You probably know what happened on this date in 1903: the Wright Brothers made the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
It's often said, inaccurately, that the flight the Brothers made that day was the "first" flight. Actually, people had flown for centuries before that in gliders, hot-air balloons and other airborne vehicles. But those flights were wholly dependent on the speed and direction of the wind; they had no other power source and therefore could be kept up only for very limited amounts of time. Other would-be inventors tried to make airplanes or gliders with wings that flapped or could otherwise be made to propel or steer them. Needless to say, they proved unsuccessful.
The real innovations in the Wright Brothers' plane were that its wings were fixed, it was powered by something other than the wind and that controls (which the Brothers invented) regulated the course of the flight.
That control--known as the three-axis control-- may have been the most important innovation of all: It's still used on all fixed-wing aircraft, from crop dusters to the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus A 380. It's the reason that every one of those planes can keep their equilibrium, a.k.a. balance, throughout a flight. If an aircraft can't be balanced, it can't fly.
Now...Think of another vehicle that can't move forward unless it's balanced.
Since you're reading this blog, the bicycle is probably the first such vehicle that came to mind. So, it should come as no surprise that the Brothers were bicycle mechanics and, later, manufacturers. They studied motion and balance using bicycles in their homemade wind tunnel. Knowing this shatters the common misperception that when Shimano and other bicycle parts manufacturers, as well as bicycle makers, were making "aerodynamic" equipment, they were following the lead of the aerospace industries. In fact, as we have seen, the Wright Brothers and other inventors were studying the aerodynamics of the bicycle eight decades before Shimano or other companies paid heed.
So...The next time you see an aerodynamic bike or part, you can thank (or blame) Orville and Wilbur Wright.
From New York City, you can ride north for three days or so (or drive about five hours) and come to Lake George, often called "The Queen of American Lakes".
There's another lake in the area: Placid. Most of you know that the town named for the lake hosted the Winter Olympics, most famously in 1980, when an underdog US Hockey Team beat the mighty Soviet squad. (Many people mistakenly think that the upset occurred in the championship game because the meme "The US beat the Soviet Union for the Gold Medal" has been repeated so many times. The Yanks' victory over the Soviets actually came in the semi-finals.) Lake Placid was also the site of the third Winter Olympiad, in 1932.
Even when there aren't Olympics Games in session, a trip to the lakes and the town--and to surrounding Warren County--is worthwhile. Located in the Adirondacks, the area offers some of the most beautiful fall foliage anywhere as well as all sorts of stunning mountain and lake vistas, as well as many opportunities for hiking, cycling, skiing, canoeing and other outdoor activities.
There was a time, though, when nearly all of the economic activity in Warren County related to farming (especially dairy) and logging. Hardly any of the county's municipalities, including Lake George, Queensbury (the present county seat) and even Glens Falls were barely hamlets, and none of the few roads were paved. During the spring rains, riders of high-wheelers sometimes found themselves slogging through mud that came up to the hubs of their tall front wheels.
Can you imagine cyclo-cross on a high-wheeler? I imagine riding under the conditions I've described were difficult enough on a bike with two wheels of equal size. That might be the reason why, in the days of the first American Bike Boom, a Glens Falls boy named Harry D. Elkes became a World Champion.
In 1964, Howard Mason wrote about Elkes and his upstate New York milieu. Mason could recall the first bicycle he ever saw--a high-wheeler--some seventy-five years earlier. He also mentioned a cycle industry that flourished in the area in spite of the sparse population and the fact that, for much of the year, cycling was all but impossible, given the road conditions and the bicycles available at that time, not to mention the spring rains I've mentioned and the heavy snows that fall from October through April. It was particularly interesting to read about one dealer who, even decades after the Bike Boom died out, wanted no part of the auto business "because of the service after a sale". Cars, and tires especially, were not very reliable in those days.
You can read more about the world of cycling in the 1890's in Warren County on the county Historical Site's website. "Such were the so-called 'good old days' of the '90's," Mason wrote. "You may have them."
As I've mentioned in other posts, I was a bicycle messenger in Manhattan for a year.
I was so, so young then. I can say that now: Many more years have passed since I made my last delivery than I had spent in this world before I made it. Sometimes I wonder, though, if I've really made any progress since then or whether I've simply found jobs and other situations in which my quirks and flaws work for me, or are simply overlooked.
Perhaps the real reason I can say now that I was so young when I did it is that, really, I couldn't do anything else at that time in my life. Rarely could I spend more than a couple of minutes with another person, or doing nearly anything else besides riding my bike without feeling anger or sadness or both. In the space of not much more than a year, two people who were very, very dear to me had died--one suddenly, the other mercifully--and another committed suicide. The only sort of job I could work was one in which I had only momentary interactions with people who could have told me that I was "wasting" my life by doing what I was doing or that, really, it was all I could do, all I could ever do. I could satisfy people only for moments, episodically, and I simply had to do a job in which I would be remunerated for doing so.
Those--even more than my physical changes--are reasons why I couldn't do that job today, although sometimes I wish I could. I understand now how it would be too easy for me to continue with a job in which I give and receive momentary satisfactions and rewards, not think about the future and not have to think about whether or not I was at my best because, really, there was no better or worst, only getting that next package, that next document, that next slice of pizza (Yes, I delivered a couple of those!) to the whoever needed it within the next fifteen minutes--and to never, ever think about it again, or at least until someone else--or even the same person--ordered such a delivery later in the day, the following day, the following week.
In short, there was no future. And there was no past because, really, no one else cared about anything else, as long as he (most of our customers were men) got a timely delivery. It didn't matter that I was a creative genius who had not been recognized or that I was stupid enough to believe I was one and angry enough to feel that others less deserving (which included just about everybody else) were being recognized and rewarded in ways I wasn't.
If I would have changed anything about my job, I would have wanted to work at night. There was something I liked about navigating the city's byways in the dark--or by streetlights, anyway, and the shadows they and the nightlights of small offices and furnished rooms cast. Of course, had I worked at night, I probably would have been making even more of those runs to then-seedy parts of the city (or to more gilded places with their own written codes of omerta) with envelopes and small packages, all the while pretending (or telling myself) I had no idea of what was in them.
There's nothing new about that aspect of being a bicycle messenger, a job that's been around for almost as long as the bicycle itself. Back in the days of the first Bike Boom in the US (roughly from the mid-1880s until the first years of the 20th Century), night messengers delivered telegrams for telegraph offices. They also, not surprisingly, ran side errands, such as fetching cigarettes and delivering "notes". I put quotation marks around that word because nightclubs, brothels and other establishments that operated after, say, 10pm sent and received them. So they were "notes" in the same sense as some of those envelopes I found myself delivering to the same addresses over and over again.
Those messengers were, as often as not, pre-teen boys. In those days, kids were put to work practically the day after they learned how to walk. But for jobs like those of night messenger and chimney-sweeper, the boys were often recruited out of orphanages or "reform" schools. In other words, they were the ones "nobody would miss".
Jacob Riis documented them, as well as other children, women and immigrants who worked in squalid and dangerous conditions, in How The Other Half Lives. His eloquent writing and starkly, beautifully poignant photographs helped people to learn about the conditions in which people like the messenger boys lived and worked. They also were instrumental in passing legislation such as the New York law--among the first of its kind--prohibiting people under the age of 21 from working as messengers after 10 pm.
A few times I made deliveries after that hour, or before the break of dawn. Somehow I don't imagine they were co-op sales agreements or copies of professionals' credentials. I know, though, that even though I was old enough to work those hours, I was still very, very young.
