The bicycle wasn’t invented in Britain but it was perfected here, and the world’s biggest cycle manufacturers were once British, exporting around the globe. Think the Dutch bike is Dutch? Nope, it’s British, a roadster-type cycle of around 1911. And even though cycling is more than 200 years old it has a secure future because of its simplicity. The bicycle has the never-bettered ability to amplify human strength and extend the distance that a human can travel without the aid of a motor, or a horse.
And it was this ability – especially of the horse bettering kind – that some cycle historians theorise led to the creation of what would become the bicycle. The two-wheeler that would later morph into the bicycle was created, they say, in answer to a transport crisis brought on by a cataclysmic climatic event.
In April 1815 Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted spewing lava and ash until July of the same year. It was the biggest eruption in 1,300 years and the sky was so loaded with dust that average global temperatures dipped, and artists had a field day, painting scenes with dramatic sunsets. 1816 became known as the ‘year without a summer’.
On holiday by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Mary Shelley, her husband Percy and John William Polidori were trapped in Lord Byron’s house by constant rain. Byron suggested a essay writing competition: come up with a ghost story. Mary Shelley created Frankenstein; Polidori wrote The Vampyre. Not too far Continue reading “Cycling in Britain, 1818–2018”
