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 women—or, 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 bicycle’s 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 wasn’t just a huckster’s 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 children’s 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 Saturn—“a beautiful golden road” thronged with “bicyclists from…all 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 miner’s bike would have looked odd in the streets of Stockholm…but 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. It’s 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 Spielberg’s 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 Wright Flyer took off over Kill Devil Hills in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Orville and Wilbur Wright were bicycle mechanics and manufacturers whose crucial breakthroughs in understanding the phenomena of lift and drag came when they attached a strange apparatus to the handlebars of a bike—a bicycle wheel, mounted so it spun horizontally, festooned with drag plates and model “wings”—and went pedaling through the streets of Dayton, Ohio. The brothers applied further lessons on balance, stability, and flexibility that they had learned from bicycles to design their plane, and they built it using tools and components straight out of their bike shop. The aviation age was, as Richardson forecast, an extension, a result, of the cycling boom.
Today there are machines that resemble the bicycle-airship hybrids imagined in the nineteenth century: pedal-driven helicopters and ornithopters and other light aircraft, designed by engineers in the aerospace laboratories of leading universities. Other visions remain unfulfilled. In the run-up to the 1971 Apollo 15 mission, NASA briefly entertained the idea of equipping astronauts with electric bicycles. A NASA photograph documents a test run: a rider in a full space suit is shown astride a prototype “lunar mini-bike,” navigating the low-gravity training environment that astronauts nicknamed “the vomit comet.” The mini-bike was eventually shelved in favor of the four-wheeled lunar roving vehicle, or “moon buggy.” In space, as on Earth, car culture trumped the bicycle.
But the dream of a bike on the moon did not die. The leading advocate was David Gordon Wilson, an MIT professor and the author of Bicycle Science, the “bible” of bicycle engineering and physics. Years after NASA abandoned the project, Wilson continued to champion the use of pedal-powered vehicles by astronauts. The bicycles Wilson proposed accommodated two cyclists and were semi-recumbent; the design called for metallic mesh wheels engineered to ply the dusty lunar surface and parallel loops of high-tensile steel wire in place of a traditional chain drive. Wilson claimed that these bicycles would provide necessary exercise while serving as transport for astronauts on research expeditions. The lunar cyclist would experience novel climatic conditions, enjoying “the freedom conferred with having no wind resistance with which to contend.” Wilson supported his proposals with precise calculations: “The ‘cruising’ speed for an astronaut, fully equipped, pedaling a two-man vehicle alone across uncompacted lunar soil would be 27.5 feet per second, or 18.75 mph.”
Wilson’s ideas about travel in outer space were not limited to bicycles on the moon. In a 1979 article he described life in “a space colony established on an artificial satellite.” He pictured “planes with supine pedaling pilots” cruising over the colony’s skyline. These aircraft would be available for free to all residents of the colony in a system Wilson likened to the White Bicycle Plan, the bike-sharing program formulated by anarchists in mid-1960s Amsterdam. But he imagined a bicycle culture unlike any on Earth. “The picture I have tried to portray of human-powered transportation in future lunar exploration and in space colonies is far from the slow, tiring, second-class systems to which bicycle transportation seems to have been relegated here on earth,” Wilson wrote. “Planes would be capable of acrobatics. A popular sport would be reenactments of famous battles from the First World War. Parachutes would probably be unnecessary. An aerial collision would result in both planes and pilots floating gently to the ground.”
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Nine decades before David Wilson wrote those sentences, a momentous event in the history of transportation took place in Ireland. John Boyd Dunlop was a forty-seven-year-old Belfast-based veterinarian of Scottish birth. Dunlop had never ridden a bike, but his nine-year-old son, Johnnie, spent hours at a time racing his tricycle with friends on the paved track in a local park. Johnnie often complained to his father about the trip between the park and the Dunlop home. The ride was fine so long as Johnnie stuck to level macadam paths, but when the route veered onto the rougher terrain that prevailed in much of the city—streets laid with granite paving stones and threaded by tram tracks—pedaling became laborious, and the journey uncomfortable. Dunlop was familiar with the issue. Crisscrossing Belfast on his veterinary rounds, Dunlop had often noted the unpleasant vibrations that shook the horse-drawn carriages and dogcarts in which he traveled. Those vehicles, like Johnnie’s tricycle, had solid tires that juddered and dragged on all but the smoothest roadways.
Dunlop was a thinker and a tinkerer. He looked the part. He had sharp, skeptical eyes and a long professorial beard, as thick and geometric as a topiary hedge. He liked to apply his intelligence to practical problems and to devise solutions, to use his head and hands to bring new things into the world. He designed and built a number of instruments for use in his veterinary surgery. He sold medicines for dogs and horses that he had developed and patented himself. He had “an abiding interest in the problems of road, rail and sea transport” and was intrigued in particular by the mechanisms of wheels, a fascination, he said, that began in childhood, when he observed the way wooden agricultural rollers moved over the furrows on his family’s farm in Ayrshire, in southwest Scotland. Now, in the autumn of 1887, he turned his attention to the question of his son’s cycle rides. Could Dunlop contrive improvements to Johnnie’s tricycle that would make the boy’s commute more tolerable and, perhaps, give him an advantage in those races in the park with friends?
Dunlop focused his attention on the tricycle’s solid rubber tires. A better-designed tire would be durable enough to withstand the punishments of the road but sufficiently flexible to offer a less jarring ride as it passed over uneven ground. Smoother cycling, Dunlop suspected, would also mean speedier cycling. In physics terms, he was grappling with questions of rolling resistance and shock absorption. “It occurred to me,” he wrote years later, “that the problem of obtaining speed or ease of propulsion…might be solved by a peculiar mechanical arrangement of cloth, rubber and wood.”
Rubber, in particular, held the key. Dunlop’s idea was to take a length of rubber tubing, fill it with some substance, and attach the tube to the cycle wheel, interposing a cushion between the wheel and the surfaces over which it rolled. He first tried using a water-filled hose pipe. When that yielded poor results, he began to experiment with another substance: compressed air. Dunlop pumped air into a tube of sheet rubber, as you would to inflate a soccer ball; he covered that air-filled tube with an outer layer of linen and affixed it to the circumference of a large wooden disk. A series of trials in the yard of Dunlop’s veterinary establishment proved that this apparatus rolled farther, and with greater ease, than a conventional cycle wheel. Dunlop then built proper prototypes: a pair of wooden cycle-wheel rims, three inches wide and thirty-six inches in diameter, to which he fastened the inflated rubber tubes, sheathed in canvas and an additional outer layer of sheet rubber.
Dunlop secured these tires to the rear of his son’s tricycle on the night of February 28, 1888. Immediately, Johnnie set out for a ride, “eager to have a speed trial of his new machine.” It was just before ten p.m., an hour when Belfast’s streets were generally free of traffic. “The moon was full and the sky clear,” Dunlop wrote. “As it happened there was an eclipse of the moon so [Johnnie] came home. After the shadow of the moon had passed he went out again and had a long run. The next morning, the tyres were carefully examined and no scratch could be found on the rubber.”
We cannot know what went through the boy’s mind as he pedaled his newly swift and smooth-running tricycle over the moonlit cobbles. Although his father recounted his memories of the event many times and wrote about it in a book, Johnnie’s thoughts were never documented. But the significance of that February 1888 tricycle ride is a matter of record: it was the world’s first cycle journey on pneumatic tires. Five months later, John Boyd Dunlop was granted a patent for “An Improvement in Tyres of Wheels for Bicycles, Tricycles, or Other Road Cars,” a breakthrough that sent millions racing into the last decade of the nineteenth century on two wheels.
Today the Dunlop name is known worldwide, thanks to the eponymous tire company. During Dunlop’s lifetime, a footnote complicated his claim on history. In 1890, Dunlop’s patent was rescinded after the discovery of an earlier invention that had been unknown to him. Nearly a half century before, another Scotsman, Robert William Thomson, had made the same imaginative leap, receiving a patent for a new kind of carriage wheel containing an air-filled sleeve, a device that “intercepted vibration from the road” before it reached the wheel’s rim. The name Thomson gave to his creation had a poetic ring: “Aerial Wheels.”
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The connection we make between cycling and flying is metaphorical. You might even call it spiritual: an expression of the powerful feelings of freedom and exhilaration we experience when we ride bikes. But it is also a response to a physical fact. If cyclists imagine themselves to be flying, it is because, in a sense, they are.
When you ride a bicycle, you’re airborne. The wheels that spin beneath you slip a continuous band of compressed air between the bike and the road, holding you aloft. That floating feeling, that sensation of airy buoyancy, is heightened by the way the bike bears your body: your legs do the work of propelling the vehicle, but the job of supporting your body weight is outsourced to the bicycle itself. Today you can attach an inflatable saddle to your seat post and sit back on a pillow of air even as your bike’s wheels turn on air. Perhaps you are riding down an empty road on a quiet night; maybe, like Johnnie Dunlop, like Elliott and E.T., you are riding on a night lit by a full moon. Your bicycle will not take you on a voyage to the moon, but it is not quite earthbound, either. You’re in another world, an intermediary zone, gliding somewhere between terra firma and the huge horizonless sky.