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The so-called bicycle window, St. Giles’ Church, Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, England.
St. Giles’ is a small parish church that sits on a patch of pleasantly shaded land in the village of Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, twenty-five miles west of London. There has been a house of worship on this site since Saxon times. The oldest part of the church building, its rough-hewn stone tower, dates from the period of the Norman Conquest.
The place is also holy ground for literati of a certain age and inclination. It was at St. Giles’, in 1742, that Thomas Gray conceived “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” a meditation on death and bereavement that was once among the most celebrated poems in the English language, a fixture of syllabi until tastes swung to less orotund verse. Today, Gray himself is in the churchyard, in a grave marked by an altar-shaped tombstone that sits just outside a chapel window on the building’s east façade. St. Giles’ is a lovely place, tranquil and picturesque, an ideal spot for a rest—eternal or merely momentary. If you find yourself there on a mild evening, you will take in a setting little different from the one immortalized by Gray:
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.
My visit to St. Giles’ came in the spring, on a day of warm breezes and pouring sunshine. The panorama—church, churchyard greenery, surrounding countryside—was unreasonably pretty, and as I strolled the long path that snakes through St. Giles’ grounds, the birds were singing so wildly that I punched up the Voice Memos app on my iPhone and made a recording. Looming about one hundred yards to the south of the church was the Manor House, a sixteenth-century estate once owned by Queen Elizabeth I, and later by Sir Thomas Penn, the son of William Penn, Pennsylvania’s founder. For an American who had spent little time in the leafy home counties but many hours reading nineteenth-century novels and watching costume-drama adaptations of those novels, the scenery was exotic but familiar. I half-expected to see Dame Maggie Smith bustling out of the church in period dress.
The person who materialized instead was St. Giles’ minister, Reverend Harry Latham. With a couple of adjustments to his wardrobe, Latham himself might have stepped from the pages of Jane Austen. He was the picture of the handsome country vicar. He was perhaps forty-five years old, but he had the unlined face and full hairline of a younger man. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a pin-striped shirt with a clerical collar. There was a faint musical lilt when he spoke, and his manner was soothing. Latham has a second pulpit about a mile up the road at St. Giles’ sister church, St. Andrew’s, where the congregation is younger and the services more informal, with sermons augmented by guitars and drums and sing-alongs. It is easy to picture Latham in either role: intoning the Beatitudes beneath St. Giles’ medieval vaults or strumming an acoustic on the altar at St. Andrew’s, his feet tapping along in open-toed sandals.
I had phoned a few months earlier to arrange a meeting, and followed up with emails, including one on the evening before my arrival. But as I faced Latham that afternoon in the churchyard, it was apparent that he had no idea who I was or what I could be doing there. I watched him take me in, cap to sneakers, registering the facts of the case: I was a stranger, my accent was American, I was clearly seeking neither pastoral care nor communion with the ghost of Thomas Gray. He came to the obvious conclusion. “You’re looking for the bicycle window,” Latham said.
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The bicycle is a definitively nineteenth-century thing. It was the product of hard science and machine age engineering, of mass production and global trade. It was a creation of Victorian commercial culture, blown up big and spread wide by billboards and newspaper advertisements and popular songs. The bicycle stood for modernity and for modernism. “Lady Progress” was the mascot of the first periodical devoted to cycling, Le vélocipède illustré, published in Paris beginning in 1869. Drawings that appeared above the magazine’s masthead depicted a female cyclist in a heroic pose, leaving dust in her wake as she streamed forward on two wheels, clutching a banner, with a headlamp lighting the way. The image winked at Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People while linking the bicycle to the hallmarks of changing times: women’s liberation, new technology, speed, freedom. Decades later, Picasso, Duchamp, and other artists and writers still enshrined the bicycle as an emblem of the avant-garde.
Yet a crucial truth about the bicycle, as a historical and technological phenomenon, is that it arrived illogically late. It was an anachronism at birth. The first bike came into the world a decade and a half after the invention of the steam locomotive. By the time the bicycle achieved its ideal form, the automotive revolution was stirring. The groundbreaking Rover bicycle hit the market in 1885; that same year, Gottlieb Daimler introduced his proto-motorcycle, the Einspur, and Karl Benz built his first Motorwagen. The knowledge and materials required to create a bike have been around since the Middle Ages, but it took centuries for the forces of fate and fancy to align and give the world the thing itself.
Perhaps this is why the bicycle library is cluttered with apocrypha: fantasies and hoaxes and bogus origin stories, projected centuries and even millennia back into history. Victorians dreamed of bicycles in antiquity, envisioning Roman velocipede cavalries and gilded bicycles waiting to be excavated from pharaohs’ tombs in the Valley of the Kings. The idea was echoed in the advertising art that pictured bicycles alongside figures from classical mythology. The surrealist jokester Alfred Jarry may have had such visions in mind when he wrote his satirical retelling of the crucifixion story, “The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race” (1903), in which Jesus punctures a tire with his crown of thorns and lugs his bicycle up the hill to Golgotha:
The bicycle frame in use today is of relatively recent invention. It appeared around 1890. Previous to that time the body of the machine was constructed of two tubes soldered together at right angles. It was generally called the right-angle or cross bicycle. Jesus, after his puncture, climbed the slope on foot, carrying on his shoulder the bike frame, or, if you will, the cross.
No one could mistake Jarry’s jape for fact. But myths have slipped into history books and popped up in respectable journalism. “Bicycles appear in the bas reliefs of ancient Babylon, Egypt, and Pompeii,” asserted The New York Times in 1974, breezily revising the birth date of the bicycle by thousands of years. Among scholars, the search for a lost ur-bicycle continues. It is as if the reality of the machine’s nineteenth-century origins remains at some basic level unbelievable, even to those most conversant with the history. Researchers grasp at scraps, identifying supposed bicycle progenitors: a fifteenth-century wood carving showing what may be a toy tricycle, a treadle-operated seventeenth-century “invalid carriage,” a variety of other human-powered machines propelled by the turning of cranks and the pumping of handles.
This antecedent spotting can be enjoyable, even when it is far-fetched. At least two works by Hieronymus Bosch have been noted for their depictions of putative proto-bikes, and it is fun to imagine that the bicycle began as a figment of that great freakish mind. One Bosch drawing, Witches (c. 1500), features a kind of primitive unicycle: a woman is pictured astride a large wooden wheel, to which her feet are attached by pedal-like straps. This device is shown rolling through a typically grotesque Boschian landscape; it appears to be headed for a crash with a nude figure whose rear end is being probed by a long-beaked bird.
Another Renaissance master was at the center of a notorious bicycle hoax. In September 1974, newspaper readers around the world were startled by the announcement that a sketch of a bicycle had been discovered in Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, a previously unpublished compendium of the artist’s drawings and writings. The drawing was said to be the work of Leonardo’s student and servant Salai, based on a design by Leonardo himself. Scholars greeted the claim with skepticism. The sketch was suspiciously detailed and modern-looking, showing a bike with a crank, pedals, a rear-driven chain wheel, and a mudguard. A raft of evidence has since confirmed that the image is counterfeit, likely scribbled into the Codex between 1966 and 1969 by a person whose intent may have been humorous rather than fraudulent. An art historian at UCLA found that the page of the Codex where the bicycle now appears previously featured abstract geometric jottings, two circles intersected by arcs. These may have suggested the shape of a bicycle to the prank’s perpetrator, who completed the job with a few quick pen strokes.
Some speculate that the drawing of “Leonardo’s bicycle” was the work of a mischievous monk at the Abbey of Santa Maria di Grottaferrata, near Rome, where the Codex was housed for years while undergoing restoration. But the culprit may never be identified. The question, in any case, is not whodunit but why an obvious forgery was greeted with credulity and enthusiasm, by the public at large and by officialdom. As the cycle historians Tony Hadland and Hans Erhard-Lessing have noted: “The Italian cultural bureaucracy…still upholds ‘Leonardo’s bicycle.’ ” The stubbornness may be explained by the wry words of the writer Curzio Malaparte: “In Italy, the bicycle belongs to the national art heritage in the same way as Mona Lisa by Leonardo, the dome of St. Peter or the Divine Comedy…. When you say in Italy that the bicycle has not been invented by an Italian…then a long shudder will run down the peninsula’s spine, from the Alps to the Etna.”
Italy is hardly the only bastion of what we might call bicycle nationalism. The historiography of the bicycle is clouded by competing priority claims, clashing accounts of the bike’s creation and evolution that reflect a struggle for patriotic bragging rights. Paul Smethurst, the author of The Bicycle: Towards a Global History, has described the politics behind these battles over the bicycle’s lineage: “As soon as individuals—and by extension nations—are credited with great inventions, ideas or works of art, edifices of mythological proportions can emerge. In the chauvinistic and sometimes jingoistic atmosphere of 19th-century Europe such edifices bolstered national prestige, and in the modern era technological advances have been especially valued.”
At least one creation myth came from outside Europe. In 1897, the diplomat and politician Li Hongzhang declared that the bike was an ancient Chinese invention. Li told a group of American journalists that the bicycle was developed at the time of the Yao dynasty, around 2300 b.c. The vehicle was known as the “happy dragon,” and it grew so popular that it disrupted China’s social order: women neglected their household duties to spend their time riding, and the emperor was forced to impose a ban. This was a clever yarn, neatly accounting for the happy dragon’s disappearance while evoking current events: the rise of bicycle-riding feminists, and the backlash against them.
Li, a famous raconteur, may well have spun his fairy tale spontaneously, from whole cloth. But certain priority claims appear to have been deliberately concocted as government propaganda. A 1949 article in the Soviet journal Physical Culture and Sport detailed the heroics of Efim Artamonov, a Russian serf who invented a high-wheeled bicycle in 1801, nearly seven decades before similar machines appeared in western Europe. According to the article, Artamonov hand-built the bike, which he then rode eleven hundred miles, from his home in Verkhoturye, in the Urals, to Moscow, where he presented it to Czar Alexander I as a wedding gift. (The czar rewarded the inventor by freeing him from serfdom.) A year after its publication in Physical Culture and Sport, the Artamonov story was codified with an entry in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and soon thereafter a replica of the landmark bicycle was installed in the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow. There’s no mistaking the Cold War imperatives behind this legend, which established Soviet primacy in bicycle history while hitting familiar notes about the glory of Russian workers. (“Artamonov, who with his invention anticipated the modern bicycle by many years, serves as an example of native wit and ingenuity.”) The claim was debunked as pure fiction by scholars who dug into the archives following the collapse of the USSR. Nevertheless, a bronze monument with an inscription proclaiming Artamonov the inventor of the bicycle still stands in the Ural city of Yekaterinburg.
The Artamonov hoax has the flavor of Jorge Luis Borges, sending the student of bicycle history into the bibliographical labyrinths, chasing footnotes that lead to blank walls. Another nineteenth-century literary fraud aimed to establish French patrimony for the bicycle. The perpetrator was a Parisian journalist who, in a move Borges would have savored, upgraded his pedigree by adding an aristocratic “de Saunier” to his given name, Louis Baudry. It was under that nom de plume, in 1891, that Baudry published Histoire générale de la vélocipédie, which dated the birth of the bicycle to exactly one hundred years earlier—smart marketing on the author’s part, since it meant that the publication of his Histoire coincided with the bicycle’s centennial. According to Baudry, the first bicycle was a “rigid” two-wheeler (it had no pedals or steering apparatus) crowned with a decorative head carved in the shape of a horse or lion. The vehicle was called the célérifère and was invented, Baudry wrote, by a nobleman, the Comte Dédé de Sivrac. Neither the célérifère nor the Comte de Sivrac ever existed, but the falsehoods have been repeated in books ever since, and bicycle museums in Europe and the United States have exhibited replica célérifères. Baudry did not disguise his jingoism, concocting an entirely French first quarter-century of cycling history, stretching from the Reign of Terror to the Bourbon Restoration, spiced with evocative scenes: a célérifère unveiling in the Palais-Royal, célérifère-mounted mailmen plying Paris streets. But Baudry was rhetorically shrewd, pooh-poohing the célérifère as homely while championing it as the First—an epic humblebrag. “M. de Sivrac’s invention was but a poor little naked seed!” he wrote. “What sweat, what tears, what expense, what years it took to produce fine bicycles from the primitive célérifère of the eighteenth century!”
The most telling passages in Baudry’s tract were those that lashed out at non-French claimants to the bicycle’s invention. His animus was aimed especially at France’s neighbor to the northeast. “Could a brain from the other side of the Rhine have conceived the [bicycle]?” he wrote. “Is that plausible after all?”
Baudry had in mind a particular Rhinelander: Baron Karl von Drais, a minor nobleman, originally from the city of Karlsruhe, on the western edge of the German Confederation, in the Grand Duchy of Baden. Baudry’s loathing for Drais was intense; at times in his Histoire, it seems that Baudry can hardly bring himself to write Drais’s name. (“The Badenian was merely a thief of ideas.”) But the record is clear. The crucial breakthroughs that brought the bicycle into existence took place in the brain of Karl von Drais. It was Drais who devised the first bicycle, which rolled into the world in the city of Mannheim, on the eastern bank of the Rhine, in the late spring of 1817.
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The basic facts of the story have been established. On June 12, 1817, Drais unveiled the invention he called the Laufmaschine, or “running machine.” That day, Drais made a short demonstration ride on a road that ran south from central Mannheim, covering a distance of eight miles in just under an hour. It is unknown how many onlookers were present for the Laufmaschine’s debut, but those who were would have been impressed—and, perhaps, tickled—by its novelty. It had two wheels, each approximately twenty-seven inches in diameter, arranged in a line, one wheel in front of the other. The wheels were connected by a wooden slab, which was fitted with a cushioned saddle. The rider centered his weight on the vehicle, straddling the seat, and rolled the wheels forward by pushing off the ground, one foot at a time—the “running” motion that gave the Laufmaschine its name. The steering mechanism was a kind of tiller, a long pivoting pole hitched to the front axle. If the rider came to a hill or other terrain that was difficult to navigate by the usual means, he could dismount, rotate the steering rod forward, and use it to drag the Laufmaschine behind him. There was a brake, too, operated by a pull cord. To thwart copycats, Drais placed the brake on the front section of the frame, where it was hidden by the rider’s legs.
The design was clever in several ways. Drais situated the saddle toward the rear of the frame, at a height low enough for the user’s legs to reach the ground. On the other end of the Laufmaschine, Drais placed a padded rest for the forearms. This arrangement held the rider’s body in an optimal position—back erect, torso slightly tilted forward—providing comfort and ensuring efficient movement. “The instrument and the traveller are kept in equilibrio,” Drais noted in his first published description of the invention. He had hit upon the defining oddity of bicycle mechanics: the symbiosis between man and machine, between the bicycle and the rider who is also the power source. Drais’s intuition about ergonomics was matched by an eye for aesthetics. The Laufmaschine was primitive by comparison with the bicycle as we have come to know it, lacking many key features, notably pedals. But its silhouette—the slender frame that loops on either end into wheels of equal size—is recognizably that of a bike. To behold the Laufmaschine in 1817 was to glimpse the future.
Nevertheless, those who witnessed Drais’s first ride might have been more amused than amazed. To early-nineteenth-century eyes, the Laufmaschine told a visual joke: it was a parody of a chariot. Drais had commissioned a cartwright to construct the machine, and the building materials—the frame of seasoned ash, the spoked wooden wheels wrapped in iron hoops—were carriage materials. It was, in short, a horse-drawn cart that had somehow become separated from the horse and most of the cart, and fallen under the command of a toiling human being. The Laufmaschine, critics quipped, was a coach that forced its passenger to walk in the mud, while burdening him with the labor normally delegated to a four-legged beast. It was a contraption that “turned a man into a horse.”
In fact, the first person to make the comparison to horses was Drais himself. He touted the Laufmaschine as a horse replacement, offering travelers a new kind of autonomy and, under the right conditions, greater speed. “When roads are dry and firm, [the Laufmaschine] runs on a plain at the rate of eight or nine miles an hour, which is equal to a horse’s gallop,” Drais wrote. “On a descent, it equals a horse at full speed.” For Drais, the Laufmaschine was a “facilitator” and an “accelerator,” a device that augmented a person’s own natural powers of locomotion. The machine did not dehumanize its rider—if anything, it superhumanized him, allowing him to travel faster, more efficiently, more freely.
This was the message Drais carried across Europe in the half decade following the Laufmaschine’s introduction. He spent several years refining the design, creating new Laufmaschine models—tandems, three- and four-wheeled variations, a Laufmaschine with an extra passenger seat “for a lady”—while seeking to secure patents in different territories. Drais was an imperfect proselytizer, an oddball who alienated as many people as he charmed. He had been born Karl Friedrich Christian Ludwig Freiherr Drais von Sauerbronn in Karlsruhe in 1785. The Drais family was titled but not wealthy. His mother was born the Baroness von Kaltenthal; his father, Baron Wilhelm von Drais, was privy councillor to the grand duke of Baden, Karl Friedrich. Karl was named after the duke, who attended his christening.
As a child, Karl showed a keen interest in machines and devised new ones of his own. When he reached his teenage years, it was decided that he should pursue a career in civil service, and he enrolled in a school of forest administration run by his uncle. Drais later studied architecture, physics, and mathematics at the University of Heidelberg, but a career in forestry was deemed his best professional option.
In 1810, Drais secured an appointment as the grand duchy’s chief forester. The title was impressive, but the job was hardly a job at all. It was a ceremonial post: Drais received a salary but did basically no work. He went officially “off duty” in 1811, continuing to collect his pay while living in Mannheim and pursuing private obsessions. Effectively, the government was providing him with a stipend to daydream and tinker. It was a good investment. Drais would go on to invent a periscope, a wood cooker, a meat grinder, a machine that recorded piano music on paper, the earliest keyboard typewriter, and the first shorthand transcription machine. In a portrait painted when Drais was in his early thirties, he has the eccentric look of a gentleman inventor: ill-fitting coat, tousled hair, glassy faraway gaze.
Drais was particularly interested in the problem of transport. Breakthroughs in science, medicine, and engineering had radically transformed everyday life in Europe, yet the horse-drawn vehicles used to move human beings over land had not been meaningfully upgraded for centuries. In 1813, Drais tried his hand at an improvement, designing a four-wheeled carriage, to be piloted by two or more people, with a foot-powered crank and a hand-operated “rudder” for steering. He called it the Fahrmaschine, the driving machine. The device had a variety of technical shortcomings, but it was the clear forerunner of the two-wheeler that Drais would soon conceive.
What prompted Drais to dream up the Laufmaschine? The question has vexed historians. Hans-Erhard Lessing, Drais’s biographer, has argued that the invention of both the Fahrmaschine and the Laufmaschine are linked to crop shortages, which turned Drais’s thoughts to the possibility of horseless travel, a means of personal transport not reliant on stores of oats or corn. In the case of the Laufmaschine, Lessing says, the precipitating event was a global cataclysm: the “super-colossal” eruption of Mount Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, which sent a towering column of ash skyward on April 10, 1815. The following year, the ash cloud reached the Northern Hemisphere. The result was the climatological and ecological disaster known as “the year without a summer.” Winter temperatures and blizzards continued into the summer months of 1816, destroying harvests in Europe and North America. The Rhine River valley was one of the places hardest hit, and Lessing theorizes that the chaos there—devastating crop shortfalls and deaths of horses on a mass scale—compelled Drais to once again take up the horseless transport problem. It is a seductive origin story: the bicycle’s creation was heralded by the largest volcanic explosion ever recorded, a literal big bang.
Still, it is just a theory, and the murk surrounding Karl von Drais’s eureka moment may never lift. As for the Laufmaschine’s decline: that story is well known. It enjoyed a brief vogue in several European and American cities, fell out of favor within a few years, and stands today as an oddity: a technological landmark that is also a curio, a historical flash in the pan.
Yet the Laufmaschine was revolutionary. Several decades elapsed between the introduction of Drais’s machine and the invention of a pedal-driven two-wheeler, and another thirty-odd years passed before further refinements gave us the modern bicycle. But none of these bikes would have existed had Drais not established what scholars call the “two-wheeler principle,” the single-file lineup of two wheels. For that leap of the imagination alone, Drais merits the heady title Vater des Fahrrads, Father of the Bicycle.
During his lifetime, acclaim eluded Drais. Infamy did not. His life was tumultuous, shaken by great events of the age and by the cutthroat politics of his caste. In 1822, he was targeted by student mobs in the aftermath of a controversial legal decision made by his father, then the highest-ranking judge in Baden. Drais fled to Brazil, where he hid out for years, working as a land surveyor on the plantation of a German-Russian nobleman. He returned to Baden in 1827, but he came under fire for his increasingly liberal-nationalist views and support for democratic reforms. He was harassed by the authorities, who slandered him as a madman and a drunk. The press played along, dubbing Drais “the foolish forester” and deriding him as an inventor of useless machines. There were efforts to commit him to sanatoriums, and he survived at least one assassination attempt. In 1848, following France’s “February Revolution,” he renounced his noble title, taking the name “Citizen Karl Drais.” But in 1849, when an uprising in Baden failed, his assets were seized and his pension cut off—repayment, the government said, for “the cost of revolution.” Drais retreated to his hometown of Karlsruhe, where he lived just a few streets away from the home of another pioneer of mechanized transport, Karl Benz, a child at the time. Drais died, destitute, on December 10, 1851. A Laufmaschine was among his scant possessions at the time of his death. He was buried in Karlsruhe, beneath a gravestone that made no mention of his inventions, summing up his life’s work in bland bureaucratese: “Chamberlain, Forester, Professor of Mechanics.”
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Researchers do not agree on all aspects of the Laufmaschine story. Hans-Erhard Lessing’s “year without a summer” hypothesis has become a part of the official narrative, asserted as a fact in books and other commemorations. In 2017, on the bicentennial of Drais’s first ride, Germany issued a silver twenty-euro coin featuring depictions of the Laufmaschine and the Tambora eruption. Yet Lessing has stated plainly that the theory is based on circumstantial evidence, with no testimony from Drais himself connecting the Laufmaschine’s invention to the climatic catastrophe of 1816. (In fact, the only inspiration cited by Drais himself was ice-skating—a clear precedent for the push-and-glide motion used to propel the Laufmaschine.) Paul Smethurst has suggested that “environmentalist revisionism” may be behind the acceptance of the “year without a summer” narrative. “The bicycle has gained a symbolic role as a ‘green machine’ in the 21st-century, so it might seem ‘natural’ to associate its invention with an environmental crisis of 200 years ago,” Smethurst writes.
Other scholarly quibbles are more pedantic, such as the argument that the Laufmaschine should not be classified as a bicycle, since it lacked pedals. Bicycle history holds many milestones, a long sequence of design breakthroughs and mechanical enhancements that came after Drais. There are plenty of firsts to go around, and various nations—France, England, Scotland, the United States, Italy, Japan—can claim pivotal roles in the bike’s technical development. But the primacy of the Laufmaschine, its status as the ur-bike, is unchallenged today by all but cranks and fantasists.
Of course, dreams do persist. There are bicycle obsessives who care little for the fine points of scholarly disputes or nationalist priority claims. Their love strikes a more mystical chord. For romantics like these, the search for the bike’s origins leads to Stoke Poges, to St. Giles’ Church, and to the bicycle window.
Inside the church, on the building’s west-facing wall, there is a stained-glass window framed by an ogive arch. The window’s centerpiece is a World War II memorial listing the names of eight St. Giles’ congregants who died in the war. Just above and to the right of the memorial is an additional piece of glass, measuring eighteen inches by eighteen inches, which was not part of the original design and sits rather awkwardly, like a crude patch, atop the window’s harlequin pattern of colored panes. The panel holds an enigmatic image: a small muscle-bound male nude, a cherub perhaps, is blowing a horn while straddling a strange device with a single spoked wheel.
This is the so-called bicycle window. No one is certain where or when it was created, or what exactly it portrays. Its provenance has been traced by different investigators to fifteenth-century Flanders and sixteenth-century Italy. Some have suggested that the contraption it depicts is a medieval land-surveying tool known as a waywiser. (The knotted string that appears in the upper left portion of the panel is similar to those found on waywisers.) Others point to passages in the Book of Ezekiel that describe cherubs riding wheels, and to religious paintings and mosaics depicting such scenes.
What is clear, in any event, is that the bicycle window has nothing to do with bicycles. It is evidently a section of a larger stained-glass composition; details that could clarify what kind of apparatus the horn player is riding have been cut off, leaving fragmentary images within the panel’s borders. The rear of the machine arcs into what appears to be a circular shape. But it is a wild leap to conclude that this truncated form is the rear wheel of some kind of bike or bike-like vehicle.
Nevertheless, many have drawn that conclusion. Word of the window’s existence first began to circulate when the members of a cycling club visited Stoke Poges in 1884. Reports surfaced in cycling magazines, and a sketch of the window appeared in one of the earliest bicycle histories, Harry Hewitt Griffin’s Cycles and Cycling (1890), above a caption that dated it to the seventeenth century and offered no hedging language: “The church window cyclist of 1642.” In his text, Griffin went further, construing the St. Giles’ window as a historical missing link, a “clue to the student who is desirous of tracing manual locomotion to its birth.”
By the turn of the century, the lore of the St. Giles’ window had spread sufficiently that guidebooks touted it as a tourist draw on par with Thomas Gray: “Every visitor to Stoke Poges visits Gray’s tomb, and no less a matter for pilgrimage has the so-called ‘Bicycle Window’ become of late years.” “Pilgrimage” was the right word. Even those not prone to fantastical thinking may have found their imaginations inflamed by the atmosphere of St. Giles’—by the sight of a “sacred bicycle,” consecrated in stained glass among the arches and archangels.
Today bicycle pilgrims still come to St. Giles’, though not, according to Reverend Harry Latham, in the numbers they once did. Still, when Latham brought me into the church that afternoon, it was clear that this was a tour he had given before. Architecturally, St. Giles’ is a hodgepodge, telling a centuries-long story of building and rebuilding. There are Saxon windows, Norman walls, a Gothic nave, a Tudor chapel, late-seventeenth-century hatchments, Victorian arches. Latham and I were alone, and the place was very quiet, still, and dark. It was dank, too. The weather outside was warm, but inside the church, it was chilly: the cold and wet of a thousand English winters had blown into the building and never left. Latham led me past the Easter Sepulchre, a tomb containing the mortal remains of Sir John de Molyns, a fourteenth-century knight. Latham said: “Before I show you the bicycle, I need to show you the place that it came from.”
On the south side of St. Giles’, just opposite the wooden porch entrance to the building, there is a separate entryway that leads into a little vestibule. This place is known as the Manor House Entrance. As the name suggests, it once served as a private way in and out of the church for the residents of the neighboring stately home, a place for St. Giles’ fanciest congregants to gather themselves, and to discard wet clothes on a rainy day, before stepping into the sanctuary. Eventually the occupants of the Manor House stopped using the entrance, and the vestibule became a kind of storeroom where St. Giles’ clergy kept bulky items: cleaning supplies, gardening equipment, a bicycle or two. “Today we use it as a kitchenette,” Latham said. There was a small table in one corner, next to a mini-refrigerator.
The oddest features of the room are two small south-facing windows that are hung with what is best described as stained-glass collages. These windows hold a weird array of ornaments and images: floral motifs, swags, scrollwork, dogs, birds, fierce-looking griffins holding coats of arms in their beaks. For years, the bicycle panel sat in these windows too, another element in a surreal jumble. Some decades ago, the clergy at St. Giles’ got tired of bringing visitors into the vestibule to view the bicycle window. So they cut the panel out of the window and installed it in the church proper.
In fact, the bicycle panel was twice decontextualized. Its first home was neither the sacred confines of the sanctuary nor the adjacent vestibule but an entirely different building: the Manor House. “The vestibule was built when they were downsizing the Manor House,” Latham said. “This was in the mid–seventeenth century, we think. They obviously had some scraps of glass from the house they wanted to recycle.” In other words, the bicycle window was originally a domestic oddity, an adornment of a noble family’s posh digs. Perhaps Queen Elizabeth herself laid eyes on it when she visited the Manor House in 1601. Latham said: “They brought the stained glass from the Manor House and threw it in here. I don’t think much care was taken with it, frankly. I mean, it’s a mishmash.”
Latham led me through a little corridor, back into the sanctuary. He said: “I think it was a good idea to pop the bicycle window into the church. I’m sure it was irritating having to bring people through. So, you know, ‘Let’s put it where everyone can see it.’ Then there’s no more problem. And now it’s become part of the furniture. Anyway, there it is.”
There it was. The sunlight was glancing down on St. Giles’ west façade, and on the other side of those walls, where Latham and I now stood, the backlit bicycle window had a somber glow. There is a feeling that sometimes steals up on me when I’m someplace beautiful and ancient, like St. Giles’. The stones and the bones; the dusty light and the musty air; the history, the mystery. The solemn majesty of such an atmosphere doesn’t so much inspire faith as ignite self-doubt, overwhelming whatever confidence I have in the power of my own mind and the worth of my worldly knowledge—throwing into question any inklings I might hold about the riddles of the universe, bicycle genealogy included. Latham stood patiently alongside me for several minutes while I studied the window, stepping forward, stepping back, snapping photos, and gazing at the thing again. There was no denying: it was a strange and alluring artifact. The toes of the rider’s right foot appeared to be reaching down to touch the ground, and his left foot was raised in the air. It was not crazy, I had to concede, for a viewer to suppose that this personage was moving his thingamajig forward by the same push-and-glide motion with which Karl von Drais had impelled the Laufmaschine. I asked Latham if he thought the contraption looked like a bicycle. “Not really,” he said. “But I suppose it looks enough like one.”
We exited St. Giles’, stepping back into the bright blusteriness of a spring day in Buckinghamshire. Latham led me around the church’s exterior, pointing out some more features of the architecture. Eventually we arrived at the spot where a granite slab commemorated the churchyard’s famous occupant: Opposite to this stone in the same tomb upon which he has so feelingly recorded his grief at the loss of a beloved parent are deposited the remains of Thomas Gray. Latham said: “A thing that you learn doing this job is that people like mysteries. They like mysteries, I think, as much as they like certainties.”