REG: Cyclists have bled us white, the bastards. They don’t pay road tax, they run red lights. And what have they ever given us in return? XERXES: Pneumatic tyres. REG: What? XERXES: Pneumatic tyres. REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did […]
Continue ReadingIn the early years of the 20th Century, Sears Roebuck & Co. sold a device “popular with railroad and telegraph employees, both male and female.” The Harris 20th Century Railroad Attachment promised to make a “regular railroad velocipede out of […]
Continue ReadingIn December 2001, the “tech world’s most-speculated-about secret” was a personal transportation device. Costing $100m to develop, the inventor said the device – codenamed Ginger – was to be “to the car what the car was to the horse and […]
Continue ReadingJumping around on bicycles has a long history. Wheelmen of the 1880s rode down flights of steps, balanced on ledges and pulled the sort of tricks that would make Hans ‘No Way’ Rey wince. And this wasn’t just on new-fangled […]
Continue ReadingThe League of American Wheelmen was a highly influential organisation in the 1890s. It was non-partisan, bestowing its favours on whichever politicians would promise to support its Good Roads campaign, started in the 1880s. In the 1896 Presidential election campaign, […]
Continue ReadingThat’s a famous Mark Twain quote. It’s actually the last line from a short piece called ‘Taming the bicycle’. Twain wasn’t referring to a Safety bicycle, he was talking about an Ordinary, a high-wheeler. The quote is often, er, quoted […]
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