Jody Rosen - Two Wheels Good : The History and Mystery of the Bicycle

VOYAGE TO THE MOON

Cycles Brillant. Advertising poster by artist Henri Boulanger (alias Henri Gray), 1900.

In the 1890s, advertising posters depicted bicycles in outer space. These are some of the most famous images of the bicycle ever created: they show bikes pressed against the firmament, bikes streaking past comets and planets, bikes coasting down the slopes of sickle moons. The riders of these bicycles are often womenor, rather, goddesses. They have bare breasts and rippling Grecian garments and long hair that trails behind them like a jet stream. In one advertisement, for the French bicycle company Cycles Sirius, a nearly nude cyclist rides sidesaddle across a starry sky, her eyes closed, her smiling face thrust upward in ecstasy. The image says that a bicycle is a conduit of otherworldly pleasure. A bike ride can shoot you to the stars; a bike ride could give Aphrodite an orgasm. A poster designed in 1900 for another French firm, Cycles Brillant, pictures two barely clad female figures adrift in the Milky Way. One of them, with fairy wings on her back and an olive bough in her left hand, is reaching up toward the front wheel of a bicycle that hovers overhead like an orbiting sun. The bike is spotlit and radiant, reflecting the glow cast by a diamond that floats nearby. In this surreal vision, the bicycle itself is a deity, a heavenly body beaming light down to Earth.

These posters date from the turn-of-the-century cycling boom, the brief period prior to the rise of the automobile when the bicycles dominion was uncontestable, and when bike manufacturers, facing a glutted marketplace, sought to distinguish their products with eye-popping art nouveau ads. But the celestial bicycle wasnt just a hucksters hard sell. The first proto-bicycle, a curious two-wheeled contraption that had neither pedals nor cranks nor a chain, was likened by its admirers in the late 1810s and early 1820s to Pegasus, the winged stallion of Greek mythology. Nearly five decades later, a chronicler of the velocipede craze in Paris marveled that the vehicles had been brought to such perfection, both for velocity and lightness that they gave the appearance of flying through the air. A cartoon from the same period made the connection explicit. It showed a man in top hat and tails straddling a velocipede suspended on either end by hot air balloons, with rotor blades for wheels and a brass spyglass mounted on the handlebars. The bike is seen soaring above Paris, on its way out of town. A caption reads: voyage a la lune .

A flying bicycle. A bicycle that slaloms between the stars. A bicycle you can pedal to the moon. Popular culture has never let go of these ideas. In the mid-twentieth-century, manufacturers marketed bikes with sleek contours suggestive of jumbo jets and brand names that evoked air and space travel: the Skylark, the Skyliner, the Starliner, the Spaceliner, the Spacelander, the Jet Fire, the Rocket, the Airflyte, the Astro Flite. Flying bicycles appear in childrens literature and pulp novels and science fiction. In Bikey the Skicycle and Other Tales of Jimmieboy (1902), by the American author John Kendrick Bangs, a young boy has a magical bike that is capable of speech and flight. Boy and bicycle go wheeling above church steeples, across the Atlantic, over the Alps, and up into space, where they cycle on the outer ring of Saturna beautiful golden road thronged with bicyclists fromall parts of the universe. A Robert Heinlein novel from 1952, The Rolling Stones, tells the story of teenage siblings, residents of a colony on the moon, who take their bicycles to Mars to go prospecting for radioactive ore. (A miners bike would have looked odd in the streets of Stockholmbut on Mars or on the Moon it fitted its purpose the way a canoe fits a Canadian stream.) Today, tales of space travel by bicycle give voice to distinctively twenty-first-century questions of politics and identity. Trans-Galactic Bike Ride, published in 2020, is an anthology of feminist bicycle science fiction stories of transgender and nonbinary adventurers.

And of course, there is the famous scene in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial when a bicycle rises out of a pine forest on the edge of suburban tract land and climbs into the sky. Its one of the most indelible tableaux in cinema: a BMX bike, piloted by a ten-year-old earthling, with an alien in the handlebar basket, silhouetted against Steven Spielbergs preposterously big and bright full moon.

These are potent fantasies. They bespeak a primal desire to cast off the bonds of gravity, to speed away from Earth itself. But are they just fantasies? In 1883, the British physician and writer Benjamin Ward Richardson predicted that the new and independent gift of progression with which bicycles had endowed human beings would soon be dramatically extended: The art of flight will be the practical outcome of the grand experiment which is now going on. During the last years of the century there were countless efforts to merge the bicycle and the airship. Newspapers and scientific quarterlies announced the inventions of the Aerial-Cycle, the Luftvelociped, the Pegasipede. There were designs for bikes with whirling rotors, with whipping fan blades, with kite-shaped sails; there were proposals for dirigibles powered by squadrons of cyclists. These machines never reached the sky, but on December 17, 1903, twenty years after Richardson published his prognostication, the