The blog

Lofty women on bicycles, “towering majestically above the thrones of wheel work”

by carltonreid / on April 07, 2015 /

I’ve just come across this wonderful quote from Thomas Hay Sweet, author of the 1897 book Social transformations of the Victorian age: a survey of court and country. Bicycles feature in the book, of course. Sweet – who wrote under […]

When women fancied cyclists; but a bicycle widow complained

by carltonreid / on September 22, 2013 /

‘Madeline’, promised anonymity, wrote the following to American weekly magazine The Bicycling World, 17th December 1880: “My window looks out upon a street that seems to be a favorite bicycle route, or at least a favored one, and the appearance […]

The rosy-cheeked future for cycling (and legal protection in case you are run down by a driver)

by carltonreid / on April 08, 2013 /

The rosy cheeks may have been the result of imagined exertion along this improved, macadamised road in Detroit but the mascara and the lipstick seem to suggest the artist wanted to portray this fictional young rider as a confident, independent […]

Happy New Year! “Good luck to you! No punctures, no breakdowns, and easy roads!”

by carltonreid / on December 31, 2012 /

“Good luck to you! No punctures, no breakdowns, and easy roads!” Centrefold in Puck magazine, January 5th, 1898 Artist: Samuel D. Ehrhart Large version: 1600 x 999 Massive version: 6983 x 4362 Source: Library of Congress

Ugly girls on bicycles: “Don’t scratch a match on the seat of your bloomers.”

by carltonreid / on December 27, 2012 /

For many women, the Safety bicycle of the 1890s enabled escape. Escape from kith and kin, escape from the strictures of late Victorian society, escape from tight corsets and voluminous dresses (bloomers weren’t invented for bicycling but so-called ‘Rational dress’ […]

The “Mecca of all good cyclists”: Ripley Road

by carltonreid / on March 02, 2012 /

The War of the Worlds, the pretty Dibble sisters, Occam’s Razor, women’s liberation, and the London Olympics: all are linked by the “most famous cycling highway in the world.” On Saturday, July 29th, 2012, a fast-moving peloton of professional cyclists […]

High society synchronised cycling, 1896

by carltonreid / on February 08, 2012 /

The Sprockettes mini-bike women’s group of Portland, Oregon, fuses cycling and street dance and has been entertaining the eclectic Portland bicycle scene since 2004. The San Francisco Bicycle Ballet is older, first performing in 1996. Rewind one hundred years and […]

Victoria Pendleton, 1896

by carltonreid / on January 24, 2012 /

One of these two photographs was taken in the 1890s; the other is a photograph of Victoria Pendleton posing as an 1890s wearer of ‘rational dress.’

Lesbians and Cycling: an Illustrated History

by carltonreid / on January 06, 2012 /

Last month I ran a posting featuring the group photograph below. I suggested that one of the men pictured looked rather feminine and, perhaps, was a woman impersonating a man. A 19th Century woman muscling in on a man’s world […]

"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.

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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?

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