Carl has had great fun describing the latest cycling news from the
Victorian era, and I cannot help but get in on the game.
Here from May 1886, a report on the Stanley Show:
Dwarf, or so-called safety bicycles, are, with due respect to their
riders and their apparent popularity, a delusion and a snare. There is
not one of them from which a header or a tumble backwards cannot be
taken, and there is, after all, very little difference whether one
lands on one¹s head from a four or six foot bicycle; there is more
friction owing to chains and bearings, more difficulty in steering,
and more nonsense talked about record-breaking on this sort of machine
than in and on all other makes of cycles put together. The only
advantages are ease in mounting and dismounting, and the fact that, the
wheel being shorter and the machine more com- pact, there is less
resistance to the wind. But the average rider, who buys a machine of
this sort on the strength of the wonderful records made upon it, will
find himself sadly handicaped by scorchers, whose business it is to
create records on all the new dwarf machines which crop up, and whose
performances on any machine are perfectly valueless from a practical
stand-point.
....the so-called ³safeties² are only a fashion.
http://www.aafla.org/SportsLibrary/Outing/Volume_08/outVIII02/outVIII02c.
pdf
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Ryan Cousineau [email hidden] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics
to think that they have to take drugs to succeed." -Paul Erdos