September 23, 2025 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, before cars ruled the roads, the bicycle was America’s great innovation. Known in its early years as the “mechanical horse,” it gave ordinary people freedom of movement and reshaped everything from medicine to road building. Margaret Guroff, author of The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life, shares the story of how two wheels set a nation in motion.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. From the modernization
of medicine to the development of our country's road systems,
the bicycle has had a major impact an American life.
Though its rise occurred in the nineteenth century, cycling is
still something that's very popular in our country today. Margaret Goroff,
(00:31):
author of The Mechanical Horse, How the Bicycle reshaped American Life,
brings us the story.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Here's Margaret.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
The first thing that looked like a bicycle was invented
in Germany by a guy named the Baron Vondres, and
he was making this during a time where there had
just been a major volcano eruption in what's now Indonesia,
and that had caused a lot of soot and air
(01:06):
pollution to kind of blot out the sun. Basically for it,
there was a whole summer eighteen sixteen where it was
called a year without a summer in Europe because it
was so cold and cloudy, and that affected the harvest
that year. In the next year, there wasn't enough food,
particularly for horses. A lot of horses had to be
put down. And so there's a theory that part of
(01:29):
what gave him the idea to make this thing was
that he was looking for a substitute for a horse,
something that could replace these animals that were in short
supply because of this meteorological event. So he made this thing,
and the object was called a drazine, and it looked
a lot like a modern bicycle, except that it didn't
(01:51):
have petals. So it was very heavy, made initially with
wood and then with iron, and the way you would
get around on it was kind of straddle it and
just push off like sort of red flintstone, one foot
in front of another. They compared it to ice skating
on land. It kind of spread in continental Europe that
(02:13):
year eighteen seventeen. You couldn't actually weren't factories, but he
wrote about it, and other people would look at the
pictures and try and build one. The next year it
came to America. Somebody made one that was displayed in Baltimore,
and it was a curiosity.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
People would pay to come and see it.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
And one of the people who saw it was an
artist by the name of Peel who was from Philadelphia,
and he had his own museum again of curiosity. He
is one of the first people to excavate a full
dinosaur skeleton in the United States, which he had on
display at his museum. And he also saw this draysine
(02:58):
in Baltimore home and paid someone to build him one.
And these machines were this kind of amazing revelation to
people because it was one of the first things that
would help you go as fast on land as a
horse because you could roll. You could get it rolling.
(03:19):
Now you couldn't go uphill with this thing. They weighed
a ton, but if you were going downhill, you go
really fast, and that was an astonishing new development. There
was a brief kind of a fad of these, but
they were very not only heavy, but very expensive to build.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
You really had to be rich to.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Have one, and so they sort of were a curiosity
in the United States first summer, and they kind of
went away and people forgot that they even existed for
nearly fifty years. The next technological innovation was putting pedals
(03:59):
on this thing, and again it still didn't look like
a modern bike. They just took pedals and stuck them
on the axle of the front wheel. And the person
who did that in this country was named Pierre la Lamont.
He was a French immigrant who came here in eighteen
sixty five, so right at the very end of the
(04:19):
Civil War. And when he came, he came with this
machine that he had built in Paris that was basically
like a dresine, except it added the pedals, and he
came to Connecticut and got a job in a factory,
I believe, but he also spent his time reassembling this thing,
(04:40):
working on this thing, and that is the first known
bicycle with pedals, So it's the first thing that you
could just sit on and keep going without touching the
ground for an indeterminate amount of time, which again was
a new technological marvel.
Speaker 4 (04:56):
Nobody had ever seen or heard of anything like this.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
L Lamon actually got an American patent for this machine,
and there are stories about him riding it around in
the countryside near an Sonia kind of get where he's from.
And there's one story that he was kind of going
down a hill and lost control of the bicycle and
nearly hit these two guys on a horse carriage, and
(05:21):
the two guys took off because they didn't know what
was coming at them. They end up in a bar
a tavern. He crashes, gets himself up and kind of
staggers into the tavern and he hears them talking about
how they had seen the devil coming at them, just flying,
not touching the ground, and his response was I was
(05:42):
the devil. So he goes back to France not long after,
and it turns out that nobody's quite sure how, but
there were people in France who were also starting to
make this device. Whether they had seen him do it,
who knows, but they were adding pedals to the old
drazine structure. And this was at the end of the
(06:05):
eighteen sixties. Now these were called also velocipedes, and there
was a velociped mania in France. Everybody was riding them.
And then that came over here. There were some European
gymnasts and there was a stage show and they came
over here and we're riding these devices on stage. And
(06:27):
again they were fast and they were also they had
this character of seeming magical because nobody could really understand
how you could balance on these two wheels and just
keep going. I mean, there was even a story in
a Scientific American about it where it's like, we're not
quite sure how this works. That happened over a winter,
(06:51):
and people in the United States, again, people of means
because these were not cheap, started to buy them or
rent them or just go to They started to have
these bicycle schools where you could go to learn to
ride one, which again was something that no adult knew
how to do, so it was hardgoing.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
And then they started racing them.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
But this was all indoors during a winter, and they
predicted that as soon as the summer came, everyone was
going to be riding these things, and it was this
whole new again, you know, the mechanical horse. The thing
that happened then when the weather turned warmer was that
(07:36):
in Europe people kept riding these things because European roads
were much better than American roads, so there was all
kinds of technology in Europe to make these roads, stone
roads that were domed so that they shed water. In
the United States at that time, the road technology was
(07:58):
way worse. We were a lot more dependent on rivers
and waterways and canals by then and railroads forgetting people
and goods around the country. So in the United States,
the weather turn warmer, everybody went outside and you couldn't
really ride these things on the roads. The roads were
too bumpy or they were too muddy. These velocipedes were
(08:21):
still very heavy. The wheels were like wagon wheels, they
were made of wood. It was not a smooth ride,
and it just became something that was not practical. So
people had been racing them, and there had been this velocipied.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
Mania, but in the United States that vanished very, very quickly.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
And you've been listening to author Margaret Goroff tell the
story of the history of the bicycle, particularly here in
the United States, so that we get a taste of
what was going on in Europe as well. Her book
The Mechanical Horse of the Bicycle re shaped American life. Oh,
it's a heck of a story about our culture and technology.
(09:06):
And that first pedal on the front wheel, Well, it's
a French immigrant who patents this idea, and of course
it spreads like wildfire. I love the name of the bicycle,
then the velocipede.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
I wish that had stuck. That's a really great name.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
And of course a lot of the development in Europe
had to do with the sheer fact that they simply
had better rows. As Margaret said, we relied on canals
and rivers to move so much of what we moved
along in this expansive country. When we return more of
the story of the bicycle and how it reshaped American life.
Here on our American Stories, and we're back with our
(10:10):
American stories and the story of the mechanical horse aka
the bicycle. When we last left off, Margaret Gooff had
told us about the surge and popularity of the bike
in the early eighteen hundreds, followed by the sudden drop
off once people began to try to ride them on
the roads. The roads were unfit for the wheels and
(10:32):
cyclists were searching for solution.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Let's return to Margaret.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Before there were cars, it was the bicycle community that
kind of helped develop the road system that we have.
So early in the country's history. Country roads in particular
were not built by the government. They were not funded
by the government. It was just the responsibility of whoever
(11:00):
farmed the land near the road to make sure that
the road was passable, otherwise that farmer couldn't get their
goods to town to market. There was in some places
a road tax that was calculated in terms of labor,
so you would be tacked like a day or two
days a year of having to go show up as
(11:22):
if you were on a jury. You just get called
and you have to show up to kind of fix
the roadway, which means moving some dirt around. And that
was not very well done because it was you know,
it was not professionally done. It was done by a
lot of people who you know, were just doing it
so that they could say they did it. In the cities,
it was the responsibility of the adjacent property owner to
(11:45):
maintain the roadway. But obviously everything's a little closer together,
so you didn't have as much responsibility for as much roadway.
And in the cities the roads would be paved, although
not necessarily with stone. It could be gravel, it could
be you know, wood that would brought. And this was
the way it had always been, this system of maintaining
(12:07):
the roads, and it was perceived by the people whose
responsibility it was to do it, that is, the property owners,
that it was fine, you know, and they didn't want
to be taxed more. They didn't want to pay money
for some you know, professional to come in and do whatever.
They also didn't want to be required to build roads
(12:28):
that were up to European standards. You know, you can't
tell a farmer, well, instead of moving dirt around, now
you're gonna have to break a lot of stones. In addition,
the United States didn't really have the expertise to know
how to build roads that would stay dry and stay
usable all year long. There was typically a season of
every year where the roads were just so muddy and
(12:49):
mucky that no one could go anywhere in the countryside.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
You just had to stay home.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
So what happened with the velocopies, the first petal velocipity,
first philosophy mania that couldn't really go on American roads
and just sort of died out. What happened in Europe
was that the technology continued to develop, and one of
the things that they discovered was that if you make
your wheels not out of wood with wooden spokes, but
(13:17):
out of wire spokes, they were light enough weight that
you could make them bigger, and the bigger your driving
wheel is the faster you can go for each turn
of the pedals. Because again there were no chains yet,
so your wheel turned as fast as you could turn it.
But if it was a bigger and bigger wheel, each
turn would cover more ground. So they created these wirespoke
(13:39):
wheels that got as big as they could get, which
is twice the length of the rider's leg. And that's
when you see those big wheel bikes, the Penny Farthings
that are just like way over your head. And you
would order those basically by in seam size and they
would build them for you. And these bicycles, because the
arc of the higher was more gentle. When they started
(14:03):
to come over to the United States in the mid
late eighteen seventies, people could ride these on the bad
roads because a smaller wheel is going to catch every
single bump, but a big arct wheel like that is
going to roll easier on the road. Now, again, these
were very expensive, and also you had to be kind
of strong to get on these, and you had to
(14:26):
for the most part where pants, which meant that this
was something that strong men of means younger men usually
were doing. But these bicycles became popular among young businessmen
who would start to try and go out in the
country ride on the country roads, and they started investigating
(14:46):
the parts of the countryside that were in between railroad stops.
Speaker 4 (14:51):
So this was new.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
You know, these people hadn't really been traveling through there
for a long time, and they noticed that the roads
were no good. And so these young industrialists or whoever
they were lawyers and doctors and all that. They started
agitating to improve the roads, and they made the point
that it would be better for the farmers they could
(15:14):
get their goods to market more easily, more consistently. So
they started they banded together, they created a lobby, and
they started agitating for the government to start paying for
improvements and teaching civil engineers how to maintain these roadways.
(15:34):
And at first there was a lot of resistance, particularly
from the farmers because they had their hands full, but
the bicyclists were able eventually to make the case to
the farmers that this would have mutual benefits. And one
of the ways that the government ended up encouraging this
(15:54):
also was by extending mail delivery as long as the
roads were able, and so if a farmer wanted to
get mail delivery at their house instead of having to
go into town every time, they had to make sure
that their roads were possible. So this alliance inspired the
first state highway.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
Expenditures on roadways.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
These big wheel bicycles were really for wealthy young men,
the older people, people who you know, had disabilities, women
who were wearing you know, heavy skirts that wouldn't accommodate
them they couldn't enjoy them. And what happened in the
late eighteen eighties was that they hit upon the chain
(16:41):
drive for bicycles. With a chain, you can make a
wheel turn more than once for every time you crank
the pedals, and so that meant that these bicycles that
had been so high could come back down to the
level of the earlier pedal velociped but could still be
and so they had the lighter weight wirespoke wheels, the
(17:04):
air filled rebber tire which helps with bumps on the road.
So when that happened, when the bicycle came down again,
that opened it up for a lot of different groups
of people who had not been able to ride the
high wheeler.
Speaker 4 (17:18):
So that meant women, older men, children.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
That's when bicycling really started to take off in this
country in the early eighteen nineties. And what women in
particular found was that unlike before when if they wanted
to go to another town, they needed a horse, they
needed a carriage, they needed a driver, They needed to
be from a family that was wealthy enough to have
(17:45):
those things. They needed permission from their father, from their husband.
They couldn't really travel independently. When you start to get
this lower bicycle, which was called the safety bicycle, and
it eventually becomes more affordable. You find people traveling longer distances,
and women traveling longer distances under their own steam and
(18:09):
without being observed, without chaperone, so you know, you could
go places that the train didn't go, You could go
places that you couldn't walk to. And there was a
there's actually a study that had to do with the
genetic makeup of people in the countryside, and they had
found that because of the bicycle, because people could go
(18:31):
farther for courting, that actually the genome in those areas
became more varied. That people were going farther to find
their partners. And there was this sense that, you know,
women should not be part of the public sphere, they
should stay home, They should be just leaving the rest
of the world on its own. Now you start to
see women in particular, but all kinds of people who
(18:54):
have bicycles as being more out and about and on
their own, you know, without having to check in with anyone,
which was considered dangerous to the moral order.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Actually, and you've been listening to Margaret Gooff tell the
story of the bicycle, and in the end about so
much more, particularly how the bicycle helped shape cultural life
in this country. When we return more of the story
of the mechanical horse.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
That is the history of the bicycle.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Here on our American Stories, and we're back with our
American stories and with author Margaret Gooff telling the story
(19:44):
of the bicycle and America.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
When we left off, she just told us about the bicycle.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Boom in the eighteen nineties, when a technological innovation, the
lowering of the bicycle thanks to the chain, allowed more people,
including women, to access writing and increase mobility.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Back to Margaret with the rest of the story.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
So in Europe there had been a move towards more
scientific understanding of medicine and health. In this country, people
thought of doctors as kind of in charge of the
whole person. They're not just their physical wellbeing, but sort
of their moral wellbeing and how that could play into
(20:32):
their health. There was a thought that each person had
their own individual chemistry, like just because something was good
for one person didn't mean it would be good for everybody.
Each person had to be individually analyzed by their doctor
who knew them well. And one of the things that
American doctors were saying about the bicycle was that you
(20:57):
shouldn't write it or you shouldn't override, because you only
had so much energy in your life, like a battery
that you can't recharge, and you had to conserve that,
and you couldn't You couldn't be going out exercising willy nilly,
because you would just wear yourself out and then you'd die.
And there were certain things about American life that supported this,
(21:19):
like the clothes that women wore. Middle class women at
the time were expected to wear these very restrictive corsets
that they needed in part because the weight of their
clothes and the weight of their skirts was so much
that they needed this infrastructure underneath that would distribute the weight.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
So it wasn't all just sitting on their hips. But
you could be.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Wearing twenty five pounds worth of clothing. You'd be wearing
very narrow, pointy shoes, and so these women were in
these very tight things that kept them from breathing well,
and they weren't exercising, so they had no muscle strength,
and so they were very frail. A lot of them
they couldn't, you know, you couldn't catch your breath or
(22:01):
you would faint, and the doctors were saying, well, of
course a person like this should never.
Speaker 4 (22:05):
Exercise, because that would be the end of them.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
But what happened with the bicycle and I were talking
about in the eighteen nineties the safety bicycle, is that
they were so enticing and they seemed like so much
fun that people were willing to try them, you know,
even though the doctors were saying, please, don't do this,
you'll die. And these women could not wear these corsets.
(22:29):
They had to figure out a different way to dress
themselves because it just didn't work on the bicycle. So
they started wearing just for bicycling, not in the rest
of their lives, but for bicycling.
Speaker 4 (22:40):
They would wear a.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
Looser undergarment, they would wear shorter skirts. They would go
riding around, they would get a little exercise, they would
get a little sun, and they would feel better and
people started feeling stronger, people started, you know, feeling healthier.
And that was part of a larger move that combined
(23:02):
with what was going on in Europe and the fact
that there were, you know, the communications between America and
Europe were tighter. We were seeing a lot of people
immigrating from Europe including people who had medical knowledge. So
there were you know, there were discovering all these new
things about health and discovering the germ theory of disease.
(23:24):
There was a lot going on, but part of what
was going on was that people who were riding these
bicycles and feeling better were realizing, you know, my doctor
doesn't know everything, and you can test something out and
see whether it works. And if you know, exercise works,
exercise makes you feel better. And this also showed that
(23:47):
there were in fact some things that were like good
for everybody that you didn't need this individual like person
studying you and telling you how your moral life would
be improved or changed their way whatever. You could say,
well maybe everybody should eat more roughage, or everybody should
do this, you know. So it was part of and
(24:08):
played into a larger change in how people thought about
health and medicine at the time.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
The beginning of the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
The production of bicycles ramped up like crazy. Producers were
making new innovations in how bikes were built. They were
adapting technology from making plows and making tractors, and so
the bicycles became by eighteen ninety seventeen ninety eight, just
(24:39):
the market was just flooded with them, and some of
them were not good, which a lot of people say
is another reason for the boom to end was that
there were just a lot of bikes on the market
that were dangerous, falling apart, or that didn't give you
that exhilarating experience that got people hooked. In the eighteen
nineties bike boom, it seemed like every nobody was riding
(25:00):
a bike, got more and more popular, they got cheaper
and cheaper to buy, they were more and more used ones,
so it seemed like everybody was doing it. And then
right around the turn of the century boom stopped. People
stopped using it for the most part. I mean, there
were still people who rode them and used them for work,
but they weren't a fad anymore. The myth has long
held that the car was invented and everyone just moved
(25:22):
directly from bicycles to cars, and that that's what killed
the bike boom. But in fact, the car was invented
at the end of the nineteenth century and invented by
people who had been bicycle mechanics. First Henry Ford, Yes
he was a bicycle mechanic and he adapted a lot
of bicycle technology, wheels and stuff like that, gears and
(25:44):
everything to what he was doing, but they were very expensive,
so it wasn't until Henry Ford in the second decade
of the twentieth century started mass producing cars that ordinary
people would start to afford them. So there was this
ten year gap when people really had stopped riding bicycles,
(26:06):
but before a lot of people could start being able
to afford a car.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
But the thing that made it much more difficult for
people to ride bicycles at the beginning of the twentieth
century was things.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
Like streetcars, which were cutting up the roads and cities
and went fast, and you know, there were beginning to
be cars on the roads, so it just became less
practical for people to use a bike for entertainment. What
happened in the nineteen seventies was that again a new
technology for US, lightweight European ten speed.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
Bicycles came over and then we started building.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
American ten speeds and that got really a lot of
young people on bikes in the mid nineteen seventies, and
some of those young people had the same kind of
organizational aspiration as the earlier bikers who had fought for
just may roads, and so with this new group, you
see people advocating for old railway right of ways that
(27:07):
weren't being used for anything to be turned into rail trails.
Speaker 4 (27:10):
That starts happening in the seventies.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
And also the first dedicated bike lanes in cities like
New York are happening in the nineteen seventies. You also
had bike messengers at that point. I mean, there's a
whole bunch of stuff going on. The thing about the
bike is that it comes and goes. Right now, I
think a lot of people are finding really practical uses
(27:36):
for it, especially in cities where distances are shorter. But
there have been times recently in our recent history where
nobody rode a bike, and there are still places in
the country where you can't really But the times when
bicycles are popular coincide with times when they are perceived
as fun and safe. And what's happening right now is
(27:59):
that a lot of cities have been investing in bike
lanes and also in bike share companies bike share programs,
and that gives people a way to use a bike
without really taking their lives into their hands. And now
we're seeing another new technology that is really starting to
(28:22):
catch on, which is electric bicycles, which make it super
easy to go up a hill. They're getting cheaper, they're
getting lighter weight, and that's coinciding with a huge older demographic,
baby boomers who came of age maybe in the nineteen
seventies bike boom, after a period when nobody rode a
(28:42):
bike really and they want to keep riding their bikes,
but they maybe.
Speaker 4 (28:46):
Don't want to deal with those hills anymore.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
So this electric addition, it's something else that is fun
and practical, and I think that's a lot a large
part of why right now we're seeing a lot of
people on bikes. So before the bicycle, really the only
way to travel a long distance in this country, other
(29:08):
than on.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
The waterways, was with a horse, whether it was riding
a horse or.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
A horse and carriage, and the creation of the bicycle
really affected the way we live now.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Madison Dericot, and a special thanks to
Margaret Goroff. The Mechanical Horse, How the Bicycle Reshaped American
Life is her book and it's available wherever you buy
your books, and it was just a blast to just
walk through American life and the bicycle, and where the
(29:41):
two intersected, and how the bicycle changed in some ways
and in many ways American life. And my goodness, when
we hear about where the science was as related to
let's say, exercise, and how we had a finite amount,
so we should be careful how we use it up.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Be careful.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Anytime anyone says the science is settled, that's a humbling,
humbling anecdote about where the consensus was on science in
the eighteen nineties. The story of the bicycle, the mechanical horse.
Here on our American Stories
And we returned to our American stories. From the modernization
of medicine to the development of our country's road systems,
the bicycle has had a major impact an American life.
Though its rise occurred in the nineteenth century, cycling is
still something that's very popular in our country today. Margaret Goroff,
(00:31):
author of The Mechanical Horse, How the Bicycle reshaped American Life,
brings us the story.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Here's Margaret.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
The first thing that looked like a bicycle was invented
in Germany by a guy named the Baron Vondres, and
he was making this during a time where there had
just been a major volcano eruption in what's now Indonesia,
and that had caused a lot of soot and air
(01:06):
pollution to kind of blot out the sun. Basically for it,
there was a whole summer eighteen sixteen where it was
called a year without a summer in Europe because it
was so cold and cloudy, and that affected the harvest
that year. In the next year, there wasn't enough food,
particularly for horses. A lot of horses had to be
put down. And so there's a theory that part of
(01:29):
what gave him the idea to make this thing was
that he was looking for a substitute for a horse,
something that could replace these animals that were in short
supply because of this meteorological event. So he made this thing,
and the object was called a drazine, and it looked
a lot like a modern bicycle, except that it didn't
(01:51):
have petals. So it was very heavy, made initially with
wood and then with iron, and the way you would
get around on it was kind of straddle it and
just push off like sort of red flintstone, one foot
in front of another. They compared it to ice skating
on land. It kind of spread in continental Europe that
(02:13):
year eighteen seventeen. You couldn't actually weren't factories, but he
wrote about it, and other people would look at the
pictures and try and build one. The next year it
came to America. Somebody made one that was displayed in Baltimore,
and it was a curiosity.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
People would pay to come and see it.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
And one of the people who saw it was an
artist by the name of Peel who was from Philadelphia,
and he had his own museum again of curiosity. He
is one of the first people to excavate a full
dinosaur skeleton in the United States, which he had on
display at his museum. And he also saw this draysine
(02:58):
in Baltimore home and paid someone to build him one.
And these machines were this kind of amazing revelation to
people because it was one of the first things that
would help you go as fast on land as a
horse because you could roll. You could get it rolling.
(03:19):
Now you couldn't go uphill with this thing. They weighed
a ton, but if you were going downhill, you go
really fast, and that was an astonishing new development. There
was a brief kind of a fad of these, but
they were very not only heavy, but very expensive to build.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
You really had to be rich to.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Have one, and so they sort of were a curiosity
in the United States first summer, and they kind of
went away and people forgot that they even existed for
nearly fifty years. The next technological innovation was putting pedals
(03:59):
on this thing, and again it still didn't look like
a modern bike. They just took pedals and stuck them
on the axle of the front wheel. And the person
who did that in this country was named Pierre la Lamont.
He was a French immigrant who came here in eighteen
sixty five, so right at the very end of the
(04:19):
Civil War. And when he came, he came with this
machine that he had built in Paris that was basically
like a dresine, except it added the pedals, and he
came to Connecticut and got a job in a factory,
I believe, but he also spent his time reassembling this thing,
(04:40):
working on this thing, and that is the first known
bicycle with pedals, So it's the first thing that you
could just sit on and keep going without touching the
ground for an indeterminate amount of time, which again was
a new technological marvel.
Speaker 4 (04:56):
Nobody had ever seen or heard of anything like this.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
L Lamon actually got an American patent for this machine,
and there are stories about him riding it around in
the countryside near an Sonia kind of get where he's from.
And there's one story that he was kind of going
down a hill and lost control of the bicycle and
nearly hit these two guys on a horse carriage, and
(05:21):
the two guys took off because they didn't know what
was coming at them. They end up in a bar
a tavern. He crashes, gets himself up and kind of
staggers into the tavern and he hears them talking about
how they had seen the devil coming at them, just flying,
not touching the ground, and his response was I was
(05:42):
the devil. So he goes back to France not long after,
and it turns out that nobody's quite sure how, but
there were people in France who were also starting to
make this device. Whether they had seen him do it,
who knows, but they were adding pedals to the old
drazine structure. And this was at the end of the
(06:05):
eighteen sixties. Now these were called also velocipedes, and there
was a velociped mania in France. Everybody was riding them.
And then that came over here. There were some European
gymnasts and there was a stage show and they came
over here and we're riding these devices on stage. And
(06:27):
again they were fast and they were also they had
this character of seeming magical because nobody could really understand
how you could balance on these two wheels and just
keep going. I mean, there was even a story in
a Scientific American about it where it's like, we're not
quite sure how this works. That happened over a winter,
(06:51):
and people in the United States, again, people of means
because these were not cheap, started to buy them or
rent them or just go to They started to have
these bicycle schools where you could go to learn to
ride one, which again was something that no adult knew
how to do, so it was hardgoing.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
And then they started racing them.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
But this was all indoors during a winter, and they
predicted that as soon as the summer came, everyone was
going to be riding these things, and it was this
whole new again, you know, the mechanical horse. The thing
that happened then when the weather turned warmer was that
(07:36):
in Europe people kept riding these things because European roads
were much better than American roads, so there was all
kinds of technology in Europe to make these roads, stone
roads that were domed so that they shed water. In
the United States at that time, the road technology was
(07:58):
way worse. We were a lot more dependent on rivers
and waterways and canals by then and railroads forgetting people
and goods around the country. So in the United States,
the weather turn warmer, everybody went outside and you couldn't
really ride these things on the roads. The roads were
too bumpy or they were too muddy. These velocipedes were
(08:21):
still very heavy. The wheels were like wagon wheels, they
were made of wood. It was not a smooth ride,
and it just became something that was not practical. So
people had been racing them, and there had been this velocipied.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
Mania, but in the United States that vanished very, very quickly.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
And you've been listening to author Margaret Goroff tell the
story of the history of the bicycle, particularly here in
the United States, so that we get a taste of
what was going on in Europe as well. Her book
The Mechanical Horse of the Bicycle re shaped American life. Oh,
it's a heck of a story about our culture and technology.
(09:06):
And that first pedal on the front wheel, Well, it's
a French immigrant who patents this idea, and of course
it spreads like wildfire. I love the name of the bicycle,
then the velocipede.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
I wish that had stuck. That's a really great name.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
And of course a lot of the development in Europe
had to do with the sheer fact that they simply
had better rows. As Margaret said, we relied on canals
and rivers to move so much of what we moved
along in this expansive country. When we return more of
the story of the bicycle and how it reshaped American life.
Here on our American Stories, and we're back with our
(10:10):
American stories and the story of the mechanical horse aka
the bicycle. When we last left off, Margaret Gooff had
told us about the surge and popularity of the bike
in the early eighteen hundreds, followed by the sudden drop
off once people began to try to ride them on
the roads. The roads were unfit for the wheels and
(10:32):
cyclists were searching for solution.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Let's return to Margaret.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Before there were cars, it was the bicycle community that
kind of helped develop the road system that we have.
So early in the country's history. Country roads in particular
were not built by the government. They were not funded
by the government. It was just the responsibility of whoever
(11:00):
farmed the land near the road to make sure that
the road was passable, otherwise that farmer couldn't get their
goods to town to market. There was in some places
a road tax that was calculated in terms of labor,
so you would be tacked like a day or two
days a year of having to go show up as
(11:22):
if you were on a jury. You just get called
and you have to show up to kind of fix
the roadway, which means moving some dirt around. And that
was not very well done because it was you know,
it was not professionally done. It was done by a
lot of people who you know, were just doing it
so that they could say they did it. In the cities,
it was the responsibility of the adjacent property owner to
(11:45):
maintain the roadway. But obviously everything's a little closer together,
so you didn't have as much responsibility for as much roadway.
And in the cities the roads would be paved, although
not necessarily with stone. It could be gravel, it could
be you know, wood that would brought. And this was
the way it had always been, this system of maintaining
(12:07):
the roads, and it was perceived by the people whose
responsibility it was to do it, that is, the property owners,
that it was fine, you know, and they didn't want
to be taxed more. They didn't want to pay money
for some you know, professional to come in and do whatever.
They also didn't want to be required to build roads
(12:28):
that were up to European standards. You know, you can't
tell a farmer, well, instead of moving dirt around, now
you're gonna have to break a lot of stones. In addition,
the United States didn't really have the expertise to know
how to build roads that would stay dry and stay
usable all year long. There was typically a season of
every year where the roads were just so muddy and
(12:49):
mucky that no one could go anywhere in the countryside.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
You just had to stay home.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
So what happened with the velocopies, the first petal velocipity,
first philosophy mania that couldn't really go on American roads
and just sort of died out. What happened in Europe
was that the technology continued to develop, and one of
the things that they discovered was that if you make
your wheels not out of wood with wooden spokes, but
(13:17):
out of wire spokes, they were light enough weight that
you could make them bigger, and the bigger your driving
wheel is the faster you can go for each turn
of the pedals. Because again there were no chains yet,
so your wheel turned as fast as you could turn it.
But if it was a bigger and bigger wheel, each
turn would cover more ground. So they created these wirespoke
(13:39):
wheels that got as big as they could get, which
is twice the length of the rider's leg. And that's
when you see those big wheel bikes, the Penny Farthings
that are just like way over your head. And you
would order those basically by in seam size and they
would build them for you. And these bicycles, because the
arc of the higher was more gentle. When they started
(14:03):
to come over to the United States in the mid
late eighteen seventies, people could ride these on the bad
roads because a smaller wheel is going to catch every
single bump, but a big arct wheel like that is
going to roll easier on the road. Now, again, these
were very expensive, and also you had to be kind
of strong to get on these, and you had to
(14:26):
for the most part where pants, which meant that this
was something that strong men of means younger men usually
were doing. But these bicycles became popular among young businessmen
who would start to try and go out in the
country ride on the country roads, and they started investigating
(14:46):
the parts of the countryside that were in between railroad stops.
Speaker 4 (14:51):
So this was new.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
You know, these people hadn't really been traveling through there
for a long time, and they noticed that the roads
were no good. And so these young industrialists or whoever
they were lawyers and doctors and all that. They started
agitating to improve the roads, and they made the point
that it would be better for the farmers they could
(15:14):
get their goods to market more easily, more consistently. So
they started they banded together, they created a lobby, and
they started agitating for the government to start paying for
improvements and teaching civil engineers how to maintain these roadways.
(15:34):
And at first there was a lot of resistance, particularly
from the farmers because they had their hands full, but
the bicyclists were able eventually to make the case to
the farmers that this would have mutual benefits. And one
of the ways that the government ended up encouraging this
(15:54):
also was by extending mail delivery as long as the
roads were able, and so if a farmer wanted to
get mail delivery at their house instead of having to
go into town every time, they had to make sure
that their roads were possible. So this alliance inspired the
first state highway.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
Expenditures on roadways.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
These big wheel bicycles were really for wealthy young men,
the older people, people who you know, had disabilities, women
who were wearing you know, heavy skirts that wouldn't accommodate
them they couldn't enjoy them. And what happened in the
late eighteen eighties was that they hit upon the chain
(16:41):
drive for bicycles. With a chain, you can make a
wheel turn more than once for every time you crank
the pedals, and so that meant that these bicycles that
had been so high could come back down to the
level of the earlier pedal velociped but could still be
and so they had the lighter weight wirespoke wheels, the
(17:04):
air filled rebber tire which helps with bumps on the road.
So when that happened, when the bicycle came down again,
that opened it up for a lot of different groups
of people who had not been able to ride the
high wheeler.
Speaker 4 (17:18):
So that meant women, older men, children.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
That's when bicycling really started to take off in this
country in the early eighteen nineties. And what women in
particular found was that unlike before when if they wanted
to go to another town, they needed a horse, they
needed a carriage, they needed a driver, They needed to
be from a family that was wealthy enough to have
(17:45):
those things. They needed permission from their father, from their husband.
They couldn't really travel independently. When you start to get
this lower bicycle, which was called the safety bicycle, and
it eventually becomes more affordable. You find people traveling longer distances,
and women traveling longer distances under their own steam and
(18:09):
without being observed, without chaperone, so you know, you could
go places that the train didn't go, You could go
places that you couldn't walk to. And there was a
there's actually a study that had to do with the
genetic makeup of people in the countryside, and they had
found that because of the bicycle, because people could go
(18:31):
farther for courting, that actually the genome in those areas
became more varied. That people were going farther to find
their partners. And there was this sense that, you know,
women should not be part of the public sphere, they
should stay home, They should be just leaving the rest
of the world on its own. Now you start to
see women in particular, but all kinds of people who
(18:54):
have bicycles as being more out and about and on
their own, you know, without having to check in with anyone,
which was considered dangerous to the moral order.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Actually, and you've been listening to Margaret Gooff tell the
story of the bicycle, and in the end about so
much more, particularly how the bicycle helped shape cultural life
in this country. When we return more of the story
of the mechanical horse.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
That is the history of the bicycle.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Here on our American Stories, and we're back with our
American stories and with author Margaret Gooff telling the story
(19:44):
of the bicycle and America.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
When we left off, she just told us about the bicycle.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Boom in the eighteen nineties, when a technological innovation, the
lowering of the bicycle thanks to the chain, allowed more people,
including women, to access writing and increase mobility.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Back to Margaret with the rest of the story.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
So in Europe there had been a move towards more
scientific understanding of medicine and health. In this country, people
thought of doctors as kind of in charge of the
whole person. They're not just their physical wellbeing, but sort
of their moral wellbeing and how that could play into
(20:32):
their health. There was a thought that each person had
their own individual chemistry, like just because something was good
for one person didn't mean it would be good for everybody.
Each person had to be individually analyzed by their doctor
who knew them well. And one of the things that
American doctors were saying about the bicycle was that you
(20:57):
shouldn't write it or you shouldn't override, because you only
had so much energy in your life, like a battery
that you can't recharge, and you had to conserve that,
and you couldn't You couldn't be going out exercising willy nilly,
because you would just wear yourself out and then you'd die.
And there were certain things about American life that supported this,
(21:19):
like the clothes that women wore. Middle class women at
the time were expected to wear these very restrictive corsets
that they needed in part because the weight of their
clothes and the weight of their skirts was so much
that they needed this infrastructure underneath that would distribute the weight.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
So it wasn't all just sitting on their hips. But
you could be.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Wearing twenty five pounds worth of clothing. You'd be wearing
very narrow, pointy shoes, and so these women were in
these very tight things that kept them from breathing well,
and they weren't exercising, so they had no muscle strength,
and so they were very frail. A lot of them
they couldn't, you know, you couldn't catch your breath or
(22:01):
you would faint, and the doctors were saying, well, of
course a person like this should never.
Speaker 4 (22:05):
Exercise, because that would be the end of them.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
But what happened with the bicycle and I were talking
about in the eighteen nineties the safety bicycle, is that
they were so enticing and they seemed like so much
fun that people were willing to try them, you know,
even though the doctors were saying, please, don't do this,
you'll die. And these women could not wear these corsets.
(22:29):
They had to figure out a different way to dress
themselves because it just didn't work on the bicycle. So
they started wearing just for bicycling, not in the rest
of their lives, but for bicycling.
Speaker 4 (22:40):
They would wear a.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
Looser undergarment, they would wear shorter skirts. They would go
riding around, they would get a little exercise, they would
get a little sun, and they would feel better and
people started feeling stronger, people started, you know, feeling healthier.
And that was part of a larger move that combined
(23:02):
with what was going on in Europe and the fact
that there were, you know, the communications between America and
Europe were tighter. We were seeing a lot of people
immigrating from Europe including people who had medical knowledge. So
there were you know, there were discovering all these new
things about health and discovering the germ theory of disease.
(23:24):
There was a lot going on, but part of what
was going on was that people who were riding these
bicycles and feeling better were realizing, you know, my doctor
doesn't know everything, and you can test something out and
see whether it works. And if you know, exercise works,
exercise makes you feel better. And this also showed that
(23:47):
there were in fact some things that were like good
for everybody that you didn't need this individual like person
studying you and telling you how your moral life would
be improved or changed their way whatever. You could say,
well maybe everybody should eat more roughage, or everybody should
do this, you know. So it was part of and
(24:08):
played into a larger change in how people thought about
health and medicine at the time.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
The beginning of the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
The production of bicycles ramped up like crazy. Producers were
making new innovations in how bikes were built. They were
adapting technology from making plows and making tractors, and so
the bicycles became by eighteen ninety seventeen ninety eight, just
(24:39):
the market was just flooded with them, and some of
them were not good, which a lot of people say
is another reason for the boom to end was that
there were just a lot of bikes on the market
that were dangerous, falling apart, or that didn't give you
that exhilarating experience that got people hooked. In the eighteen
nineties bike boom, it seemed like every nobody was riding
(25:00):
a bike, got more and more popular, they got cheaper
and cheaper to buy, they were more and more used ones,
so it seemed like everybody was doing it. And then
right around the turn of the century boom stopped. People
stopped using it for the most part. I mean, there
were still people who rode them and used them for work,
but they weren't a fad anymore. The myth has long
held that the car was invented and everyone just moved
(25:22):
directly from bicycles to cars, and that that's what killed
the bike boom. But in fact, the car was invented
at the end of the nineteenth century and invented by
people who had been bicycle mechanics. First Henry Ford, Yes
he was a bicycle mechanic and he adapted a lot
of bicycle technology, wheels and stuff like that, gears and
(25:44):
everything to what he was doing, but they were very expensive,
so it wasn't until Henry Ford in the second decade
of the twentieth century started mass producing cars that ordinary
people would start to afford them. So there was this
ten year gap when people really had stopped riding bicycles,
(26:06):
but before a lot of people could start being able
to afford a car.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
But the thing that made it much more difficult for
people to ride bicycles at the beginning of the twentieth
century was things.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
Like streetcars, which were cutting up the roads and cities
and went fast, and you know, there were beginning to
be cars on the roads, so it just became less
practical for people to use a bike for entertainment. What
happened in the nineteen seventies was that again a new
technology for US, lightweight European ten speed.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
Bicycles came over and then we started building.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
American ten speeds and that got really a lot of
young people on bikes in the mid nineteen seventies, and
some of those young people had the same kind of
organizational aspiration as the earlier bikers who had fought for
just may roads, and so with this new group, you
see people advocating for old railway right of ways that
(27:07):
weren't being used for anything to be turned into rail trails.
Speaker 4 (27:10):
That starts happening in the seventies.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
And also the first dedicated bike lanes in cities like
New York are happening in the nineteen seventies. You also
had bike messengers at that point. I mean, there's a
whole bunch of stuff going on. The thing about the
bike is that it comes and goes. Right now, I
think a lot of people are finding really practical uses
(27:36):
for it, especially in cities where distances are shorter. But
there have been times recently in our recent history where
nobody rode a bike, and there are still places in
the country where you can't really But the times when
bicycles are popular coincide with times when they are perceived
as fun and safe. And what's happening right now is
(27:59):
that a lot of cities have been investing in bike
lanes and also in bike share companies bike share programs,
and that gives people a way to use a bike
without really taking their lives into their hands. And now
we're seeing another new technology that is really starting to
(28:22):
catch on, which is electric bicycles, which make it super
easy to go up a hill. They're getting cheaper, they're
getting lighter weight, and that's coinciding with a huge older demographic,
baby boomers who came of age maybe in the nineteen
seventies bike boom, after a period when nobody rode a
(28:42):
bike really and they want to keep riding their bikes,
but they maybe.
Speaker 4 (28:46):
Don't want to deal with those hills anymore.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
So this electric addition, it's something else that is fun
and practical, and I think that's a lot a large
part of why right now we're seeing a lot of
people on bikes. So before the bicycle, really the only
way to travel a long distance in this country, other
(29:08):
than on.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
The waterways, was with a horse, whether it was riding
a horse or.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
A horse and carriage, and the creation of the bicycle
really affected the way we live now.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Madison Dericot, and a special thanks to
Margaret Goroff. The Mechanical Horse, How the Bicycle Reshaped American
Life is her book and it's available wherever you buy
your books, and it was just a blast to just
walk through American life and the bicycle, and where the
(29:41):
two intersected, and how the bicycle changed in some ways
and in many ways American life. And my goodness, when
we hear about where the science was as related to
let's say, exercise, and how we had a finite amount,
so we should be careful how we use it up.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Be careful.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Anytime anyone says the science is settled, that's a humbling,
humbling anecdote about where the consensus was on science in
the eighteen nineties. The story of the bicycle, the mechanical horse.
Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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