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Passengers pedaling stationary bikes in the gymnasium of RMS Titanic, 1912.
A pair of exercise bicycles are resting 12,500 feet beneath the North Atlantic Ocean, about 370 miles south-southeast of Newfoundland. In 1912, these same bikes sat alongside rowing machines, an “electric camel,” and other pieces of state-of-the-art equipment in the gymnasium of the RMS Titanic. The bicycles had a single flywheel and were mounted in front of a large dial whose red and blue arrows marked the rider’s progress toward the distance of 440 yards, a quarter mile. There is a famous photograph of a man and a woman using these machines, taken by a photographer for a London newspaper in the hours prior to the ship’s departure from Southampton, England. Their clothing is prim—proper attire for Edwardian travelers on a luxury ocean liner. The woman wears a black woolen overcoat and a veiled hat topped with flowers; the man has a tweed suit and a shirt with a white, presumably starched, collar. It is eerie to imagine these cyclists, or others like them, pedaling in place while the big boat speeds toward the crash that will send it to the bottom of the ocean.
The last passengers to ride the bikes were Charles Duane Williams, fifty-one, an American lawyer based in Geneva, and his twenty-one-year-old son R. Norris Williams, a Harvard student and champion tennis player. The Williamses repaired to the gymnasium to pedal as the ship foundered, sportsmen to the end. When it was clear that the Titanic was going down, they made their way onto the deck, where the elder Williams was struck by the ship’s collapsed funnel and swept overboard to his death. R. Norris Williams was also washed into the sea, but he swam to an inflatable lifeboat. He suffered severe frostbite, overruled doctors who announced their intention to amputate his legs, and went on to win men’s singles titles at the U.S. National Tennis Championships in 1914 and 1916.
It is unclear where in the Titanic’s two-square-mile debris field the stationary bicycles ended up. Underwater photographs reveal that the walls of the gymnasium were crushed inward—the result, experts hypothesize, of a massive column of water that blasted the Titanic when her bow hit the seabed. The bikes, or the remnants thereof, are probably still in the gym—eaten by rust, encrusted with anemones, circled by fish.
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It has been suggested that the stationary bicycle predated the locomotive kind. Proponents of this theory point to the Gymnasticon, a machine patented in 1796, which had a pair of flywheels powered by wooden treadles and bore some resemblance to today’s recumbent exercise bikes. As with most questions of bicycle genealogy, your opinion will depend how elastic your definition of a bike is, and how long and hard you squint. In any case, it is certain that by the late 1870s, various devices were in use that allowed cyclists to pedal a bike indoors, without moving forward an inch.
Many of the earliest machines were so-called rollers. Typically these had rectangular frames made of metal or wood that held three free-spinning cylinders a few inches above the floor. A cyclist would place his bicycle on the cylinders, straddle the bike, and pedal as a “cyclometer” connected to a conveyor belt ticked off the distance covered. Rollers were quickly adopted by professional cyclists for training purposes; they are widely used to this day by serious riders, amateur and pro. Less successful were efforts to turn roller-cycling into a spectator sport. In 1901, two world-famous cyclists—the pioneering Black racing champion Marshall “Major” Taylor and the record-setting speed demon Charles “Mile-a-Minute” Murphy—competed in a series of one-on-one roller-bike contests in vaudeville theaters. But even these stars could not sell audiences on a race that lacked forward motion.
The first rollers required cyclists to balance their bikes as they pedaled, but modified versions appeared with components that held the bicycle firmly in place. Manufacturers also began to produce true stationary bikes, freestanding apparatuses equipped with handlebars, an adjustable seat, and, almost always, a single spinning wheel. These “home trainers” had various mechanisms to simulate loads and apply resistance, allowing riders to adjust the difficulty of their indoor ride. This customization—the fact that you could replicate the rigors of every genre of bike ride, from the lazy spin down a flat road to the onerous uphill climb—was an impressive novelty. “The use of a home trainer gives the best sort of indoor exercise,” wrote the cycling activist Luther Henry Porter in 1895. “It can be taken in every stage from the most charming moderation to the utmost severity.”
The arrival of home trainers marked an evolution in the way people conceived of bicycles and bicycling. To ride a stationary bike was to embrace the notion that exercise—the pure physical exertion of pedaling—was an end in itself, separate from the experience of bicycle travel. Stationary bikes recast cycling as “training,” and construed the bicycle first and foremost as a fitness machine, a device for building stamina, growing muscles, shedding pounds. It was an esoteric idea at a time when the health benefits of cycling were still a topic of public debate. To some, the act of pedaling an unbudging bike, indoors, made no sense. “We may expect to find some idiot advertising, in the very near future, a stationary bike for home use,” sniffed a British journalist in 1897, unaware that such machines had been invented years earlier. “He will declare [a ride on a stationary bike] to furnish all the benefits of a spin along country roads into the heart of nature.”
Some stationary cyclists went to lengths to simulate outdoor conditions. Riders were advised to situate their home trainers by open windows or to direct electric fans toward the bikes to produce wind resistance. In 1897, an ambitious home cyclist, a scene painter by trade, created a pastoral panorama in his London living room. The man painted “two long country views” on large strips of canvas, which he arranged on rotating spools on either side of his roller bike. These canvases were connected by slender wires to the rim of the bicycle’s rear wheel; when the wheel revolved, the scenery was set in motion, and the man’s indoor ride was transformed into a bucolic one, a cruise through “fields, villages, towns…the realism of which left little to be desired.” Four circular fans, set at the top of each of the spools, enhanced the effect, shooting a stiff breeze across the two-dimensional downs and dales.
For those wishing to simulate outdoor bike riding today, technology has of course advanced. These days a cyclist can download an app, strap on a headset, and undertake a virtual-reality journey on a home trainer. In January 2017, Aaron Puzey, a software engineer in Scotland, completed a nine-hundred-mile bike ride using a VR app he designed himself. Puzey’s software siphoned data from Google Street View to assemble a 3D version of the roads from Land’s End, in Cornwall, to the village of John o’Groats, in northeastern Scotland—the storied lengthwise crossing of the British mainland undertaken by generations of wet and wind-lashed cyclists. Puzey traveled the route on his stationary, in his living room.
But stationary bicycling can’t, and needn’t, substitute for the standard kind. Pedaling in place is its own kind of cycling practice. We can describe the contrast between a stationary bike and a traditional one in terms other than “training versus travel.” In the classic nineteenth-century formulation, the bicycle is an annihilator of space—making the big world small, propelling the scene painter from the ersatz English countryside in his London flat out into the real-life green and pleasant land. The exercise bike, by contrast, is a devourer of time. When you pedal a stationary you are literally going nowhere; the point is how long you pedal for, and at what pace. Spinning, the “studio cycling” sport that originated in the late 1980s and has become a global fitness phenomenon, pits cyclists against the clock: spin classes are tests of endurance, challenging cyclists to keep the pedals pumping without pause for forty-five or sixty or seventy-five minutes at a stretch. You could say that a stationary bike is a clock with pedals. Most models are equipped with digital displays that flash numbers back at the cyclist, tallying the time elapsed down to the tenths of a second, along with other crucial statistics: speed, pedal rotations per minute, calories burned.
A stationary bicycle is a versatile machine. It has often been repurposed and reimagined, adapted for ends that have little or nothing to do with biking per se. Exercise bikes are favorite tools of sports therapists, who prescribe regimens of stationary cycling to patients recovering from leg and lower torso injuries. Stationaries are also used for diagnostic purposes. Cardiologists employ specially designed exercise bicycles to conduct electrocardiograms, cardiopulmonary examinations, and other tests of heart, lung, and muscle function. Doctors say that this method yields more accurate results than traditional cardiovascular stress tests conducted on treadmills, because bicycles engage so many muscles and body systems. A patient gets on the bike and is wired up: electrodes are pasted to her chest and midriff, pulse oximeters are clipped to her fingertips or earlobes, a breathing mask is fitted over her face. Trussed in this fashion and propped on the saddle of an upright stationary or the reclined seat of a recumbent, the patient may look less like a bicycle rider than a bicycle component—the node of a gonzo gearing system co-designed by Rube Goldberg and Google.
Stationary bikes were put to use in unlikely ways long before the digital age. Beginning in 1899, a research team led by Professor W. O. Atwater of Wesleyan University conducted a celebrated series of experiments to gauge the efficiency of “the human engine.” The scientists placed a stationary bike inside a large metal-lined wooden box and used magnets and a small dynamo to convert the action of the bike’s chain-driven rear wheel into an electrical current. The guinea pig for this research was a male cyclist who pedaled the stationary, at staggered intervals, for several days and nights. The rider was not permitted to leave the box, which was outfitted with a folding bed, a chair, and a table. The man’s food, drink, and “excretory products,” as well as the bicycle’s electrical output, were measured and analyzed “with the greatest accuracy.” By this means the scientists were able to calculate the ratio of the “fuel” consumed by the cyclist to the energy generated by his pedaling. The findings, Atwater announced, left no room for doubt. A human being was the world’s most economical energy source, “much better…than a locomotive, yielding twice as much power for a given amount of fuel…. In fact no kind of engine yet contrived—steam, gasoline or electric—is equal to the human engine as a producer of energy.”
A different set of conclusions might have been drawn from the same data: that riding a bicycle is an exceptionally efficient means of turning human exertion into energy, and that stationary bicycles in particular can be utilized to convert that energy into power sources like electricity and to run machines and tools of various kinds. Over the decades, the pedal power of stationaries has been harnessed to run dentists’ drills in New Deal Civilian Conservation Camps, to activate the air-conditioning in a subterranean Roman bunker built for Benito Mussolini, to light a giant Christmas tree in Copenhagen’s City Hall Square, and to work the film projector in a movie theater in Vilnius, Lithuania. In 1897, a whimsical inventor in St. Louis began marketing a “shower-bath bicycle” whose arrangement of pumps and pipes and a watering can–like nozzle, arcing up and over the rider from the bike’s rear sprocket, permitted a cyclist to exercise and bathe simultaneously, while regulating the water pressure with the vigor of his pedaling. Today the same principle is applied in southwestern Colombia’s Nashira Eco-Village, a planned community of single women and children, where a lone stationary bicycle provides the pumping power that runs the communal showers serving a population of four hundred.
The promise of exercise bicycles as alternative energy sources has excited the imaginations of environmentalists. Stationaries have been utilized on small farms and communes to grind flour and thresh wheat, and some cycle advocates have dreamed grander dreams of pedal-driven agriculture and industry, of putting stationary bikes to work on a vast scale in fields and factories and homes. These ideas were elaborated in one of the more fascinating artifacts of 1970s bicycle utopianism, Pedal Power in Work, Leisure, and Transportation, a manifesto, history, and how-to co-authored by a group of scholars and activists and published in 1977 by Rodale Press, which specialized in books about sustainability. Pedal Power’s rhetoric combined technophobia and machismo, a familiar mix among bicycle activists, assailing “this age of lasers and deep space probes” in which “much of the muscle in the industrialized world hangs like a rag doll.” The solution, the authors wrote, was to foster a “climate of bikology,” exploiting the “full human potential inherent in the use of bicycles for work.”
The book made the case for the “Energy Cycle,” a low-tech pedal-driven contraption developed by engineer Dick Ott and the “Research and Development Department of Rodale Press.” The Energy Cycle consisted of a stripped-down bike frame, the seat of a typing chair, a work bench, and a variety of cranks, sprockets, and pulleys. It could be combined with any number of tools to perform a range of jobs, from farm work and light manufacturing to basic household tasks. It could power lathes and drills and stone polishers and potter’s wheels; it could pull weeds and winch a plow and irrigate a field; it could clean grain, shell corn, roll oats. It was also a kind of jumbo Cuisinart, an infinitely adaptable kitchen appliance. It was capable of opening cans, sharpening knives, kneading dough, beating batter, churning butter, plucking feathers, skinning fish, slicing meat and cheese, pureeing fruits and vegetables, making sausages and ice cream and applesauce. By delegating the heavy-duty labor to the legs and feet, the Energy Cycle freed a user’s hands to do other things: “Researchers report that when working with cherries, a person can sort, pluck, and feed with the hands while the feet do the pitting.” But the authors of Pedal Power imagined a headier future for pedal-driven machines:
As the bicycle in a sense “liberated” people at the turn of the century, pedal power can liberate millions again. Women, who throughout the world must daily perform difficult tasks by hand, can benefit…. If pedal power extends beyond class and economic lines, we have put geography to rest.
More than four decades later, this vision sounds both naïve and prescient. “Bikology” has not emancipated millions nor rendered geography obsolete. But the use of pedal-driven tools is on the rise, particularly in rural communities of the developing world, to help ease the burdens of manual labor and bolster economic productivity. (In Latin America, where pedal-powered contraptions are popular, a new word has entered the vernacular: bicimáquinas, “bicycle machines.”) Aid workers are increasingly turning to devices such as pedal-driven water purifiers, which harness the power of stationary bicycles to bring potable water to impoverished regions and disaster zones.
In the West, the bicycle machine remains a scruffy pet of the activist left. During the two-month-long Occupy Wall Street standoff in the autumn of 2011, demonstrators at Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park charged batteries and powered laptops by pedaling stationary bikes rigged with generators. It was a cheap, practical way to supply energy to the Zuccotti Park tent city. But for protesters decrying, among other things, an unholy alliance of politicians, Wall Street, and the fossil fuel industry, the power of those whirring bicycle wheels was above all symbolic: a low-tech rebuke to Big Oil capitalism.
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Wall Street, for its part, does not view stationary bicycles as engines of the revolution. They are commodities whose value has been trending upward for two decades. Today, the global stationary cycle market is valued at nearly $600 million, and is expected to grow to almost $800 million by 2026. High-design flourishes and hefty price points have reached the humble world of pedal-driven food-prep gizmos. What would the dreamers behind the Energy Cycle make of the Fender Blender? It is a stationary, available in various Day-Glo hues, with a pedal-activated blender that rests on a platform above a twenty-eight-inch flywheel. Designed and marketed by Rock the Bike, an Oakland-based “event technology” company specializing in pedal-powered novelties, the Fender Blender is “good for thousands of smoothies with minimal hassle and maximum fun.” The bikes retail for about $2,700.
The driving force behind stationary bicycle sales is fitness, a craze for indoor cycling that has elevated the sport to the level of step aerobics and yoga as a workout-industry mainstay. Today, consumers who purchase exercise bikes for use in the home make up the largest sector of the market. I wonder how many of these machines will meet the fate of the stationary I remember from childhood visits to my grandparents’ house: a lime-green Schwinn “Exerciser” that migrated over the years from living room to guest bedroom to a mildewing corner of the basement, where it languished next to an unloved ping-pong table, as lost to the world as the bikes that went down with the Titanic. Surely legions of stationary bicycles are sunken in cellars, relics of forsaken New Year’s resolutions, of fitness regimens that hit the shoals.
Then again, for millions today, exercise cycling is a more serious pursuit than in the past. The origins of the current boom date to 1987, when Jonathan Goldberg, a South African–born professional bicycle racer, narrowly averted a deadly crash while road training at night near his home in Santa Monica, California. Goldberg welded together a homemade stationary and switched to training in his garage. Soon he began to contemplate the entrepreneurial prospects of indoor cycling.
Goldberg, who goes by the nickname Johnny G, had a head for business and a flair for bromides. The result was a new form of exercise, or at least a shrewd reformulation of an old form of exercise, which Goldberg christened “Spinning.” (Goldberg quickly trademarked the term, along with “Spin,” “Spinner,” and “Johnny G Spinner.”) Spinning was modeled on aerobics: high-energy classes, held in gyms and fitness centers, with thumping music and instructors exhorting cyclists to pedal harder and longer. Goldberg’s innovation was to give the enterprise an overlay of spirituality and self-help. “The stationary bike, potentially the most boring piece of equipment imaginable, can be brought to life, but only if you have a true urge to imbue it with energy,” Goldberg wrote in Romancing the Bicycle: The Five Spokes of Balance (2000), a memoir and mission statement. “The Spinning program is…about surrendering to the Universe, freeing the mind, opening the heart and creating personal parameters.” In publicity portraits, Goldberg, a wiry man with peroxide-blond hair, was cast as a kind of Zen master: photos showed him practicing martial arts on a windswept beach and seated in the lotus position in a garden beside a Buddha statuette. If the imagery was “Eastern,” Goldberg’s self-actualization credo was, unmistakably, American. “The gift of the Spinning program,” he wrote, “can be synthesized into one vital message: You are the most important person in the world. Never stop believing in yourself.”
In recent years, a new generation of moguls has transfigured studio cycling, pumping it up with new technology and higher decibel music, while reformulating the spin class as an “extreme” athletic endeavor and a “tribal” rite. The company most responsible for the shift is SoulCycle, which grew from a single location on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to a juggernaut with studios in more than a dozen American states and Canada, and a valuation of hundreds of millions of dollars. SoulCycle was founded in 2006 by three New Yorkers, Elizabeth Cutler, Julie Rice, and Ruth Zukerman. These entrepreneurs recognized that affluent, fitness-conscious young urbanites wanted a more social experience in the gym. They pitched SoulCycle as a “cardio party,” with “rockstar instructors” leading riders who “move in unison as a pack to the beat.” SoulCycle’s studios combine elements of the nightclub and the wellness spa. The music is up-tempo, rhythmic, loud. The studios are lit by candles and have walls emblazoned with slogans and beatitudes: we aspire to inspire. we inhale intention and exhale expectation. we commit to our climbs and find freedom in our sprints. the rhythm pushes us harder than we ever thought possible. addicted, obsessed, unnaturally attached to our bikes. high on sweat and the hum of the wheel. core engaged, we reshape our bodies one ride at a time.
The language is drivel—even rockstar instructors must find it difficult to inhale intention—but it is undoubtedly drivel by design. There is no denying SoulCycle’s marketing savvy, which begins with its clever brand name. Like Johnny G, SoulCycle sells stationary biking as a spiritual practice, a means of personal enlightenment. This idea is increasingly a part of bike culture, circulating online and in cycling’s version of inspirational literature. (Sample titles: The Bicycle Effect: Cycling as Meditation; The 100 Most Powerful Affirmations for Cycling; Mindful Thoughts for Cyclists: Finding Balance on Two Wheels; Pedal, Stretch, Breathe: The Yoga of Bicycling.) A tenet of the spirituality marketed by SoulCycle is that inner peace brings outer beauty: the enlightened cyclist, it is strongly intimated, will also be a hot cyclist with a rockin’ bod, like SoulCycle’s toned and tatted instructors.
SoulCycle has endured financial setbacks, and weathered the Covid-19 shutdown of its studios, in part by holding “indoor cycling” classes outdoors. But it was the SoulCycle studio ambience that gained the company its cult, and that can’t be replicated in broad daylight. The lights are dim. The music thuds and booms. The candles flicker like constellations. The words on the wall read: take a journey, find your soul. Seventy cyclists are pedaling their unmoving bikes to a distant place, an illimitable territory not found on any map. They travel the boundless roadways of the self.
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The stationary bicycle has reached other frontiers. Peloton, the subscription media and exercise-equipment service, attracts thousands of riders at a time to its livestreamed cycling classes. The slick design and high price tags of Peloton’s proprietary bikes, equipped with touchscreens that allow members to join both live and on-demand classes from the comfort of home, have further elevated the stationary bicycle to the level of luxe status symbol. The company launched in 2013, but its apotheosis came in 2020, when Covid drove millions of fitness buffs into quarantine. In April 2020, in the early weeks of the crisis, a record twenty-three thousand Peloton members streamed a single live class. A good number of them, it’s safe to assume, were refugees from SoulCycle. Peloton cannot simulate the sweaty camaraderie that devotees of SoulCycle cherish, in what I suppose must now be characterized as IRL stationary biking. Instead, Peloton’s members—a few million strong at this writing, though the company has vowed to grow the number into the hundreds of millions—have merged the old-fashioned act of bicycling with that quintessential twenty-first-century experience: staring at a screen, alone and yet not alone, in the spectral company of countless others. If Peloton meets its membership goals, it may yet lay claim to the largest mass bike rides in history—a virtual phalanx of millions, pedaling together through cyberspace.
At least one exercise bicycle has departed this earthly plane altogether. Some 220 miles above the earth’s surface, in the International Space Station, there is a machine called a Cycle Ergometer with Vibration Isolation and Stabilization System, or CEVIS. Missions on the space station usually last six months. While in orbit, astronauts experience microgravity, floating and drifting in the air, never using their legs to support their own weight. These conditions take a toll on the human body. Astronauts lose bone density and muscle mass, and they must maintain an intensive exercise regimen to ensure that their legs will still work—that they will be able to stand upright and walk—when their feet again touch terra firma.
The CEVIS is located in the space station’s Destiny Laboratory. It has been called “NASA’s stationary bicycle,” but it is not exactly stationary, and it doesn’t look much like a bike. It has neither handlebars nor a seat. It consists of a set of pedals that drive a small flywheel through a planetary gear set. The flywheel is contained inside a small rectangular box, from which the pedals protrude; this apparatus is attached to a larger metal frame, which, in turn, is bolted to the wall of the laboratory by isolation mounts. To operate the CEVIS, astronauts simply clip their shoes into toe clips and pedal. There is a back pad to support the upper body, and riders can further secure themselves with a belt and shoulder straps. But the toe clips are sufficient to keep a cyclist moored to the bike, and many astronauts choose to simply balance their bodies atop those pedals, which gives a ride on the CEVIS the appearance of a magic trick. The pedals turn; the bike and the cyclist hover in dreamy microgravity. The thing looks like a levitating unicycle. “Cycle Ergometer with Vibration Isolation and Stabilization System” doesn’t capture the effect.
Astronauts can adjust the resistance level of the CEVIS. They can do scaled training and interval training. A computer monitor mounted at eye level, like a screen on a Peloton bike, allows cyclists to listen to music or watch a movie as they pedal. The CEVIS is also a data device. Its computer collects information on riders and transmits the numbers back to planet Earth, so NASA doctors can create cycling protocols tailored to the fitness needs of individual astronauts.
The CEVIS does not quite fulfill the old fantasy of bicycles in outer space. No one will mistake the pedaling astronaut for the nymphs in those old advertising posters, zigzagging their bikes through an obstacle course of moons and stars. But a spin on NASA’s bicycle holds other wonders. Astronauts are often required to ride for ninety minutes at a stretch, during which time the space station passes over two sunrises, completing an orbit of Earth. At NASA they like to joke that the riders of its exercise bike are the fastest cyclists in history, capable of circling the globe in a single workout. (“Lance Armstrong, eat your heart out!” wrote the astronaut Ed Lu in a blog post.) A cyclist clicks his shoes into the CEVIS and goes wheeling above clouds, deserts, jungles, oceans full of islands and icebergs, the Himalayas, the Amazon, Newfoundland, New York, Antarctica, Africa, Asia—crossing the heavens at 17,150 miles per hour, and going nowhere at all.