The blog

icanhascheezburger, 1889

by carltonreid / on January 18, 2012 /

Long before there was icanhazcheezburger, cute boys with cats or cashcats.biz, there was a cat-themed advert for a thread company. J&P Coats Sewing Threads is still in existence. In the late 1880s the company advertised its threads with the technological […]

Ferrari, 1877

by carltonreid / on January 09, 2012 /

When high-wheel bicycles are seen at fêtes, or on telly, or on posters for TfL competitions, it’s ten to a penny (farthing) that the gents riding them will be prim, proper and of relatively advanced age. Top hat. Waistcoat. Long […]

Horse shit, steam power and crap cycling

by carltonreid / on December 20, 2011 /

Satirical artist William Heath produced this fascinating depiction of transport of the future in 1829, a year before the first passenger steam train service, and while horse-drawn stage coaches still ruled the road (they plied their trade on turnpikes, the […]

Danny Macaskill, 1886

by carltonreid / on December 15, 2011 /

Jumping 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 […]

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”

by carltonreid / on December 02, 2011 /

That’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 […]

"How cyclists were the first to push for good roads & became the pioneers of motoring." ROADS WERE NOT BUILT FOR CARS is a print, Kindle, iPad and free e-book about roads history.

The coming of the railways in the 1830s killed off the stage-coach trade; almost all rural roads reverted to low-level local use. Cyclists were the first group in a generation to use roads and were the first to push for high-quality sealed surfaces and were the first to lobby for national funding and leadership for roads. They were also the first promoters of motoring; the first motoring journalists had first been cycling journalists; and there was a transfer of technology from cycling to motoring without which cars as we know them wouldn't exist! Nearly seventy car marques – including Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC – had bicycling beginnings.

'Roads Were Not Built for Cars' is a history book, focussing on a time when cyclists had political clout, in Britain and especially in America. The book researches the Roads Improvement Association - a lobbying group created by the Cyclists' Touring Club in 1886 - and the Good Roads movement organised by the League of American Wheelmen in the same period.

The book was published in a Kickstarter limited-edition in September 2014. Island Press of Washington, D.C. published a revised second-edition in April 2015.

Thanks to research grants and advertising support, text-only PDF chapters from the book are slowly being made available for free to read online. The free distribution model is being used in order to get the book seen by as many eyes as possible. The paid-for publications are richly illustrated; the free versions have had the pix stripped out and replaced with adverts.

To get notification of the paid-for and free publications subscribe to the (infrequent) email newsletter. See below or in the sidebars.

+++++++++

MOTORISTS' FRONT OF JUDEA: Apart from the pneumatic tyre, ball bearings, differential gears, roads, motoring, car ads, and aviation, what have the cyclists ever done for us?

+++++++++

Fill out my online form.