by Robert Penn
The social ramifications were immense. In New England there were blizzards in July. Many farmers were wiped out, prompting both the rapid settlement of New York and expansion into the mid-west. In Ireland, 65,000 starved to death. In England there were food riots and the dramatic colours of the dust-laden sunsets inspired a young landscape artist, J. M. W. Turner. Byron wrote his poem Darkness. In Switzerland, the endless winter moved the 18-year-old Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.
In 1816, known as the ‘year without a summer’, the harvest failed across the Western world. The role of the price of oats was then something like the price of oil today. In southern Germany ‘true famine’ prevailed, according to the historian Carl von Clausewitz. There, farmers who could no longer afford oats to feed their horses, shot them. An eccentric German aristocrat, Baron Karl von Drais de Sauerbronn, a former student of mathematics at Heidelberg University and inventor, witnessed the slaughter. Without horse power, society faced an even graver crisis. Inspired by necessity, Drais realized a dream as old as mankind: he conceived a mechanical horse with wheels.
The ‘Draisine’ was invented in 1817. It was the first prototype bicycle. Also known as a ‘laufmaschine (‘running-machine’), it comprised two wooden carriage wheels in line, a wooden bench which the rider straddled, and an elementary steering system. You didn’t pedal. You propelled it by scooting or paddling your feet along the ground: travelling downhill or at speed, you lifted both feet off the ground.
It was original. No one had previously put a pair of wheels in line, on a frame, and made use of the fundamental precept of the bicycle: balance by steering. It was thought then that without your feet on the ground, you’d fall over. The Draisine taught humanity that you can balance on two wheels in line if, and only if, you can steer.
One of the big, unanswered questions in the history of the bicycle is: why, when technology had made it feasible for at least 3,500 years, did the Draisine take so long to invent? A hypothesis is that no one believed you could actually balance on two in-line wheels. It is possible that Drais only worked it out himself by chance. He may have anticipated stabilizing the machine by almost constant use of the feet: only when it was built, and he was ripping down a hill did he raise his feet from the ground and realize he could achieve the same with the help of the steering mechanism.
By imparting velocity to a machine, Drais also accelerated the act of walking or running, while simultaneously reducing the energy consumption required. To prove his point, he rode from Mannheim, where he lived, to the Schwetzinger Relaishaus and back in an hour, along Baden’s best road. The same journey took three hours on foot.
With hindsight, we know that the Draisine was the earliest ancestor of the bicycle. At the time, it did not make a significant impression. The machine was expensive, cumbersome and weighed some 100 lb. The poet John Keats scornfully called it ‘the nothing of the day’. It was ahead of its time. Roads, especially in winter, were generally too awful to ride on. By 1820 the machines had been banned from pavements in Milan, London, New York, Philadelphia and Calcutta. In Europe, when the harvests recovered, the Draisine fell into obscurity and the dream of a mechanical horse was abandoned for forty years. Ironically, the Draisine is now having a popular renaissance — in the form of a toy bike thought to be the ideal way to help children learn balance. It’s a fine example of things going full circle.
Today, we take the ability to ride a bicycle for granted. This is partly because we think it’s easy — once learnt, never forgotten — and partly because the vast majority of us learn when we are children. It was not always so. Throughout the history of the bicycle, adults attended ‘riding schools’ to learn how to maintain the machine in equilibrium, just as we take driving lessons today. Denis Johnson, an enterprising London coach-maker who custom-made Draisines, opened the first riding school in Soho, in 1819. He charged a shilling a lesson, catering for the upper-class Regency dandies, among whom the machine was fashionable for a summer, hence its nickname, the ‘dandy-horse’.
The next great evolutionary leap for the bicycle happened in Paris during the 1860s: rotary cranks and pedals were attached to the front wheel of the Draisine and the ‘velocipede’ was born. In 1868—70 it sparked a fashionable craze — ‘velocipede mania’ — on both sides of the Atlantic. The addition of pedals meant the rider’s feet were off the ground all the time. Since the pedals were attached to the front wheel, the handlebar had to be braced against the side-to-side effect of pedalling and, when turning, the steering was encumbered by the pressure of pedalling, due to the misalignment between the leg and the plane the pedal rotates in. In consequence, everyone went to ‘school’ to learn how to ride. The first Parisian velocipede manufacturer, Michaux et Compagnie, opened an indoor training school in 1868, beside their new factory. Free lessons were given to people who bought velocipedes; the rest hired instructors by the hour. After half a dozen lessons, riders were sent out to brave the streets.
When a velocipede from Paris was demonstrated at a gymnasium in London in 1869, people were amazed. The magazine Ixion: A Journal of Velocipeding, Athletics, and Aerostatics, carried a report by John Mayall, later a great advocate for cycling:
I shall never forget our astonishment at the sight of Mr. Turner whirling himself round the room, sitting on a bar above a pair of wheels in a line that ought, as we innocently supposed, to fall down immediately . . . I turned to Mr. Spencer and exclaimed, ‘by Jove, Charley, there’s a balance!’
Later the same year, an article in the periodical Scientific American breathlessly concluded: ‘That a velocipede should maintain an upright position is one of the most surprising feats of practical mechanics.’
In April 1869, the Pearsall brothers opened their ‘Grand Velocipede Academy or Gymnaclidium’ on Broadway, New York. Hundreds of influential citizens attended to try out the new craze. The famous acrobatic brothers, the Hanlons, also opened a school. Some ‘velocinasiums’ advertised women-only classes, and hired female instructors. Books of riding instructions were published. Entrepreneurs quickly spread the craze for riding ‘academies’ or ‘rinks’ across the country: by late spring, Boston had twenty schools, most major cities had at least a dozen and every small town had one.
In 1869 an American journalist summed up the reasons these schools were so popular:
Velocipedes are pretty things to look upon as they whirl along so swiftly and gracefully, operated by some practiced hand. But did you ever try to ride one? It seems an easy thing to sit on the little carpeted seat, put your feet upon the treadles, and astonish everybody by your speed; but just try it! And don’t invite your lady friends to witness that first performance either. You mount the machine with a great deal of dignity and confidence, you see that all is clear, you undertake to place your feet in the proper position, and – the trouble begins. Your first half hour is spent [deciding] which shall be uppermost, yourself or the machine, and the machine exhibits an amount of skill and perseverance that astonishes you.
When the velocipede evolved into the ‘high-wheeler’ or ‘ordinary’ in 1870 (the nickname ‘penny-farthing’ was only used later), having an instructor was highly advisable. The pedals were still attached to the front wheel, inhibiting the steering, the rider was seated high over the front wheel and there was now a long, long way to fall. Again, a plethora of riding schools sprang up, usually associated with a bicycle manufacturer. When Columbia Bicycles relocated its headquarters in Connecticut, the à la mode offices featured, on the fifth floor, ‘the most complete riding school in existence’.
In 1884, at the age of 48, Mark Twain said, ‘I confessed to age by mounting spectacles for the first time, and in the same hour, I renewed my youth, to outward appearance, by mounting a bicycle for the first time. The spectacles stayed on.’ Twain’s essay, Taming the Bicycle, on learning to ride a high-wheeler with a hired instructor or ‘Expert’, illustrates well the perils of the machine:
He [the Expert] said that the dismounting was perhaps the hard
est thing to learn, and so we would leave that to the last. But he was in error there. He found, to his surprise and joy, that all that he needed to do was to get me on to the machine and stand out of the way; I could get off, myself. Although I was wholly inexperienced, I dismounted in the best time on record. He was on that side, shoving up the machine; we all came down with a crash, he at the bottom, I next, and the machine on top.
After several further attempts – ‘the result as before . . . you don’t get down as you would from a horse, you get down as you would from a house afire’ — Twain did finally mount the machine:
We got up a handsome speed, and presently traversed a brick, and I went out over the top of the tiller and landed, head down, on the instructor’s back, and saw the machine fluttering in the air between me and the sun. It was well it came down on us, for that broke the fall, and it was not injured. Five days later I got out and was carried down to the hospital, and found the Expert doing pretty fairly. In a few more days I was quite sound. I attribute this to my prudence in always dismounting on something soft. Some recommend a feather bed, but I think an Expert is better.
The Expert returned to the fray with four assistants and Twain eventually learnt to balance and steer:
The bicycle had what is called the ‘wabbles,’ and had them very badly. In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was against nature. That is to say, that whatever the needed thing might be, my nature, habit, and breeding moved me to attempt it in one way, while some immutable and unsuspected law of physics required that it be done in just the other way . . . For instance, if I found myself falling to the right, I put the tiller hard down the other way, by a quite natural impulse, and so violated a law, and kept on going down. The law required the opposite thing — the big wheel must be turned in the direction in which you are falling. It is hard to believe this, when you are told it . . . The intellect has to come to the front, now. It has to teach the limbs to discard their old education and adopt the new.
Twain memorably concludes: ‘Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.’
Many who rode high-wheelers didn’t. With the arrival of the safety bicycle in 1885, the world finally had a machine that was both safe (at least compared to the high-wheeler) and easy to steer. Since the pedals were attached via a chain to the rear wheel, the front wheel was free again to undertake its principal responsibility — steering. Only the aged and the overly prudent required ‘experts’ now. Leo Tolstoy, aged 67, took instruction in 1895 and Jerome K. Jerome reported how, around the same time in London’s parks, ‘elderly countesses [and] perspiring peers, still at the wobbly stage, battled bravely with the laws of equilibrium; occasionally defeated, they would fling their arms round the necks of hefty young hooligans who were reaping a rich harvest as cycling instructors: “Proficiency guaranteed in twelve lessons.”’
For the greater part of humanity, balancing on a safety bicycle was straightforward. In The Complete Cyclist, published in 1897, A. C. Pemberton wrote: ‘What each learner must remember is simply to turn the handles in the direction in which he is falling . . . the rest is easy’ — a fact that lies at the heart of the universal appeal of the bicycle to this day.
Bicycling Science, an academic tome on the physics behind the machine, explains balancing a bike as: ‘making the small support motions necessary to counter each fall as soon as it starts, by accelerating the base horizontally in the direction in which it is leaning, enough so that the acceleration reaction (the tendency of the centre of mass to get left behind) overcomes the tipping effect of unbalance’.
Perhaps Twain put it better but the point is that balance is at the heart of the story of the bicycle. Drais understood this, even if he did discover it by accident. And the key to balancing a bicycle is learning to steer the handlebars the way the bicycle is leaning, putting the centre of mass back over its support, and regaining equilibrium. Only temporarily, of course, for a bicycle follows more or less a curving trajectory, continually deviating a little to one side or the other. I’ve often wondered if it is this — the eternal serpentine course of the bicycle, the ‘dignified curvature of path’ as H. G. Wells called it — that lies at the root of my love for the machine.
Initially a child learning to ride a bike will refuse to steer the way the bike is leaning; once this is grasped, the child will over-correct, yanking the handlebars to left and right, veering dramatically from side to side like a sailor on shore leave full of rum. In time, the steering adjustments become more subtle, and second nature.
If you restrain or lock the steering on a bicycle, you cannot ride it. If you’ve ever got the front wheel of a bike stuck in a tram track, or off-road in a narrow rut, you’ll know what I mean. In addition, a bicycle has to be moving forward to balance. Balancing a bicycle at rest — a manoeuvre known as a ‘track stand’ — is difficult. The fixed-wheel riders you see at city traffic lights managing to balance their bikes without dabbing a foot down are only nominally at rest. With the front wheel set at an angle, they are minutely rolling the bicycle backwards and forwards. They are also showing off. I know. I used to do it.
For a year I became obsessed with not putting a foot down whenever I cycled in London. Being able to do a track stand at traffic lights was one of the skills required: anticipating lights and braking early, knowing when to run them on amber and intuiting the manoeuvres of motorists were also critical. I regularly used to get from my flat in Paddington, north of Hyde Park, to the college in the City where I studied photo-journalism, without ever dabbing a foot down. That was easy: 4 miles — I knew the sequence of the lights at the major intersections and my route avoided main roads. More difficult was riding from Paddington to Camberwell, south of the River Thames, where my girlfriend lived. If I arrived and rode up the garden path, grinning like a fool, she knew I’d done it. ‘You make people who won’t walk on the cracks in the pavement look normal. You should seek help,’ she’d say. The relationship didn’t last.
Even today, there is a small minority of adults who can’t ride a bicycle, let alone pull a track stand: roughly 8 per cent of women and 1 per cent of men in Britain, according to a recent Transport for London survey. Apparently, most able-bodied adults can grasp the rudiments in one three-hour session. The best thing about learning to ride a bicycle, though, is that you will only have to do it once.
There is a neuroscientific explanation for why we never forget how to ride a bicycle. We have a type of nerve cell in our brain that controls the formation of memories for motor skills. They’re called ‘molecular layer interneurons’. These nerve cells encode electrical signals leaving the cerebellum — the part of the brain that controls co-ordinated movement — into a language that can be stored as memory in other parts of the brain. Of course, our molecular layer interneurons don’t only encode the skills required to ride a bicycle; they encode all motor skills, from crawling to skiing and from knitting to dancing the tango.
What this doesn’t explain is why riding a bicycle has been singled out as the one shared experience that we reference to illustrate how something once learnt can be etched in the memory so distinctly that we take it to the grave. ‘It’s like riding a bike’ — we say this about something we never forget how to do. Why not the expression ‘like rowing a boat’, ‘like using chopsticks’ or ‘like doing breast stroke’ instead? For some reason, we’ve chosen riding a bike as the benchmark motor skill by which our molecular layer interneurons may be judged. I don’t know why. I’m not sure if anyone does.
It may be to do with the relationship between the bicycle and childhood. As I’ve said, most of us now learn to ride a bike early in life, ‘before the dark hour of reason grows’, as John Betjeman put it. Perhaps, in youth, the cerebellum sends out stronger electrical signals, which are in turn encoded very carefully and stored in a secure place — the cerebral equivalent of a safe-deposit box in a steel vault beneath a bank in Zurich. Or perhaps it’s to do with
the fact that riding a bicycle fits so perfectly with the human software that our molecular layer interneurons can encode the motor skills and guarantee that the files won’t be corrupted for the life of the user.
It may also be to do with how incredibly well balanced the safety bicycle is. It’s so well balanced, it doesn’t need a rider at all. If you let a well-aligned, riderless bicycle, with freely turning steering, roll down an incline, it will remain straight and upright, up to a speed which depends on its design. A riderless bicycle can even automatically make the small steering motions necessary to right itself after a bump or disturbance of some kind. Physicists call this ‘intrinsic stability’. It is often written that the gyroscopic momentum of a bicycle’s spinning wheels alone support a riderless bike, like a spinning top. This is not true. The gyroscopic effect is one of several subtle concepts, including geometry and the distribution of mass, behind a self-balancing vehicle.
With or without a rider, a bicycle does need a well-balanced and maintained steering system to remain upright. This comprises the handlebars, the handlebar stem, the front forks and the headset. The forks have a steering tube, which passes through the head tube of the frame; the stem and handlebars are clamped to the steering tube. The headset is principally made up of two bearing assemblies or cups that are pressed into the top and the bottom of the head tube of the frame. The headset permits the forks to rotate independently of the frame, for steering and balance.
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‘We think of it as an initiative test,’ Chris DiStefano said, greeting me with a big handclap at the door of an unmarked, unassuming factory down the end of Nela Street, a dead-end road that had neither a sign nor any road markings, at the arse-end of a large industrial estate in north-west Portland, Oregon. Finding Chris King Precision Components had taken half a morning. I’d asked directions two dozen times: ‘Nope. ’Fraid I ain’t never heard of that place,’ came the reply every time. It seemed strange. The company has a reputation for making superbly engineered bicycle components — hubs, bottom brackets and, most notably, headsets. That reputation has reached around the planet and yet people who worked a block away had never heard of Chris King. Hell, they’d never even heard of Nela Street. It was confirmation of something I learnt a long time ago travelling on a bicycle: if you want local knowledge, don’t, for God’s sake, ask a local. In the end, I’d found it, as one first finds equilibrium on a bicycle, by trial and error.