What's The Wright Thing To Do?

 Two months ago, I wrote about a Dayton, Ohio building that once housed a bicycle shop.  Over decades, after the bicycle boom that straddled the 19th and 20th Centuries faded, the building came to serve other purposes, including the headquarters of an ice cream company.  

Now that building is in severe disrepair and, according to one city official, "could fall down at any moment." Moreover, the city's Director of Planning says that if the owners of the bicycle shop come back, "they would not recognize the building," as a new façade was added when the ice cream company moved in and other changes were made.

 Others argue, though, that the city--which has owned the building since 1998--allowed it to deteriorate and therefore should be responsible for repairing it and making it the historic and cultural landmark they believe it should be.

Last Tuesday, the city's zoning appeals board voted to approve the city's request to demolish it. Part of the rationale for the vote is that it's all but impossible to return the building to what it was. Even if such a thing is possible, the pro-demolition people say, the city can't afford it:  De-industrialization and the 2008 financial crisis ravaged the city in ways from which it still has not recovered.

I have never been to Dayton, but from what I've read and heard, it suffered a similar fate to cities like Camden, New Jersey (where I have been) after jobs were lost and people moved to the suburbs.  But, interestingly, Dayton also played a role in two significant historical events.  One of them involved the owners of the bike shop; the other led to the creation of a nation.

In 1995, the parties in a conflict involving the former Yugoslavia negotiated a peace accord that resulted in the founding of Bosnia-Herzegovina. (Say that three times fast!)  The treaty was signed in an Air Force base just outside the city, but the agreement is known by the name of this city.  And the bike shop owners became two of the most famous people in the history of the world.

The settlement I've mentioned is known today as the Dayton Accord.  So, if you ever go to B-H, remember that it's there because of a city in Ohio.  And those bike shop owners...perhaps you've heard of the Wright Brothers.

Yes, the building I mentioned was home to their business.  Almost everyone agrees that they learned the principles (including aerodynamics, via experimentation with riding positions) of creating a vehicle designed for flight from building, assembling and riding bicycles.

Photo by Ty Greenlees for the Dayton Daily News 

Now, I must say that as a cyclist and someone who cares about history, my heart is in the preservationists' camp, even though I understand the pro-demolitionists' arguments. As I am not a structural engineer and have never been to the building site, I am in no position to say whether the edifice can be saved.  I would aver, however,  that struggling cities have used their cultural and historic heritage as keys that opened the door to revitalization.  For two decades or so after World War II, even "the Hub"--Boston--was on the ropes.  Of course, it had many things going for it:  an attractive location, world-class universities, hospitals and museums and diversity in its population, in addition to an historic and cultural heritage few other American cities can rival.  The same can be said for Pittsburgh, which later underwent a renaissance similar to Boston's. 

I realize that Dayton is a smaller city in a different part of the nation, but I should think that embracing its historic and cultural heritage couldn't hurt. I mean, how many other places can claim to be "the birthplace of aviation?"  The Wright Brothers might not recognize the building that housed their bicycle shop, but I think the world recognizes their contribution--which was made possible by their work with bicycles.

For A Professor, Comic Relief From Bicycle Face

One of my graduate school professors said, "If you can't say it in English, say it in French.  If French doesn't work, go to German.  If you still can't say what you're trying to say, try Latin. If that fails, there's always ancient Greek."

Well, I could follow his advice only partway:  Although my French was, and is, good, I had reading, but not conversational or writing, ability in Latin.  And I only knew all the German I learned in one semester and while biking through the country, just as I know a few words of Greek acquired just before, and during, my most recent trip.  (I wonder, though, how much Socrates' Greek was like the language I butchered in the marketplaces of Milos and cafes of Thissio.

I got to thinking about my old professor's advice when I heard about another professor--Louis Vivanco, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Vermont.  His specialty is the anthropology of environmental movements, and he had a particular interest in cycling.  So, not surprisingly, he spent a lot of time looking at old newspaper articles about the "maladies" that afflicted early cyclists in Vermont, and other places.  There were warnings about "bicycle face," a mask into which a cyclist's face contorted itself,  as well as explanations about "cyclist's neuralgia," a condition that manifested itself with, among other symptoms, shriveling penises in men and "spinsterhood" (oh, my!) in women. 

He wanted to present his findings to a wider audience.  That brought him to a crisis:  He realized that an academic paper could not do them justice.  For a researcher like him, that's akin to a writer learning that words don't do justice to anything  (You mean they don't!) or a mathematician realizing that numbers can't express the relationships he or she is trying to elucidate.

His "crisis", if you will, came to a head while he attended a symposium on comics in academia.  At the end of a lecture, he went up to the presenting professor and asked "How can I do this myself?"

That professor's advice:  "Go get yourself an illustrator."

Such advice is sound, except for one problem which I, as an educator, can relate to:  Vivanco couldn't afford to hire such a professional.  So, he decided to "give it a shot" and draw the illustrations himself.  "I try to be kind an idiot savant:  I look at art and books and comics and then I do my best to reproduce what I see."

That work has led to comics about cycling throughout history, and in the present. They illustrate, if you will, much about the way larger society related to cycling and cyclists.  Today we lobby for better cycling infrastructure, or to get any such infrastructure at all.  So did cyclists 120 to 130 years ago, in Vermont and other places.  The difference, as Vivanco points out, is that because bicycles were far more expensive in relation to people's incomes than they are now, cyclists tended to be well-off and well-connected, and therefore had connections to leaders or power-brokers, if they weren't those leaders or power-brokers themselves.  Thus,  cycling clubs in places like Brattleboro and even larger cities were part of the political establishment and were quite effective in getting safer roads and other amenities.  Today, in contrast, cyclists are, in most places, organizing and lobbying as outsiders looking in at the lawmakers and institutions they're trying to influence.

From what Professor Vivanco says, media like comics are a way to help open the doors by making information more available to non-specialists.  He points out something I know very well:  Academic discourse has a language and culture all of its own and, because they are learned by relatively few people, reach very few people.  The same could be said for any number of professions related to urban planning and policy-making, such as law, engineering and environmental psychology.  Comics and other graphic media can also help people who are not specialists--and busy professionals who don't have the time or inclination to read lengthy tomes or ponderous articles on topics outside of their fields--to better understand how the struggle to get better conditions for cyclists is related to other efforts to make cities and other environments more livable and sustainable. 

Most important, perhaps, comics like Professor Vivanco's can show how demands for better air quality and bike lanes are not new, and are not battles that can be won today and forgotten tomorrow.

I'll close by saying that I like Vivanco's drawings:  They remind me of the work of Rick Morrall, who did the illustrations for Tom Cuthbertson's bike-related writings.  At least, I think that's what Morrall's work would look like if Bike Tripping  had been published in 1892 instead of 1972.

You Should Wear A Helmet Because....

The other day, I wrote about Tessa Hull's lecture on female-identified cyclists during the first "bike boom" of the late 19th and early 20th Century.

I didn't attend the lecture:  It was on the other side of the continent.  But I did read the promotional material for the lecture, and a bit about Ms. Hull.  She laments the fact that, in some ways, female-identified cyclists of today are second-class citizens to a greater degree than they were 120 years ago, when advertisements showed women riding on the front of tandems and in packs.

So, wouldn't you know it?, yesterday I came across this:

It's part of a German cycling safety campaign.  The other photos, while they show men who aren't wearing much more than the women, are notable for their complete lack of bicycles.

Now, I'm sure that whoever created that campaign understands that some people won't wear helmets because, well, they're not sexy. (Of course, that depends on what you're into!;-)) Still, you have to wonder what is accomplished with a campaign that looks more like one created for safe sex (Yes, sex really is safer with a helmet. Don't ask how I know!) or, in the first photo, something to get "bros" to buy something that will make them feel more like men.

One thing that really surprises me is that the campaign was started in Germany.  If any country in the world should know about female empowerment, it should be Germany.  I don't agree with much of her politics, but you have to admit that Angela Merkel being, arguably, the most powerful person in Europe is testament to the fact that we don't have to take our clothes off to get people to do what we want them to do.

Oh, and she can't stand Donald Trump, and the feeling is mutual. That must count for something.  That alone is reason, I believe, why someone in Germany can, and should, come up with a more enlightened bicycle safety campaign than this one--or any I've seen in the US!

Another Celt Blazes A New Path For Cycling--And Everyone

Now, on the day after St. Patrick's Day, I'm going to talk about another Celtic person in the world of cycling.

Unlike Sean Kelly, this person was from Scotland but lived in Ulster (a.k.a. Northern Ireland).  Another difference is that this person I'm about to mention never won any Tour jerseys or classics.  In fact, as far as I know, he never raced at all.  

But we should all be grateful to this person, who invented something that not only revolutionized (in every sense of the word) cycling, but the whole world. 

That last clue may have tipped you off.  Yes, this person's invention had to do with the wheel.  No, he didn't invent the wheel:  That came a few millenia earlier.  But what he did made the wheel--and the bicycle--versatile in ways no one could have previously imagined.

What's just as interesting is that this person not only was not a racer, he wasn't an engineer or a technical person.  In fact, he was a veterinary surgeon at the time he invented the thing I'm going to mention.

Early pneumatic tire.  From Dave's Vintage Bicycles

That thing was...the pneumatic tire.  Without it, bicycles are no faster than horse-drawn carriages--and wouldn't be able to traverse some of the terrain our bovine friends have trod for milennia. Ditto for automobiles:  They would have been all but useless, especially given the road conditions of around the time the gasoline-powered engine was invented.  And aircraft, at least as we know them, could not take off or land.

John Boyd Dunlop

 The man in question is John Boyd Dunlop.  As the story goes, his young son was prescribed cycling as a cure for a heavy cold.  Given the relative cost of bikes at that time, it took a pretty fair amount of audacity to complain that his tricycle--with hard rubber tires on iron wheels-- was uncomfortable.

No one knows exactly how Dunlop pere came up with the idea of bonding canvas together with liquid rubber to make an inflatable tube.  But he did and in 1888 he patented the idea--and, in the process used the word "pneumatic" for the first time.  

A local firm, W. Edlin and company, agreed to make casings for the new tubes and the following year, a well-known cyclist, Willie Hume, used the new tires to win a race at Cherryvale.  A paper manufacturer who was one of the spectators would buy Dunlop's patents a few years later.  By that time, he had moved to Dublin, where he manufactured bicycle frames in collaboration with a local firm, Bowden and Gillies.

A History of British Cycling--Infographic

If it has anything to do with England or History, I'll probably be interested.


If it has to do with England, History and cycling, well, I'm there!

And there I went when someone sent me this link, from Total Women's Cycling, with an infographic about the history of British cycling. 

In it, I found some things I'd never known before.  For example, from 1890 until the 1950's, the National Cyclists' Union banned racing on open roads.  And the Tour de France was first televised in the UK in 1980.

The infographic also mentions a cyclist whom I regard as one of the greatest of all time, perhaps the greatest besides Eddy Mercx:  Beryl Burton.  She won several road and pursuit titles and broke records previously held by men.  It might be said that she dominated the sport in a way that Jeanne Longo loomed over the rest of the female peloton two decades later or Missy Giove ruled the then-nascent sport of downhill mountain bike racing a few years later.

And the graphic ends with some of Britain's favorite bike rides.  Enjoy!

Beer, Cheese, Football--And Cycling?

If you were to ask people what the best US States for cycling are, a lot of people--even those who've  never been to those states--would probably pick Vermont, Oregon, California, Massachusetts, Washington, Colorado or Michigan (especially the Upper Peninsula and the upper parts of the Lower Peninsula).  Nearly every state would get a vote from someone:  After all, we all have different ideas about what "the best" cycling conditions are.

And, I would suspect, at least a few people would pick Wisconsin.  I've never cycled in the Badger State, but I know that its capital, Madison, is consistently rated as one of the most bike-friendly communities in the nation.  And, during cycling's first heyday (during the last two decades of the 19th Century and the first decade of the 20th), Wisconsin had one of the most extensive networks of bicycle lanes.

However, as in much of the rest of the US, the automobile rapidly overtook the bicycle as the chief means of transportation for those who did not have access to mass transit (and even among those who had it).  The bicycle was largely seen as a children's toy.

But, during the "dark ages" of cycling, Wisconsin did more than its share to keep the flame of adult cycling alive, if flickering.  And now the state--better known, rightly or wrongly, for cheese, beer and football (the US version), now boasts some of the greatest concentrations of cyclists and bicycle shops (both brick-and-mortar and online) in the nation.

Jesse Gant and Nicholas Hoffman tell this story in a book released in September:  Wheel Fever:  How Wisconsin Became A Great Bicycling State.

I want a copy for the cover alone: