From The Barrel: How Does It Age?

The bicycle has a two-century history, if you regard the draisienne as its starting point.  During that time, two-wheeled machines operated by foot power have been made from all sorts of materials, including wood--as the draisenne was.

Every generation or so, someone or another "discovers" wood as a bike-building material.  Some advantages of the material are its relative light weight and stiffness.  They, of course, are the reasons why wooden bicycle rims were used, mainly on track bikes, for decades even when nearly all frames were made of steel.  They were banned because bicycle wheels, especially those on track bikes, are built with highly tensioned spokes and ridden with high-pressure tires.  The problem was that an impact or other problem that would cause a wheel with a metal rim to bend or fold, but remain intact, would cause a wooden rim to shatter and send sharp splinters flying about.

I imagine that wooden frames wouldn't have such problems, as the joints that hold them together wouldn't be as taut as bicycle spokes, or experience impact in the same way.  On the other hand, I have to wonder how a wooden frame would hold up in various weather conditions, especially extremes of wetness or dryness.

If nothing else, a wooden bike would have a "cool factor", as few other people have one.  That is probably the reason why it would be such a popular item at an event like the North American Handmade Bicycle Show, held in Sacramento two weeks ago.

This "Cooper Bicycle" was created by industrial designer and University of Kansas professor Lance Rake. To join the wooden beams, and for the dropouts, he cut pieces of steel with a waterjet.  The seat and headtubes were also steel, just like the ones found on a traditional frame.

What makes the bike unique--and inspired its name--is the source of its wood:  a wine barrel.  A barrel-maker was known as a cooper, and I don't doubt that more than a few of them made bikes, as blacksmiths and other artisans did.  

That bikes were made by such people, and from materials like the ones Rake used, is the inspiration for a vision of his.  He wants to sell Cooper bikes, he says, but he is also interested in making plans and patterns available to local artisans "so we can make bikes from local resources."

Does he have plans to use his machine on a wine-tasting bike tour in, say, California or France or Italy?  "I hate to admit it, but I'm more of beer and whisky drinker," he confesses, "but my wife is into Red Blends."  Could a tandem be in the works?

A Response To The Climate Crisis, 200 Years Ago

What do Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the first mass migration from New England to points south and west, and the draisienne have in common?

Well, they all came to be within a few months of each other, in 1816-17.  The reason for that, though, might surprise you:  Climate change.  Well, sort of.

Yes, that was an issue two centuries ago, though no one saw it as (or called it) that.  All people knew was that in North America and Europe, the weather was unusually cold and the skies preternaturally dark.  

In fact, 1816 is still called "the year without a summer."  In the eastern United States, according to Michael Wysession, "Crops failed, winter rains were freezing, it snowed in summer; there was mass starvation."  As a result, he said, "whole towns in New England actually decided to pack up and leave," causing the migration I mentioned at the beginning of this post.  

Meanwhile, "Europe was also devastated," Wysession added.  The Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri) Earth and Planetary Sciences professor says that, while experiencing "massive flooding", the weather was "cold, bleak and rainy" through much of the Continent--including the shores of Lac Leman, a.k.a. the Lake of Geneva.

That's where 18-year-old Shelley, then known as Mary Godwin (She would later marry the poet Percy Bysse Shelley.) went for a summer vacation with Lord Byron and writer-physician John Polidori.  But when they got there, the weather was cold and the atmosphere gloomy. While holed up in their lakeside lair, they read, aloud, from Fantasmagoriana, a French collection of German horror tales.  

That inspired the writers to a competition to see who could write the best horror story.  Byron, renowned for his poetry, wrote a fragment of a story but abandoned it.  We don't know what Polidori wrote during that Swiss soujourn, but he later used Byron's fragment as the basis for The Vampyre, the first vampire story published in English.  

And the story Godwin came up with became--you guessed it--Frankenstein.

Around the time she was writing it, and Yankees were moving across the frontiers, a fellow in Germany attached two wheels to a wooden frame that was hinged at the front.  The part in front of the hinge included, in addition to the front wheel, the handlebar.  

He called his creation the Laufmaschine.  When it was reproduced in France and England, it was called, respectively, the Draisienne (in honor of its creator, Karl von Drais) and the hobby-horse (for its shape).  It is often seen as the forerunner of the bicycle.

What is almost never mentioned, however, is what motivated von Drais to come up with it:  the same climate crisis that led to the New England exodus and Frankenstein.  When crops fail, humans aren't the only ones who starve and die.  Animals, including oxen and horses, can also fall victim, as they did in 1816-17.  Some that didn't die outright were killed by their owners who couldn't afford to feed them.

So, with all of those animals dead or dying, a new mode of transportation was needed.  Von Drais was trying to provide it.


Because they didn't have electronic communications and 24-hour news cycles in those days, people on each side of the Atlantic didn't realize, until later, that they were experiencing the same conditions unsuited to growing food for humans or animals as folks on the other side of the pond were enduring.  And it wasn't until still later that anyhone realized those catastrophes had a common root:  the colossal volcanic eruption of Indonesia's Mount Tambora in 1815.  Many scientists think it was the largest such explosion in history:  It was heard more than 2000 kilometers away, reduced Tambora's maximum elevation from 4300  to 2850 meters (14,100 to 9300 feet) and spewed enough ash to filter or even block sunlight more than halfway around the world.

The effect was so great that even though the Earth had been warming somewhat for more than a century after the "mini ice age" of the 17th Century, several years of unusually cold weather (including the summer-less 1816) followed.

So, the forerunner of the bicycle was a response, if unwitting, to temporary climate change.  And getting more people to ride bicycles today is one of the best responses we can make to the crisis in climatic change that faces us today.