Imagine a world grappling with scarce resources and slow travel. In 1817, following a devastating meteorological event that left a “year without a summer,” a German inventor named Baron Karl von Drais unveiled a groundbreaking machine. He called it the “dresine,” and it was designed as a remarkable substitute for horses. This early ancestor of the bicycle, though heavy and initially without pedals, allowed riders to glide across land by pushing off with their feet. It was a revolutionary moment in personal transportation, sparking widespread interest and beginning a journey that would profoundly impact American life.
Soon, this two-wheeled wonder arrived on American shores, first as a curiosity displayed in Baltimore. People paid to witness this marvel, unaware that they were looking at the dawn of modern cycling. The true transformation came when French immigrant Pierre Lallement, in 1865, introduced a crucial innovation: pedals. Suddenly, riders could move continuously without touching the ground, a technological feat that amazed onlookers and challenged perceptions of what personal travel could be. From this early, “devilish” ride, the bicycle began its rapid evolution, paving the way for the enduring popularity of biking and shaping the very fabric of American society and its road systems.
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Speaker 2: The first thing that looked like a bicycle was invented in Germany by a guy named the Baron Fontres, 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 pollution to kind of blot out the sun, basically. For it, there was a whole summer, 1816, 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 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 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 year, 1817. 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: The next year it came to America.
Speaker 2: Somebody made one that was displayed in Baltimore, and it was a curiosity.
Speaker 3: People would pay to come and see it.
Speaker 2: 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 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. Now you couldn’t go uphill with this thing. They waged 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: You really had to be rich.
Speaker 2: To 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 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 1865, so right at the very end of the 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, 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. Nobody had ever seen or heard of anything like this. L Lamon actually got an American patent for this machine, and there are stories about him riding it around in the countryside near Ansonia, 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, 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, “I was the devil.”
Speaker 3: So he goes.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: To the old drazine structure. And this was at the end of the 1860s.
Speaker 2: Now, these 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 were riding these devices on stage. And again, they were fast, 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.” 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 no adult knew how to do, so it was hard-going. And then they started racing them. 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 new, again, you know, “the mechanical horse.” 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. In the United States at that time, the road technology was way worse.
Speaker 3: We were a.
Speaker 2: Lot more dependent on rivers and waterways and canals by then and railroads for getting people and goods around the country. So, in the United States, the weather turned 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 were like wagon.
Speaker 3: Wheels. They were made of wood.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: But in the United States, that vanished very, very quickly.
Speaker 1: 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 reshaped American life.” Oh, it’s a heck of a story about our culture and technology. 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.
Speaker 4: I wish that had stuck. That’s a really great name.
Speaker 1: 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 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 we’re back with Our American Stories and the story of the mechanical horse, a.k.a. the bicycle. When we last left off, Margaret Goroff had told us about the surge and popularity of the bike in the early 1800s, followed by the sudden drop-off once people began to try to ride them on the roads. The roads were unfit for the wheels, and cyclists were searching for a solution.
Speaker 4: Let’s return to Margaret.
Speaker 2: 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 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.
Speaker 3: There was in some places a road.
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.
Speaker 3: It could be gravel; it could be, you know, wood that would brought.
Speaker 2: And this was the way it had always been—this system of maintaining 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 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.
Speaker 3: That would stay dry and stay usable all year long.
Speaker 2: There was typically a season of every year where the roads were just so muddy and mucky that no one could go anywhere in the countryside.
Speaker 3: You just had to stay home.
Speaker 2: So, what happened with the velocipies—the first petal velocipities of 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 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.
Speaker 3: Because again there were no.
Speaker 2: 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 wire-spoke 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 inseam size, and they would build them for you. And these bicycles, because the arc of the tip was more gentle. When they started to come over to the United States in the mid- to late 1870s, people could ride these on the bad roads because a smaller wheel is going to catch every single bump, but a big, arced wheel like that is going to roll easier on the road.
Speaker 3: Now, again, these.
Speaker 2: Were very expensive, and also you had to be kind of strong to get on these, and you had to, for the most part, wear pants, which meant that this was something that strong men of means—younger men—
Speaker 3: Usually were doing.
Speaker 2: 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 the parts of the countryside that were in between railroad stops.
Speaker 3: So this was new.
Speaker 2: 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 get their goods to market.
Speaker 3: More easily, more consistently.
Speaker 2: 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. 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 also was by extending mail delivery, as long as the roads were. 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 expenditures on roadways. These big-wheel bicycles were really for wealthy young men; the older people, people who had disabilities, women who were wearing heavy skirts that wouldn’t accommodate them—they couldn’t enjoy them. And what happened in the late 1880s was that they hit upon the chain 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 fast, and so they had the lighter-weight, wire-spoke wheels, the air-filled reper 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. So that meant women, older men, children. That’s when bicycling really started to take off in this country in the early 1890s. 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 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 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 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 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: Actually, and you’ve been listening to Margaret Goroff 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.”
Speaker 4: That is the history of the bicycle.
Speaker 1: Here on Our American Stories, and we’re back with Our American Stories and with author Margaret Goroff telling the story of the bicycle and America. When we left off, she just told us about the bicycle boom in the 1890s, when a technological innovation—the lowering of the bicycle thanks to the chain—allowed more people, including women, to access riding and increase mobility. Back to Margaret with the rest of the story.
Speaker 2: So, in Europe, there had been a move towards more scientific understanding of medicine and health. In this country, people thought of doctors as kind of in charge of the whole person. They’re not just their physical well-being, but sort of their moral well-being and how that could play into their health. There was a thought that each person had their own individual chemistry, like just because something was good for one person didn’t mean it would be good for everybody.
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