by Eric Reed
trends. The bicycle emerged as an object of mass consumption in many soci-
eties at roughly the same time — the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies. German innovator Baron von Drais, the chief forestry offi cer of the
Grand Duchy of Baden, invented the draisienne, the precursor to modern bicycles, in 1817 in an effort to speed his forest inspection tours. The draisienne featured a wood frame that linked two wooden wheels rimmed with iron. The
rider pushed the machine forward and backward with his feet and braked by
applying shoe pressure to the front wheel.
Between the 1860s and the 1890s, Scottish, French, and American crafts-
men invented and exchanged key technologies and industrial processes that
s p o r t , b i c y c l i n g , a n d g l o b a l i z a t i o n i n t h e p r i n t e r a 13
contributed to the development of the modern, all- metal, two- wheel, pedal-
driven bicycle. Bicycle innovators in different workshops knew of their rivals’
technologies and borrowed ideas freely from each other.22 Mass production of
the bicycle led to a rapid decline in prices and a sharp increase in demand. By the mid- 1890s, most people could afford bicycles. A “bicycle craze” erupted
on both sides of the Atlantic, and Europeans and Americans bought tens
of millions of machines. Annual bicycle sales in France grew from 203,026
units in 1894 to 3,552,000 in 1914.23 American sales peaked in the mid- 1890s.
Robert Smith estimates that Americans bought 400,000 bicycles in 1895 and
had invested $500 million in bicycles and bicycle accessories by 1896.24 Adults rather than children comprised the fi rst generation of cyclists. American suffragist Frances Willard learned to ride a bicycle in 1895 at age 53 and wrote of her experiences to encourage other women to ride. The learning process involved twenty- two hours of private lessons over three months, some of which
were conducted under the guidance and protection of six strong young men
and women who lifted Willard onto the machine, pushed her from behind,
steered the bicycle, and hovered around her in case she lost her balance.25
The bicycle emerged as a potent cultural symbol that was synonymous
with modernity and progress, for good or for ill. The technological evolution
of the bicycle allowed humans to move faster than almost any creature or ma-
chine constructed by the 1890s. With Western society increasingly obsessed
with speed and technology, the possibilities offered by the bicycle captivated
the popular imagination. The bicycle symbolized the increasing democratiza-
tion of society. More and more men and women from all levels of the social
hierarchy gained access to the freedom and mobility that bicycles accorded.
Since the act of riding a bicycle was the same for men and women — it was
the only mass sport in which the rules and equipment were the same for
both sexes — feminists hailed the bicycle as a sign of female emancipation
and of the leveling of the social playing fi eld. Frances Willard and her fel-
low American suffragists recognized the power of the bicycle and “rejoiced
together greatly in perceiving the impetus that this uncompromising but fas-
cinating and illimitably capable machine would give to that blessed ‘woman
question.’”26 For others, the bicycle embodied many of the social and cultural
threats of modernity, especially the dissolution of traditional class barriers
and gender roles. British physician Arabella Kenealy, recounting the caution-
ary, fi ctitious tale of “Clara,” a young female bicycler, concluded:
Clara the athlete was no longer the Clara I remembered two years earlier. . . .
Where before her beauty was suggestive and elusive, now it is defi ned. . . .
Her movements are muscular and less womanly. . . . As the greatest charm
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c h a p t e r o n e
of Clara’s face — the charm that she has lost in the suspicion of “bicycle face”
(the face of muscular tension)— was incommunicable, a dainty elusive qual-
ity which could not be put into words nor reproduced on canvas, so the high-
est of all attributes are silent, as for example sympathy.27
Kenealy argued that medical evidence demonstrated that the bicycle and
other sports “unsexed” women and led them to abandon motherhood and
the domestic sphere.28
In Europe and the New World, debates about proper bicycling attire em-
blemized rapidly evolving dynamics of class, gender, and leisure around the
turn of the twentieth century. In France, differences between men’s racing
and recreational cycling garb became metaphors for class distinction; men
who dressed for speed rather than genteel style risked being associated with
the working classes, from which most competitive cyclists originated.29 De-
bates over female bicycling apparel carried profound meanings in the arena
of gender politics. The “bloomer craze” that accompanied the bicycle craze in
Europe and America challenged traditional notions of female respectability
and comportment. Many women chose to mount their bicycles in pants- like
bloomers rather than long skirts and corsets — Willard described a corset- clad rider as “miserable as a stalwart nun”— both as a political statement and to
make riding simpler and safer.30 Although they looked to France for bloomer
fashions in the 1890s, American women cyclists’ penchant for the puffy-
legged pantaloons endured after French clothing designers turned away from
them. Furthermore, the American “bloomer craze” provided inspiration for
more functional female clothing styles into the twentieth century.31
In both Europe and North America, professional, competitive bicycling
matured into a popular spectator sport as the “bicycle craze” reached its peak
in the mid- 1890s. The capacity of bicycles to magnify human locomotive
power captivated the public on both sides of the Atlantic. The short- distance
sprint contests and long- distance road races created during the “bicycle
craze,” and the star cyclists who survived them and triumphed, embodied
the Western love affair with the bicycle. Thousands of contests sprung up
across the Western world in this heyday of the bicycle. Competitive cycling
was self- consciously internationalist. In the last decades of the nineteenth
century, promoters and manufacturers sponsored numerous races that fea-
tured stables of professional riders from America, France, Britain, and else-
where.32 It should be noted, as well, that the French invented and controlled
the most important formal structures and governing bodies of international
sport in this era, including the International Cycling Union, the International
s p o r t , b i c y c l i n g , a n d g l o b a l i z a t i o n i n t h e p r i n t e r a 15
Olympic Committee, and the Fédération Internationale de Football Associa-
tion (FIFA).33
In America, short- distance sprinting contests dominated the professional
cycling scene. African- American pedaler Marshall “Major” Taylor vaulted to
the top of American sprinting in the mid- 1890s. Taylor grew up in Indiana,
one of eight children and the son of a coachman. In 1891, bicycle entrepre-
neur Thomas Hay employed thirteen- year- old Taylor as a shop hand and
trick rider in his bicycle store in downtown Indianapol
is after Taylor im-
pressed him with a riding stunt. The following year, Hay entered Taylor into
a ten- mile race sponsored by the store, expecting the young rider to clown
and inject some crowd- pleasing humor into the spectacle. Instead, Taylor
won the race handily. It was the fi rst of hundreds of victories for him.34 Taylor established dozens of records, including at least seven world one- mile speed
records, and won several head- to- head national and world track cycling
championships. Jim Crow laws and mindsets limited Taylor’s racing oppor-
tunities in America. He became an international star athlete who demanded
enormous appearance fees and traveled to Europe and Australia — also em-
broiled in a “bicycle craze” at the turn of the twentieth century — to compete against the world’s top sprinters.35 During the peak of the French craze of the 1890s, sprint cycling contests became an entertainment staple and generated
sizable gate revenues at urban venues like the Paris Buffalo velodrome.36 At
the fi rst modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, three of the six cycling
events were short- distance sprint races.
France, Belgium, and Italy were the cradles of road racing and Western
Europe emerged as the world’s road racing epicenter in the 1890s. The inter-
city road race, which by the early twentieth century was the staple event of
professional cycling, was invented in 1869 by Le Vélocipède Illustré, a Grenoble cycling newspaper, and sponsored by France’s most important bicycle manufacturer, the Compagnie Parisienne.37 Short- distance road races of less than
fi fty kilometers, many of which were sponsored by small cycling newspapers,
sprung up in subsequent years across France.38 In the early decades of road
racing, growing professionalism challenged the amateur ideal upon which
many of the early road races had been founded. For example, the organizers
of Belgium’s now- classic Liège –Bastogne –Liège road race excluded profes-
sional racers from participating in its fi rst two editions in 1892 and 1893. Most of the early road races, however, allowed amateur and professional cyclists to
compete against one another.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the modern sport of profes-
sional cycling began to take shape in Europe. Sprint and track racing con-
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c h a p t e r o n e
tinued to fl ourish. Important one- day events like the Grand Prix de Paris
sprint competition generated large gate receipts in the decade before the First World War.39 Many of the “classic” road races that today remain cycling’s
most prestigious contests were established in Western Europe between 1891
and 1914. Sports newspapers in France, Italy, and Belgium created new and
ever- more- spectacular races to entice readers to purchase copies. One- day
competitions created during this time include the Bordeaux –Paris (1891),
Liège – Bastogne – Liège (1892), Paris – Roubaix (1896), the Tour of Lombardy
(1905), and the Milan – San Remo (1907). Following the creation of the Tour
de France in 1903, the sporting press in other countries created “national”
tours of their own, the most prestigious of which was the Tour of Italy (1909).
Bicycle manufacturers, hoping victories in these races would lead to higher
sales, hired teams of professional racers to carry their brands into competi-
tion. By the eve of the Great War, a rough calendar of competitions had been
established. Thanks to their domination of emerging international govern-
ing bodies of cycling, French journalists and industrialists established a fairly unifi ed competitive schedule and rule system that benefi ted French cycling
interests.40 A corps of itinerant professional cyclists devoted themselves to
racing full- time throughout Western Europe. Millions of fans followed the
races and their favorite star cyclists in the pages of Europe’s sporting press.
The formal and informal exchanges of bicycle technologies, debates about
the meaning of the bicycle in the mass press on both sides of the Atlantic,
and the rise of a transnational, professional spectator- oriented sport of com-
petitive cycling illustrate many of the points of convergence in turn- of- the-
century Western sporting culture. Nevertheless, the period of convergence
proved to be short- lived. At the moment when the bicycle became a mass
transatlantic phenomenon, the regional histories of bicycling began to di-
verge starkly. Despite the globalization of the bicycle — by the 1930s, scores
of Asian manufacturers supplied bicycles to tens of millions of Chinese, Jap-
anese, and Indians — the national histories of bicycling were characterized
more by difference than convergence.
2. Divergences: Bicycling around the World
The meaning of the bicycle, as well as characteristics of the bicycling industry and the professional sport, differed signifi cantly from place to place. It was the local context that determined how, why, and for what purposes change over
time occurred. This rang true for all the emerging global sports. Soccer was
played around the world with the same rules by the late nineteenth century,
but its cultural and political meanings differed from place to place. For ex-
s p o r t , b i c y c l i n g , a n d g l o b a l i z a t i o n i n t h e p r i n t e r a 17
ample, in metropolitan France dynamics of class and work shaped the sport.
Middle- class Anglophiles founded early soccer clubs in the Belle Epoque, but
by the interwar years working- class men joined clubs associated with the fac-
tories that employed them.41 In early twentieth- century Algeria, meanwhile,
soccer became a “theater for a confrontation” between Muslim Algerians and
French colonial authority.42 In Latin America, soccer emerged as a passion-
ate pastime of the urban poor by the late nineteenth century, more quickly
than anywhere else. Team rivalries expressed tensions of class, ethnicity, and
neighborhood in the continent’s teeming cities.43 Local contexts shaped base-
ball’s history, as well. In the United States, the social and associative functions of baseball clubs were as important as the athletic experience of playing the
game. The “baseball fraternity” of the 1840s and 1850s became a cornerstone
of sociability for certain groups of middle- class men in New York and other
growing cities in the American northeast. The class dynamic counted; young
middle- class men’s membership in exclusive baseball clubs conveyed a kind
of respectability that could distinguish them from other strata in the rapidly
evolving urban social structure.44
Cubans began to play baseball in the 1860s, only shortly after the sport
was invented in New York City. Baseball became a touchstone for Cuban dis-
courses of revolt and national independence from Spain, even after the Span-
ish regime outlawed the sport in 1869. Baseball even had a place in Commu-
nist revolutionary culture in the 1950s and 1960s. It was widely believed that
had talented pitcher Fidel Castro pursued a professional career — it was ru-
mored that American professional teams had drafted him in the 1950s — the
Cuban Revolution might never have occurred.45 In other Caribbean nations,
as well, playing baseball took on anti- imperialist, especially anti- American, overtones.46 In Meiji Japan, which took up the sport in
the 1870s, playing
baseball enhanced Japanese virtue and manliness. Numerous Japanese vic-
tories against American teams in the 1890s were widely celebrated in the na-
tion’s press as symbols of Japan’s rise to power on the world stage.47
The history and meaning of the bicycle also differed dramatically from
place to place.48 For example, Catalonia’s failed attempts to establish and control a Tour of Spain just before the Great War mirrored larger struggles for
national power and infl uence between Barcelona and Madrid.49 In the United
States, the “bicycle craze” ended fairly quickly in the early 1900s and the professional spectator sport of cycling was short- lived. Ironically, the American bicycle industry may have been instrumental in ushering in its own demise.
David Hounshell points out that the bicycle stirred the American obsession
with rapid personal transportation but “could not satisfy the demand which
it had created.”50 Instead, Americans turned to the automobile to satisfy their
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c h a p t e r o n e
desire for speed and mobility. Many of the technologies and manufactur-
ing techniques developed for the bicycle — such as rolled- tube metal fram-
ing, transmission chains, friction brakes, the inner tube, as well as the use of assembly lines, metal stamping, and interchangeable parts — served as the
mechanical foundation and manufacturing model of the fi rst generations
of automobiles.51 The burgeoning automobile industry appropriated many
business practices pioneered by bicycle manufacturers such as guarantees on
equipment, nationwide distribution and sales forces, and planned obsoles-
cence of models to stimulate sales. By the early twentieth century, and despite the surge in bicycle sales during the Depression and the Second World War,
the bicycle in America had been reduced to the status of a child’s toy.52 The
United States emerged as the most motorized society in the world, with ap-
proximately one car per American family on the roads by 1930.53
Europe’s transformation into a motorized society occurred later than in
the United States, in part because the bicycle had been integrated into urban
transportation networks and remained a primary mode of personal trans-
portation for many parts of the European population. In 1930, for example,