Bicycle: The History by David V. Herlihy Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Bicycle: The History
Book Review: Give this one a miss
Summary: 1 Stars
Most of the book is a very detailed, often repetitive, history of the bicycle from the foot-propelled "velocipede" days until the thirties. It is quite light on the many developments since the seventies, which have led to the bikes that we are riding today. The twentieth century section is especially repetitive, as it tells essentially the same story through "utilitarian", "recreational", and "competitive" cycling section. None of these three sections are satisfying, they merely hint and suggest at the most obvious bits of common knowledge. Some of the illustrations are quite good, but nothing like what I expected from some of the other reviews, and rarely are these illustrations satisfyingly integrated into the narrative. First, I tried to read this book through with no success, it was just too dry. I then tried just picking it up and dipping in, but there really was not much of substance. Quickly the book was banished from my bedside table. Koren's NY Times Book review blurb "immensely absorbing -- always entertaining" is astonishing -- couldn't be further from the mark, in my view.Book Review: Great photos of the different bikes
Summary: 5 Stars
Bought as a gift for my Dad, the quality of photographs are really nice. Didn't get a chance to read it, not sure if my father has yet.Book Review: He needs an editor
Summary: 3 Stars
I enjoyed the book over all. The pictures and the old facts and history that came with the book were great. But in my opinion their was way to much filler, I skimmed through some things that just went on and on that again in my opinion didn't need to be in the book. It made it a little stagnate to get through.
I am currently reading his other book The Lost Cyclist, so far it's a little better at keeping me involved. Their are still times I feel like I'm reading a text book though. Love riding, glad someone's there to write about it.
Book Review: The Beautiful Invention
Summary: 5 Stars
In the second half of the 19th Century several machines engaged and excited the world's finest inventive minds. Among them were the sewing machine, the locomotive and the gun. But the machine that drew the most attention was the bicycle. In January and February of 1869, as the first craze for the early primitive bicycles hit the United States, the American patent office received about one hundred applications for improvements to the crank-driven two-wheeler. By March, over 100 more were either sent or announced.
Why? The bicycle was that deeply yearned-for device that would satisfy the centuries-old desire for cheap personal transportation.
David Herlihy's wonderful book tells the story of the invention and development of the bicycle from the first dreams set down on paper centuries ago to the present high-tech carbon fiber lightweight. While he covers the entire history of the bicycle, his main emphasis is on the nineteenth century, from 1817 when Karl von Drais made a two-wheeled hobby horse that would facilitate walking, to the bust of the great 1890's bicycle boom.
Along the way Herlihy ponders a couple of interesting questions. What, exactly is a bicycle and who invented it? That inquiry led him to conclude that Pierre Lallement, a Frenchman, is our hero. For the forty years after Drais built his "Draisine", the greatest mechanical minds searched for an efficient way propel the machine, but to no avail. It was Lallement who had the brilliant insight to attach pedaled cranks to the front wheel and turn them with his legs. And thus, the bicycle was born.
This early bicycle, or "Velocipede", was a far cry from the chain-driven modern bicycle that appeared in the late 1880's. Numerous technical improvements were needed, such as ball bearings, a cheap, reliable roller chain, high-quality steel tubing, and the tensioned wire wheel (called "spider wheels" at the time of their invention) before the "horse that eats no oats" could be realized.
Without getting bogged down in the minutia of the technology, yet filled with detail, Herlihy follows the avid inventors, excited cyclists and greedy businessmen as they sought to make and own ever better bikes.
There is a surprising nugget of information on every page. The differential gear, which allows a drive shaft to distribute the automobile's force to the rear wheels so that in a turn the inside wheel can rotate more slowly than the faster moving outside wheel, was invented for the tricycle.
The bicycle wrought profound social consequences. At times, fully one-third of the bicycle buyers in the nineteenth century were women as they used the bicycle as a tool of freedom and emancipation. Roads were improved at the urging of cyclists and thus the way for automobiles was made easier.
Lavishly illustrated, Bicycle took Herlihy fifteen years to complete. He is contemplating a sequel, taking up the story where he left off at the turn of the century. He had better not make us wait another fifteen years.
-Bill McGann, Author of The Story of the Tour de France
Book Review: a crank invention
Summary: 4 Stars
They're impractical toys of the rich. The technology is flawed. People will never put up with their limitations. It's too difficult and expensive to get them repaired. Young dandies and showoffs only want to be seen riding them. Ten years from now, people will wonder why we wasted our time on them.
Anyone who has been reading the Detroit newspapers for the last 10 years or so has seen all these arguments used repeatedly against hybrid cars, fuel cell technology and any number of non-fossil-fuel vehicle prototypes. (Only substitute "movie stars" for "dandies.")
Yet the arguments cited above come from the mid-19th century, and their target is a simple tool the whole world now takes for granted: the bicycle.
The peculiarly gleeful, small-minded scorn unique to Luddites of any era is vividly brought to life in "The Bicycle," David V. Herlihy's wonderful illustrated history.
In hindsight, it seems there could be no simpler or more obvious invention. Yet Herlihy demonstrates that the bicycle went through a very long and complicated struggle to get where it is today.
For decades, the velocipede was little more than a glorified scooter, an "aid to walking" powered by kicking the ground. Herlihy picks his way through the variants that come and go, including the 1814 "draisine" of German inventor Karl von Drais, and it's a maddening story indeed. One poor entrepreneur after another goes boom and bust as people latch on to the fad and then tire of it. "Chain the goddamn wheel to a crank!" you want to scream, but history is a cruel one-way mirror. All the reader can do is look on helplessly as the bicycle-haters get their way for more than half a century -- until 1867, when the pedal-driven crank finally closed the circle and set the bicycle rolling on a globe-girdling adventure still in progress.
The reader may have noted that no name was credited above with this crucial breakthrough, and that's another bumpy side to the bicycle's history. Herlihy sifts patiently -- but not too patiently -- through a tangled chain of conflicting claims and patents that make it extremely difficult to pick out the Henry Fords or Wright Brotherses of velocipede-dom.
The heart of the drama, though, is provided by the unceasing, and very entertaining, press wars over the alleged dangers and benefits of bicycling, which Herlihy quotes generously.
As bicycles increase in popularity, cities pass ordinances banning them from sidewalks, yahoos gather round solitary riders and throw stones, pundits decry the decline of civilization. "Velocity is the fashionable mania of the present day," clucks a London newspaper in the early 1800s. "We walk with a Velocipede, are whirled around in a light Post Coach, or run into Fortune in five minutes by a successful speculation." Another newspaper worries that bicycles will make it easier for burglars to glide away from the long arm of the law, perhaps forgetting that if bicycles are outlawed, only outlaws will have bicycles.
Volatile 19th-century sexual politics were badly chewed up in the bicycle's gears, with heated exchanges over whether bicycling was a fit pastime for ladies, and if so, what the well-turned ankle should wear. In 1895, Ethel Dumont of Victoria, British Columbia rode onto the streets in bloomers, provoking a huge sensation (the press called her a new "Lady Godiva") and the threat of a court summons. Women who simply liked to bike became caught up in the polarized atmosphere in which female bicycling was often seen as an aggressive badge of emancipation.
Of course, voices were also raised in the bicycle's defense. Herlihy quotes a letter to the editor in a York, England newspaper in the early 1820s: "We hope in the course of the summer to see [velocipedes] scuddling about in all directions, to the great discomfiture of indigestion, bad spirits, paleness, leanness and corpulency." Now these arguments have returned as well, to be used against a sprawling, obese, car-driven world the bicycle may outlive.
Herlihy's text is exhaustive but far from exhausting, and he avoids flights of poetic abstraction his subject could easily provoke. But the best thing about "Bicycle" its hundreds of fascinating illustrations, all in color on heavy enamel paper that makes the book weigh twice as much as its unassuming size indicates.
There are plenty of period diagrams and photos of bicycle variants over the years, including crazy curiosities with more and less than two wheels, but most of the illustrations trace the evolving public attitude toward bicycles.
At first, it's not a pretty tableau. Even after the crank and chain made bicycling more logical and less outlandish to watch, editorial cartoonists were merciless in their depiction of riders, who are seen running over, into and through each other in every imaginable configuration. Huge Victorian ladies are perched ridiculously on tiny wheels, mutton-chopped gentleman sprawl on the ground next to wounded trees. Later, lovely Art Nouveau posters and advertisements show a world not only reconciled, but in love with the bicycle's sublime form and function.