride. Its wheels were shod in iron, it was kind of ringed in metal. The machine itself was made of wood and iron. It was extremely heavy and you kind of like jutted and shook as you rode across the cobbles. So it was a machine that shook your bones. Mark Twain famously wrote about his attempts to learn to ride a bone shaker and he said something along the lines of, riding a bicycle is a great thing. You won't regret it if you live. So I think that bespeaks the fact that it was just, it was a pretty unpleasant way to travel because of the engineering. You read about how the next evolution of the bike was the penny farthing bicycle, which is the bicycle with the big giant wheel. And it looks completely ridiculous today. Why was that important to the bike's evolution?
SPEAKER_03: So the penny farthing bicycle is this remarkable looking machine.
SPEAKER_06: And if you see some hipster with a tattoo of an old fashioned bicycle on his or her arm, it's going to be a penny farthing, right? Some sort of mustachioed Victorian driving it. So yeah, the penny farthing was the bike with the huge front wheel and the tiny rear wheel. And again, it was a direct drive machine. So the pedals were attached to the front wheel. The reason that you have this quite remarkable looking, I think they're amazing looking machines. But the reason you needed this setup was because it supplied a gearing effect with every rotation of the pedal that turned the wheel one time, the larger the wheel, the greater the distance you would travel with each pedal turn. So you kind of get this absurd, almost steroidal front wheel in order to achieve a gearing effect. But again, this was a quite unsafe machine. It was very difficult to mount in the first place. The saddle sat quite high. It was at the height of a horse. This was the reasoning behind it. And also because you had such a big wheel, by definition, you were sitting high off the ground. And again, it was just an awkward machine because you were using that same front wheel to steer that you were pedaling on. So people were prone to doing what they called taking a header that is flying over the handlebars, kind of pitching over the bars and and injuring themselves in all kinds of gruesome ways. So something I had to give because as cool as that bike looked, it was it was particularly a safe machine. It sort of made the bicycle a device for sportsmen or daredevils as opposed to, you know, a democratic machine that was a true form of, you know, mass transit. It wasn't exactly a commuter vehicle in the same way as you would have liked. Right.
SPEAKER_03: The penny fighting looks ridiculous now, but it wasn't just a novelty that big wheel was actually trying to solve a problem. But then a new technology came along in the form of the chain drive, which changed everything about what makes a bicycle a bicycle.
SPEAKER_06: So the breakthrough came around 1879 with the notion that you create a chain drive that is you you move the pedals away from the front wheel to something like the middle of the bicycle and you hitch a chain to a sprocket, which is threaded back to the rear wheel. With each turn of the pedals, you pull that rear wheel forward and then that front wheel simply becomes a wheel that you steer with. You're not you're not driving that wheel with the pedals attached directly to it. So this is a brilliant and innovative solution, which among other things really takes advantage of the power of the human legs. That's the largest muscles in the human body are located in the legs. You know, the genius of the bicycle is that the rider is both the passenger and the engine of the machine. And a chain drive really optimizes that engine. But also there were a number of other engineering breakthroughs in this period. So you had the arrival of a diamond shaped frame, which is a sturdy setup, and you had two wheels of at first more or less equal size and then very quickly after that, you know, identical size, which solves the problem that we had with the penny farthing of, you know, people taking a header all of a sudden. It's a much safer and more stable bike and it moves much quicker and more efficiently. And here we come to, you know, the last great breakthrough, which is the development of not just tires that are that are rubber tires, but that have an inner tube filled with air, which provides a smoother and much faster ride. So suddenly you have a machine which is truly a machine that anybody can ride. Old people, young people, people have large frames. People who are small, you know, this so-called safety bicycle could bear the weight of a rider, you know, 10 times the weight of the bicycle without any problem at all. So it's at that moment that we get the bicycle proper and then we get a kind of explosion of riding across the world. I love that the accumulation of all these inventions led to a thing called the safety bicycle. Just the name, the safety bike. It kind of cracks me up.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, no, the name safety bike is funny. It's not the sexiest name, you know, it sort of sounds like you're underselling the thing. It's like it's just safe, yeah. Yeah, wow, it's safe. But it does bespeak the enormity of the problem beforehand because it really was the case that, you know, through the 19th century up until the mid 1880s, bicycles really were a kind of fringe phenomenon because they were viewed as unsafe. I mean, there were various other kind of reasons in the culture, social prejudices against the idea of women riding, children riding, which limited the numbers of riders. But prior to this period, you know, bicycles were viewed as something for daredevils.
SPEAKER_01: In the period of the bone shaker and the penny farthing, bicycles were something more like, you know, a pet rock or a like a hula hoop.
SPEAKER_06: It was a trend on that level. With the arrival of the safety bicycle, you have like an Internet sized cultural phenomenon, social phenomenon where, you know, it's a mass movement. By the time you get to the 1890s, there are millions of riders, millions of bicycle commuters in the United States and in Western Europe and in the UK, elsewhere. So the bike took off in the 1890s and it became this cultural phenomenon, but it faced a lot of pushback. And you have this whole section of your book with, you know, some negative responses to the bike.
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_03: And I wanted to read one. And this is from the Wichita Daily Eagle in 1896. The bicycle has appeared in a new role, that of destroyer of a once happy home. The woman in the case is Mrs. Elma J. Dennison, formerly of 513 5th Street, Brooklyn, 23 years old, a bicycle girl who rides a man's wheel and wears bloomers. Mr. Dennison says that his wife developed the bicycle fever to such a degree that she neglected everything, her home, her children and her husband. She lived only for her wheel and on it. I mean, that just sounds like so over the top. But you found so many examples of this from newspapers at the time. Why did the bicycle face so much pushback? Yeah, in the 1890s, the bicycle had so many enemies. There were guardians of morality and Victorian values. There were preachers and clergymen who invade against the bicycle from the pulpit.
SPEAKER_06: There were newspaper editorials who thought that bicycles were ruining the American economy, were driving children out of schools, were emptying church pews. There were people in the horse trade. There were tailors, manufacturers of cigars, even barbers said that their business was being ruined by the arrival of the bicycle because nobody wanted to shave anymore. An interesting thing, though, to note about this is this idea of a bicycle craze or a bicycle mania. There was a lot of kind of pseudo medical ideas circulating about the bicycle in this period and about various types of diseases, psychological and otherwise, that had beset society or beset individuals who were riding around too much. So, yeah, there was this idea that there were bicycle fiends or bicycle maniacs who, because of excessive biking, had essentially been driven crazy and were doing all sorts of terrible antisocial things. And there were a number of physical maladies and ailments that were attributed to the bicycle, everything from bicycle face, the idea that as if you rode along too fast for too long that your face literally like contorted and changed shape or you became, you know, knocked knee or hunched back. And this literature, by the way, isn't just like in the popular press, but it's literally in medical journals from this period. The bike had this period where it was the domain of dandies and hobbyists. But as soon as you get the safety bike era, it becomes political. It becomes a symbol of progressivism in a million different ways.
SPEAKER_03: And it was used in protests and social movements. Could you talk specifically about the role of the bike in women's suffrage?
SPEAKER_06: I think pointedly, the bicycle was embraced by women as a means of both personal and collective emancipation in this period. Prior to the arrival of the safety bicycle, you know, the early bicycles, it was a very gendered machine. There were a few women who rode them, but generally it was thought to be a machine for men, for sportsmen in particular. Well, the safety bicycle was very clearly a device that could be, it could be ridden safely by anyone, including women. And women took to the machine en masse. If you think about women in the United States and Western Europe and UK in this period, you know, the kind of haute bourgeois, middle class, upper middle class women in Victorian society, the clothing they wore at this time, if you think about what big whale bone corsets or, you know, giant hoop skirts, it was hard to move around on those things on foot, let alone mount a bicycle and ride one. So very quickly, women who wanted to ride bicycles said, okay, we've got to get some different clothing going here. So the dress reform movement was really catalyzed by bicycles, what was known as the rational dress movement. So women embraced new types of clothing, including famously bloomers, these kind of like MC Hammer style pantaloons, right? So the bicycle very much became a symbol of so-called new womanhood in this period. And it was associated with these reforms and with activists, with agitators for women's rights, for women's suffrage, for the right to vote. Women didn't just take to bicycles en masse as commuter vehicles, they used them as kind of tools of protest. You know, there were bicycle protests where women kind of rode together to the barricades to agitate for the vote, etc. There was this idea that women, you know, needed to travel around with chaperones while suddenly the bicycle freed them up to move quickly around unchaperoned and God knows what they could get up to when they're on a bicycle going who knows where doing God knows what. Again, everything sort of circles back to women and sexual purity in this period. I mean, I really like the, you know, the neuroses of society at large are very clear. If you look at the bicycle history, it makes it all, everything always seems to kind of circumnavigate back to this issue. Moving forward, the bicycle was a fixture of protests around the world throughout the 20th century. And in your book, you cite many examples of protests in England and North America where bikes were front and center.
SPEAKER_03: But one protest stands out above the rest and that is China in 1989. Could you tell me how bicycles became a fixture in the protests in Tiananmen Square?
SPEAKER_06: One crucial fact to take on board about bicycles is that they're kind of sneaky and elusive machines. You can weave through traffic on them, you can get away quick on them. You can mobilize a protest rather quickly on bicycles and disperse rather quickly. And they've actually been useful tools of protest for something like 150 years because of this. And this is something that, you know, we see in various places and moments in history. But perhaps the place where the bicycle has the most interesting kind of political trajectory is in China because there was a good period of time where it was essentially like a state mandated mode of travel. We had the Chinese Revolution in 1949. Very soon thereafter, Chairman Mao pushes for the manufacturing of bicycles on a mass basis. He puts a lot of money and muscle behind the development of a Chinese bicycle industry. And by the time we get to Deng Xiaoping, like in the 1980s, the bicycle is essentially, as I say, a state mandated device. It was thought to be one of three tools that every Chinese person needed if they were going to settle down and have a family. You need to have a radio, a sewing machine, and a bicycle. There are a couple of extremely famous bicycle brands, chiefly the Flying Pigeon, which is kind of like the Ford of Chinese bicycles. And Deng Xiaoping said, like, you know, there should be a flying pigeon bicycle in every household in China. There very nearly was. By the time we get to 1996, which is the kind of very peak of the bicycle era in China, there's something like 500 million bicycles on the roads in China. So you asked about the Tiananmen Square protests. Well, in 1989, you know, there were of course these student-led protests agitating for greater democracy. Well, everybody in Beijing rode bicycles, especially young people. So the protest in Tiananmen Square, which brought, you know, hundreds of thousands and eventually one in a million people into the square, there really were bicycle protests because you had tens of thousands of people kind of sweeping through the streets, traveling to Tiananmen Square on bicycles. The protests themselves used bicycles in various ways. And then famously, when the crackdown happened in June 1989, you had bicycles that were whisking the wounded in and out of Tiananmen Square. People, regular Beijingers, threw their bicycles in the path of the army tanks that were rolling into the square in an effort to stop them. So symbolically, the bicycle, it had always been the main means of transportation for the Chinese people for decades, but suddenly you had this kind of showdown between the might of the state and the army in the form of these giant tanks rolling in. And you had this kind of people's resistance with these pokey little bicycles. Yeah. Well, so you mentioned the fact that bicycles are just part of Chinese culture and they were encouraged to be that way and supposed to be in every household. In fact, there was like 1.5 bikes for every household in the country.
SPEAKER_03: There was a real concerted effort to turn it into a car culture at a certain point. Why and how did that happen?
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, so this is in the post-Tiananmen era, with the turn of the 21st century, there was, you know, China embraced what they called market socialism, this kind of form of really hyper capitalism that is there now. It was sort of a trade off because, you know, you had the Chinese government opening up various types of material prosperity to Chinese citizens that had previously been unimaginable. But the kind of Faustian bargain was, you know, we're not going to give you all the political rights that you want, but we're going to give you all kinds of material affluence that you've never had before. And part of that movement was an effort in the same way that Chairman Mao had led an effort to develop a Chinese bicycling industry. Well, they said we've got to get into the car manufacturing business. And boy, did they succeed because, you know, today China is the world's largest both manufacturer and consumer of cars. And they developed a car culture which dwarfs that even of the United States, the network of highways and expressways that has been built in China over the last three decades is almost twice the size of the interstate highway system here in the United States. You had ancient urban cores, you know, cities really redesigned, you know, kind of raised and redesigned for cars, big eight lane highways going up, where previously you'd had kind of twisty, winding medieval streets that were easy to get to. And you had streets that were easy to ply on bicycles. So China went hard after car culture and suddenly the bicycle, which for years had just been a fact of life and the way everyone got around, not only was discouraged, but was kind of actively stigmatized. It was marginalized both on the roads, but also there was a lot of social stigma attached to the idea of riding bikes because it was thought to be associated with the bad old days with poor people. Now there's a kind of movement back in China, kind of a turn back to bicycles, especially with the rise of the e-bike, which is sort of a compromise maybe between automobiles and cars and is a kind of wonder device. But yeah, China is a super interesting story because it's really, you know, during that peak period of cycling culture in China, you know, China was known as the kingdom of the bicycle. And you have this kind of insane bicycle boom there, which lasted for decades, followed by this intense turn against the bicycle. And now throughout the world, what we're seeing in places like the US and elsewhere is a kind of attempt by policymakers and certainly bicycle advocates and activists to try and recreate the kind of cycling culture that China developed rather organically in this period. So we're all sort of lusting after what it is that China cast off.
SPEAKER_03: You know, there's nothing inherently political about a bike. In big parts of the world, it's a very utilitarian machine. It's just this way to get around. It's unrelated to politics. But it's clear that the bike means a lot of different things in a lot of different cultures.
SPEAKER_06: So one thing that I learned in writing this book is that time and place really matter. There's no fixed meaning to a bicycle, you know, even within a city, any given city, you know, a bicycle can signify kind of like a status symbol or, you know, almost a luxury good. And in another part of town, it can be a purely utilitarian or even a device of the proletariat. It can be a tool of protest and it can be a tool of counterprotest. So if you look at the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020 here in New York, you have these remarkable protests where there were thousands taking to the streets, many of them on bicycles, where they were met by these kind of armored up bicycle cops. New York has an elite division of bicycle riot police who were kitted out in these sort of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, you know, hockey goalie type riot gear, and who not only were riding bikes, but were using bikes in various ways as weapons. They weaponized the bicycle itself. So they were using bicycles as kind of shields and in various cases as battering rams. So there's an instance in which, you know, the meaning of the bicycle is literally being fought out right there on the street, block by block. You know, this is another reason that I wanted to investigate the bicycle and write this book because the connotations of a bicycle really depend on where and who you are in any given place. So it's wrong to kind of pigeonhole what a bicycle is or who a cyclist is. There's just a lot of stereotypes and maybe kind of shallow thinking around bicycles and I was hoping to kind of complicate some of that.
SPEAKER_03: When we come back, what is the future of the bike in a world that feels like it was custom built for cars? More with Jody Rosen after this. What's more important, making sure you're set for today or planning for tomorrow? You can actually do both at the same time. With annuity and life insurance solutions from Lincoln Financial, you're not just taking care of you and your family's future. You're also helping yourself out today. Lincoln's annuities offer options to not only provide you with your guaranteed retirement income for life, but to help protect you from everyday market volatility. And their life insurance policies not only provide your family with a death benefit, but some can even give you immediate access to funds in case of an emergency. Go to Lincoln Financial dot com slash get started now to learn how to plan, protect and retire. Lincoln annuities and life insurance are issued by the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Products sold in New York are issued by Lincoln Life and Annuity Company of New York, Syracuse, New York, distributed by Lincoln Financial Distributors Inc., a broker dealer.
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SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I think the pandemic really was a crucial moment for sure. So millions of people around the world were seeking a socially distant means of travel around town. And there was the bicycle, you know, the bicycle has a way of coming back. So suddenly you had lots and lots of people kind of rediscovering that three speed that they'd stuck in the basement. Or noticing that their cities had bike share programs and you could subscribe to a bike share program or go rent one, you know, pull one out of a docking station at the corner and, you know, get around town in a quick and easy way. And I think a lot of people discovered something that maybe hadn't occurred to them because of maybe they hadn't even tried it, but just it's so pleasant to travel by bicycle. It feels so good, you know, just it's like, you know, physically and you might even say spiritually uplifting means of travel. And it's also extremely quick and convenient and, you know, a lot more fun than sitting in, you know, a box in traffic sweating while horns are blaring all around you. At least you can be cruising past the boxes or threading your way through them. But, you know, I think what's really important is in many, many places around the world, there was infrastructure that was kind of thrown up on the fly during the pandemic. So these kind of temporary bike lanes were thrown up in which in many places became permanent bike lanes. There were a lot of cities that did this better, a lot of places that did this better than we did in the United States. So, for instance, I think of Paris where they have the current mayor there. Anne Hidalgo is a zealous proponent of cycling, which makes her a controversial figure over there for sure. But she has, you know, sort of by force of will imposed cycling on Paris. The Rue de Rivoli, a major thoroughfare there, is kind of turned into a default cycling highway. She has plans, there are plans there to kind of ban cars from a lot of the, around these malls, the central districts of Paris. So the pandemic presented this like, you know, this kind of opportunity because suddenly a lot more people were on bikes. A lot of people were discovering, hey, this is a real good way to get around. And the more visionary or maybe even just aggressive policymakers and office holders said, we got to move forward and seize the moment and push some of this stuff through. So as to what the future holds for biking, it's very much up for grabs. There's a lot of pushback about this stuff. You know, here in New York City, there's, we have a plan in place, you know, congestion pricing has been approved, but for various bureaucratic reasons that it hasn't been implemented yet. People are very resistant to this because, you know, a lot of people are very attached to their cars and car culture itself is very powerful, powerful force politically and otherwise. So it's going to take a lot to make cities in the U.S. maybe look like those great cities in Northern Europe, which are places like Copenhagen and Amsterdam that are really cycling cities. But I think in certain places we'll get there. And I think it hopefully will have a domino effect because people who visit those places realize just how much better it is to get around on a bicycle or a scooter or what have you.
SPEAKER_03: Anyone who lives in a city has probably seen an e-bike, which is an electronic bike that has some pedal assist. Like, I mean, I guess you can use it without pedaling at all, but it basically makes it so that you can go up steeper hills and longer distances than you probably could on a regular bike. Are those here to stay? Like, will they be a big part of cycling's future? I think the advent of the e-bike is a really crucial development in all this because it's a lot less physically taxing to ride a bike.
SPEAKER_06: They're really amazing. And I think people who might be resistant to sweating as they're grunting along as they try and mount a hill on a regular old bike, when they whiz uphill on a pedal assist e-bike, suddenly the whole world opens up to them. And moreover, this utilitarian value is definitely a cut above in certain ways. If you're running late for a meeting and you don't want to show up dripping with sweat, you can get on an e-bike and get there in your suit looking the part. So maybe the rise of the e-bike will be a crucial development, which will help bring about the cycling culture that I think we need, at least in cities.
SPEAKER_03: You obviously love cycling and bikes, but you write about this phenomenon in the book called the adaptive golf. And it's kind of like how, for some people, the dream of riding a bike is so far from what it's like riding a bike as a beginner that it can be kind of hard to get into. What do you think about that issue for people who aren't cyclists, especially in cities? I've seen that up close and personal in my own household recently because I have a nine-year-old and we are in the extreme of a cycling household.
SPEAKER_06: My wife and I both get around by bike. My older son, who's 18, tears around New York City on his bike. But for whatever reason, my nine-year-old has not been able to bring himself to learn to ride a bike. Daddy wrote a book about bicycles. And yet he's not into it. So he's the passenger on my bike. I actually have a special seat that I had to get from Holland, which is sufficiently sturdy to bear the weight of a nine-year-old. In most cases, nine-year-olds have graduated to their own bicycles. But for him, it's that very thing. Learning to ride a bike, it's actually extremely easy once you get the knack of it. But you do have to get the knack of it. And until you do, it's hard to imagine that you're going to be able to. I recently actually had lunch with a colleague, actually rather well-known journalist who writes for, let's say, a paper of record in New York City. I'm not going to name names, but he's an adult who's never learned to ride a bike. And I tried to tell him, dude, you got to get on a bike. It's very easy to do. And he intellectually, he knows that he could learn to ride a bike. But as you say, some sort of like conceptual golf that he can't cross and bring himself to do it. Yeah. Jody Rosen, thank you so much for talking with me. And thanks for the book. I really enjoyed it. It's just delightful.
SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Roman. It was so great to be here.
SPEAKER_03: Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald, Lasha Madon, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, intern Olivia Green and me, Roman Mars. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 Pi org on Instagram, Reddit and TikTok, too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99 Pi at 99 Pi dot org.
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