On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 5/1/2001
So simple...and so right
Someone once said that the bicycle is the last machine man invented that he really understood. It's a clever line, and while it's obviously not precisely correct, like all witty epigrams, it contains a kernel of truth and wisdom. (I'm not counting modern brake/shifter pods in this "understood" category. No normal person knows how those work. But the basic bike...yes.) I've been thinking about the invention of the bike lately...
| Healdsburg Wheelmen |
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| Click to enlarge |
There is a wonderful old photograph in the collection of the Healdsburg, California Historical Society and Museum showing a group of cyclists-in fact, the Healdsburg Wheelmen-lined up on their town square, circa 1900. They're posing for the photo, with their bikes, before heading out on a Sunday ride to the thermal pools of Skaggs Springs, at the far north end of Dry Creek Valley.
I love this picture. I've seen it in an exhibit, blown up to a few feet on a side, and I wish you could see it that way too--instead of as a little 72-dpi web image--because it's rich with detail. Some of the cyclists are dressed in what we would consider quite formal attire for riding: suit coats and knickers. A few of the fellows are proudly wearing their club sweaters, with "H-W" stitched across the chest. No helmets, of course, but an assortment of hats, including bowlers and boaters. Casual, everyday fashions 100 years ago were not really all that different from current styles (for men anyway). Most of the stalwart young lads in the picture would not look out of place if they walked down the sidewalk of Healdsburg plaza today.
For that matter, the plaza where the picture was taken has not changed all that much in the intervening century either. There have been myriad changes to the town and the surrounding countryside, but the plaza itself remains for the most part consistent with its past. On the other hand, if the Healdsburg Wheelmen were to ride to Skaggs Springs today, well...they couldn't get there. The old hot springs are now bubbling away at the bottom of Lake Sonoma, behind Warm Springs Dam. However, much of Dry Creek Valley would be familiar to them. The forested ridgelines and the rolling hills along the creek have changed very little, except that the old prune orchards that made Healdsburg's town motto "Buckle of the Prune Belt" have been displaced by the ubiquitous vineyards that now make the town the epicenter of Sonoma County's wine world. Most of the old Victorian farm houses are still there, and still in good shape. The old road, probably an oiled dirt track then, is now a two-lane asphalt road, with wide shoulders to give cyclists a little elbow room next to the passing stream of cars heading to the lake. Many another community has been altered beyond all recognition over the past century, but our region has been fortunate in that what development we have experienced has been fairly benign.
Our own, 21st-century cycling club forms up for rides on the Healdsburg plaza, much as the fellows in the photo did so many years ago. We still ride up and down Dry Creek Valley, sometimes stopping for water at the visitors' center below the dam. Or we stop at the nearby country store, an old, historic structure which would be immediately familiar to the Wheelmen of old, although the sign out front might puzzle them: "Best deli by a dam site!"
But of all the elements in the picture that are similar--or not--to the way things are today, the one element that has remained the most constant is the bicycles. Look at them, lined up so neatly in the picture: they are completely recognisable and plausible as bikes as we know them today. Oh sure, there are numerous differences. They have "mustache" handlebars instead of drop bars. Their tires are more substantial than ours. (Remember those oiled dirt roads.) And Tulio Campagnolo's bright idea for a derailleur was still a few years away when this picture was taken. There actually were bikes at the turn of the century that were virtually identical to today's bikes in every way--except for the lack of derailleurs--as can be seen in the illustration on the cover of the American Wheelman reproduced here.
If one of those riders were to be catapulted into the future, and were to show up with his bike for one of our rides, he would hardly turn a head. We'd probably just take him for one of those retro guys, in a wool jersey, with a fixed-gear bike. Quaint, but not outlandishly out-of-step. Things might be a bit more jarring if one of us drifted back in time to one of their rides. Our garish jerseys and shorts would certainly raise a few eyebrows, and then the riders would zero in on our components, exclaiming, perhaps in scorn or perhaps in delight. Hard to say which. But in either case, the essence of the bike would be clear for all to see and understand, and any cyclist from either epoch would immediately know how to throw a leg over the top tube and ride.
Contrast this with the changes in design and form of that other newly invented vehicle from the turn of the century, the automobile. What looked then for the most part like what it was called--a horseless carriage--has been altered so thoroughly as to be utterly unrecognisable across that span of years, were we not able to see all the stages of refinement in between. It's true that an automobile has many more parts than a bicycle, and thus many more discrete bits that can be altered and improved. But then, that's at least part of what makes the bicycle so special: its elegant simplicity.
The bike as we know it did not emerge suddenly in splendid perfection, like Venus on a half shell. There were many false starts and hiccups along the way, as the pastime of riding gained popularity. In the latter half of the 19th century, real men rode "ordinaries" or high-wheelers. It took a brave fellow to mount and ride one of these precarious steeds though, and if that had been the zenith of bicycle design, I doubt many of us would be involved with the activity today. It wasn't until someone had the idea of driving the rear wheel with a chain from further in front--equidistant between two smaller, matching wheels--that the basic geometry of the modern bike was set...what at the time was known as a "safety" (as opposed to the clearly unsafe high-wheelers).
I'm not enough of an historian of the bicycle to know who gets credit for this brilliant innovation, and from what I've read, I'm not sure even the experts agree on who had the idea first. I do know the British were marketing such a bike in 1885, and within a decade, there were over 300 bicycle factories making similar designs in the United States. One of the biggest, the Pope Manufacturing Company of Boston, was turning out a new safety bicycle every minute at an average price of $100. At the turn of the century, bicycle racing was the most popular spectator sport in America, outdrawing even the national pastime, baseball. There were bike clubs in every town and city in the country, and every major magazine--not just the specialty publications--ran articles and advertisements for and about the sport.
But the point of this column is not to recapitulate the history of the bicycle. The point I'm trying to make, in my usual windy way, is how wonderfully right that first invention of the safety bicycle was. Whoever came up with the concept got it right, and the passage of over 100 years has only served to reaffirm how right that design was, and is. Some environmental think tank recently hailed the bicycle as the single most important invention ever for promoting a better, greener world. That announcement stated, "The bicycle is the most energy efficient form of travel ever invented and the world's most popular transport vehicle. Pound for pound, a person on a bicycle expends less energy than any creature or machine covering the same distance."
The same basic bike design that works for a professional racer works for a recreational tourist, a cycle-commuter, and a third-world peasant hauling freight. And all of those bikes are easily seen to be close kin to the bikes of those Healdsburg Wheelmen of so long ago...before the car; before the airplane; before the radio, phonograph, or television; before computers, lasers, or microwave ovens; dot.coms, e-mail, or faxes...before 99% of the machines that manage and mangle our modern lives, was the bike. And after them all, there too is the bike, still going strong. Still as elegantly simple and low-tech and efficient as it ever was. The components have been improved, and the materials have made advances, but the basic design remains the same: a few lengths of pipe welded into three triangles, plus three circles (two wheels and a crankset). Add a handful of gears, a chain, a few wires, nuts, and bolts--all of which could fit in a small paper bag--and you end up with a spindly little assembly right out of a Tinker Toy set...an unlikely little widget of which Rube Goldberg would have been proud.
And yet it works and works well. It can be lightweight and yet amazingly sturdy and durable. It can be flexible and rigid at the same time...each property exhibiting itself in the most beneficial and appropriate manner. It can go a mile a minute and yet stop on a dime. And it does all of what it does in almost complete silence, with minimal maintenance, and with no pollution.
I suspect most of us take the design of our bikes for granted. We may fuss and obsess over our components and gruppos, over titanium vs carbon fiber vs steel, but how often do we consider the basic premise of the initial invention? The original vision of that particular geometry? Do we ever marvel at the leap of faith we make: that this narrow, two-wheeled gizmo--that can't stand up on its own at rest--becomes a nimble, maneuverable vehicle when in motion? (Thanks to those two large, stabilizing gyroscopes...otherwise known as wheels.)
As long as our bikes are set up approximately the way we want, and perform adequately, most of the time we hardly know they're there, as we cruise along--our pedaling cadence almost as unconscious as our breathing--chatting with our companions and admiring the scenery. That's the beauty of them: they do their job without calling attention to themselves. But the next time you're out there, rolling down the road, spare a moment to contemplate the sublime genius of that humble little contraption upon which you are sitting. Consider how easily and simply it does what it is asked to do, translating your pedal strokes into forward motion.
Perhaps the reason no one person can be given sole credit for inventing the modern bicycle is that an idea so right, so simple, and ultimately so obvious, must have occurred to many an active mind almost simultaneously, like multiple lightning strikes across a summer prairie. And once that great idea took hold, it spread like a wind-driven grass fire, sweeping up those Healdsburg Wheelmen in its first furious blaze, then catching and consuming all of us, as it moved on around the world and down the generations.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net