September 23, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Eddie Willis grew up knowing he was adopted and never questioned it until he became a father himself. The birth of his own children sparked a need to understand his origins, leading him on a journey through closed adoption records and uncertainty. What he discovered was far more surprising than he ever imagined. Eddie shares his powerful story of identity, loss, and the meaning of family.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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. Here's Margaret.
Speaker 2 (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 Fred 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.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
The next year it came to America.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Somebody made one that was displayed in Baltimore, and it
was a curiosity.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
People would pay to come and see it.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (03:37):
You really had to be rich to.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (04:56):
Nobody had ever seen or heard of anything like this.
Speaker 2 (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
was 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,
(05:20):
and 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
(05:41):
I was the devil.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
So he goes.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
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 eighteen sixties. Now these
(06:07):
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 again they were fast
(06:28):
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.
(06:49):
That happened over a winter, 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
(07:09):
no adult knew how to do, so it was hardgoing.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
And then they started racing them.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
New again, you know, the mechanical horse.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
The thing that happened then when the weather turned warmer
was that 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.
(07:54):
In the United States at that time, the road technology
was way worse.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
We were a.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
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 still very heavy. The wheels
(08:23):
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 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. I wish that had stuck. That's a
really great name. 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
(09:28):
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
(10:09):
we're back with our 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
(10:31):
the wheels and cyclists were searching for solution. Let's return
to Margaret.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (12:52):
You just had to stay home.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (14:51):
So this was new.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (16:13):
Expenditures on roadways.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (17:18):
So that meant women, older men, children.
Speaker 2 (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
(18:08):
and 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
(18:31):
go 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 Goaroff 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, that is the history of the bicycle.
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. Here's Margaret.
Speaker 2 (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 Fred 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.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
The next year it came to America.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Somebody made one that was displayed in Baltimore, and it
was a curiosity.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
People would pay to come and see it.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (03:37):
You really had to be rich to.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (04:56):
Nobody had ever seen or heard of anything like this.
Speaker 2 (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
was 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,
(05:20):
and 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
(05:41):
I was the devil.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
So he goes.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
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 eighteen sixties. Now these
(06:07):
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 again they were fast
(06:28):
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.
(06:49):
That happened over a winter, 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
(07:09):
no adult knew how to do, so it was hardgoing.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
And then they started racing them.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
New again, you know, the mechanical horse.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
The thing that happened then when the weather turned warmer
was that 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.
(07:54):
In the United States at that time, the road technology
was way worse.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
We were a.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
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 still very heavy. The wheels
(08:23):
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 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. I wish that had stuck. That's a
really great name. 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
(09:28):
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
(10:09):
we're back with our 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
(10:31):
the wheels and cyclists were searching for solution. Let's return
to Margaret.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (12:52):
You just had to stay home.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (14:51):
So this was new.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (16:13):
Expenditures on roadways.
Speaker 2 (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 3 (17:18):
So that meant women, older men, children.
Speaker 2 (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
(18:08):
and 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
(18:31):
go 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 Goaroff 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, that is the history of the bicycle.
Here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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