It's All About the Bike

It's All About the Bike
Author: Robert Penn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2011-04-26
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1608195767

Robert Penn has saddled up nearly every day of his adult life. In his late twenties, he pedaled 25,000 miles around the world. Today he rides to get to work, sometimes for work, to bathe in air and sunshine, to travel, to go shopping, to stay sane, and to skip bath time with his kids. He's no Sunday pedal pusher. So when the time came for a new bike, he decided to pull out all the stops. He would build his dream bike, the bike he would ride for the rest of his life; a customized machine that reflects the joy of cycling. It's All About the Bike follows Penn's journey, but this book is more than the story of his hunt for two-wheel perfection. En route, Penn brilliantly explores the culture, science, and history of the bicycle. From artisanal frame shops in the United Kingdom to California, where he finds the perfect wheels, via Portland, Milan, and points in between, his trek follows the serpentine path of our love affair with cycling. It explains why we ride. It's All About the Bike is, like Penn's dream bike, a tale greater than the sum of its parts. An enthusiastic and charming tour guide, Penn uses each component of the bike as a starting point for illuminating excursions into the rich history of cycling. Just like a long ride on a lovely day, It's All About the Bike is pure joy- enriching, exhilarating, and unforgettable.

René Herse

René Herse
Author: Jan T. Heine
Publisher:
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2012
Genre: Bicycle industry
ISBN: 9789765460236

Bicycle

Bicycle
Author: David V. Herlihy
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780300104189

The nineteenth century's "mechanical horse" offered an exciting new world of transportation for all and ushered in an era of changes that resonates to the present day, changes cataloged and described in a fascinating history of an engineering marvel.

Bike Battles

Bike Battles
Author: James Longhurst
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2015-04-15
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0295805994

Americans have been riding bikes for more than a century now. So why are most American cities still so ill-prepared to handle cyclists? James Longhurst, a historian and avid cyclist, tackles that question by tracing the contentious debates between American bike riders, motorists, and pedestrians over the shared road. Bike Battles explores the different ways that Americans have thought about the bicycle through popular songs, merit badge pamphlets, advertising, films, newspapers and sitcoms. Those associations shaped the actions of government and the courts when they intervened in bike policy through lawsuits, traffic control, road building, taxation, rationing, import tariffs, safety education and bike lanes from the 1870s to the 1970s. Today, cycling in American urban centers remains a challenge as city planners, political pundits, and residents continue to argue over bike lanes, bike-share programs, law enforcement, sustainability, and public safety. Combining fascinating new research from a wide range of sources with a true passion for the topic, Longhurst shows us that these battles are nothing new; in fact they’re simply a continuation of the original battle over who is - and isn’t - welcome on our roads. Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNleJ0tDvqg

Two Wheels Good

Two Wheels Good
Author: Jody Rosen
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2023-06-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804141517

A panoramic revisionist portrait of the nineteenth-century invention that is transforming the twenty-first-century world “Excellent . . . calls to mind Bill Bryson, John McPhee, Rebecca Solnit.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker The bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly at odds with our age of smartphones and ride-sharing apps and driverless cars. Yet we live on a bicycle planet. Across the world, more people travel by bicycle than any other form of transportation. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bike—and nearly everyone does. In Two Wheels Good, journalist and critic Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an ever-present force in humanity’s life and dream life—and a flash point in culture wars—for more than two hundred years. Combining history, reportage, travelogue, and memoir, Rosen’s book sweeps across centuries and around the globe, unfolding the bicycle’s saga from its invention in 1817 to its present-day renaissance as a “green machine,” an emblem of sustainability in a world afflicted by pandemic and climate change. Readers meet unforgettable characters: feminist rebels who steered bikes to the barricades in the 1890s, a prospector who pedaled across the frozen Yukon to join the Klondike gold rush, a Bhutanese king who races mountain bikes in the Himalayas, a cycle-rickshaw driver who navigates the seething streets of the world’s fastest-growing megacity, astronauts who ride a floating bicycle in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station. Two Wheels Good examines the bicycle’s past and peers into its future, challenging myths and clichés while uncovering cycling’s connection to colonial conquest and the gentrification of cities. But the book is also a love letter: a reflection on the sensual and spiritual pleasures of bike riding and an ode to an engineering marvel—a wondrous vehicle whose passenger is also its engine.

The Cycling City

The Cycling City
Author: Evan Friss
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2021-01-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 022675880X

As Evan Friss shows in his mordant history of urban bicycling in the late nineteenth century, the bicycle has long told us much about cities and their residents. In a time when American cities were chaotic, polluted, and socially and culturally impenetrable, the bicycle inspired a vision of an improved city in which pollution was negligible, transport was noiseless and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country blurred. Friss focuses not on the technology of the bicycle but on the urbanisms that bicycling engendered. Bicycles altered the look and feel of cities and their streets, enhanced mobility, fueled leisure and recreation, promoted good health, and shrank urban spaces as part of a larger transformation that altered the city and the lives of its inhabitants, even as the bicycle's own popularity fell, not to rise again for a century. --Publisher's description.

Bikes and Bloomers

Bikes and Bloomers
Author: Kat Jungnickel
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1912685434

An illustrated history of the evolution of British women's cycle wear. The bicycle in Victorian Britain is often celebrated as a vehicle of women's liberation. Less noted is another critical technology with which women forged new and mobile public lives—cycle wear. This illustrated account of women's cycle wear from Goldsmiths Press brings together Victorian engineering and radical feminist invention to supply a missing chapter in the history of feminism. Despite its benefits, cycling was a material and ideological minefield for women. Conventional fashions were unworkable, with skirts catching in wheels and tangling in pedals. Yet wearing “rational” cycle wear could provoke verbal and sometimes physical abuse from those threatened by newly mobile women. Seeking a solution, pioneering women not only imagined, made, and wore radical new forms of cycle wear but also patented their inventive designs. The most remarkable of these were convertible costumes that enabled wearers to transform ordinary clothing into cycle wear. Drawing on in-depth archival research and inventive practice, Kat Jungnickel brings to life in rich detail the little-known stories of six inventors of the 1890s. Alice Bygrave, a dressmaker of Brixton, registered four patents for a skirt with a dual pulley system built into its seams. Julia Gill, a court dressmaker of Haverstock Hill, patented a skirt that drew material up the waist using a mechanism of rings or eyelets. Mary and Sarah Pease, sisters from York, patented a skirt that could be quickly converted into a fashionable high-collar cape. Henrietta Müller, a women's rights activist of Maidenhead, patented a three-part cycling suit with a concealed system of loops and buttons to elevate the skirt. And Mary Ann Ward, a gentlewoman of Bristol, patented the “Hyde Park Safety Skirt,” which gathered fabric at intervals using a series of side buttons on the skirt. Their unique contributions to cycling's past continue to shape urban life for contemporary mobile women.

Bicycle Design

Bicycle Design
Author: Tony Hadland
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 583
Release: 2016-10-07
Genre: Transportation
ISBN: 026252970X

An authoritative and comprehensive account of the bicycle's two-hundred-year evolution. The bicycle ranks as one of the most enduring, most widely used vehicles in the world, with more than a billion produced during almost two hundred years of cycling history. This book offers an authoritative and comprehensive account of the bicycle's technical and historical evolution, from the earliest velocipedes (invented to fill the need for horseless transport during a shortage of oats) to modern racing bikes, mountain bikes, and recumbents. It traces the bicycle's development in terms of materials, ergonomics, and vehicle physics, as carried out by inventors, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers. Written by two leading bicycle historians and generously illustrated with historic drawings, designs, and photographs, Bicycle Design describes the key stages in the evolution of the bicycle, beginning with the counterintuitive idea of balancing on two wheels in line, through the development of tension-spoked wheels, indirect drives (employing levers, pulleys, chains, and chainwheels), and pneumatic tires. The authors examine the further development of the bicycle for such specific purposes as racing, portability, and all-terrain use; and they describe the evolution of bicycle components including seats, transmission, brakes, lights (at first candle-based), and carriers (racks, panniers, saddlebags, child seats, and sidecars). They consider not only commercially successful designs but also commercial failures that pointed the way to future technological developments. And they debunk some myths about bicycles—for example, the mistaken but often-cited idea that Leonardo sketched a chain-drive bike in his notebooks. Despite the bicycle's long history and mass appeal, its technological history has been neglected. This volume, with its engaging and wide-ranging coverage, fills that gap. It will be the starting point for all future histories of the bicycle.