364 words

When it first hit the streets in the 1880s, the modern bicycle was a revolutionary innovation, the iPhone of its time. In those days, before the automobile was invented, when horses, trains, and feet were the main ways to get around, people were amazed and thrilled by these marvels of science and engineering, these small, light, “silent steeds of steel” astride which they could zip around at astonishing speeds.

The machines were cheaper and cleaner than horses, and they didn’t need to be fed, stabled, or coaxed along. They just needed a rider with legs and a bit of nerve. “The exhilaration of bicycling must be felt to be appreciated,” enthused the San Francisco Chronicle in 1879. “With the wind singing in your ears, and the mind as well as body in a higher plane, there is an ecstasy of triumph over inertia.” 

The public was smitten. In 1885, a handful of American factories cranked out about eleven thousand bicycles. A little more than a decade later, that number had shot to more than two million. Bicycle racing became the most popular athletic competition in America, drawing bigger crowds than baseball games. (It also produced America’s first Black sports star: Marshall “Major” Taylor, a Brooklyn cyclist who became a world champion.) 

At the peak of the bicycle’s popularity, in March of 1896, an inauspicious historic event was recorded: America’s very first traffic accident involving a car. A man named Henry Wells was motoring down a New York City street in one of the first commercial automobiles when he struck a bicyclist, breaking the rider’s leg. At the time, no one recognized the incident as the metaphor it was. 

Bicycles were about to be taken down by another revolutionary means of transportation, an even faster, more advanced, more exciting personal transport machine: the automobile. The race was won quickly. American bike sales plunged 90 percent between 1899 and 1909, while car sales roared upwards. It took only a few years for the bike to be shunted into a distant second place among forms of personal transport. For decades thereafter, bicycles were largely relegated to the status of toys for children and exercise equipment for adults.

Excerpted from Chp 11 of Power Metal: The Race for the Resources that will shape the future by Vince Beiser.