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“Horsey,” an “attachable bicycle ornament.” Created in 2010 by Korean designer Eungi Kim.
For millennia, civilization moved to a soundtrack of falling hooves. It was the rhythm of travel, the metronome marking the time of a journey: clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop. Horses’ footfalls amplified the quiet of rural roads. In cities, horses moving across cobblestones made a bustling background din. The sound brought pleasure: “The hoofs of the horses!—Oh! Witching and sweet / The music earth steals from the iron-shod feet,” wrote the poet Will H. Ogilvie. It was also a terrifying sound, a herald of death, as in the Book of Jeremiah: “All who dwell in the land will wail at the sound of the hooves of galloping steeds, at the noise of enemy chariots and the rumble of their wheels.” In any case, the sound was ubiquitous and inescapable. To journey over land at speed was to move to the accompaniment of a familiar racket.
The bicycle offered an undreamed-of novelty: nearly silent high-speed travel, a vehicle that shot you across the land atop spinning wheels that made almost no sound at all. Bikes snuck up on the nineteenth century. “There is something weird, almost uncanny, in the noiseless rush of the cyclist as he comes into view, passes by, and disappears,” a journalist declared in 1891. Today it is surprising to discover how many early observers expressed wonder, first and foremost, about the sound the bicycle made—or, rather, didn’t make. This was thought to be socially transformative. In 1892, a writer predicted that bicycles would eliminate the “harsh rattle and clatter” of horse-drawn vehicles, eradicating “the main source of the nervousness that so universally afflicts city dwellers.” Wags coined a nickname, drawing a distinction between the new machines and the old stomping, snorting pullers of carts and carriages. The bicycle was “the Silent Steed.”
There were other nicknames. The iron horse, the mechanical mount, the nickel-plated stallion, the steel palfrey, the two-wheeled Bucephalus. In France they spoke of the cheval mécanique; in Flanders, the bicycle was a vlosse-peerd, a “floss-horse,” a punning Flemish approximation of “velocipede.” At one time, the Chinese referred to the bicycle as “the foreign horse.” Epithets in this vein date to the dawn of the bicycle age. When the English gave equine nicknames to Karl von Drais’s Laufmaschine—the hobbyhorse and dandy horse and dandy charger—they were underlining the obvious. Of course, Drais himself was explicit about the connection. It was no accident that the destination of Drais’s first ride was the Schwetzinger Relaishaus, a coaching inn, where mail-delivery horses were stabled and weary horses could be swapped for those with fresh legs.
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The ideological battle pitting the bicycle against the car has nothing on the nineteenth-century showdown between the bike and the horse. At stake was not just the question of noisy versus “silent” transport. The bicycle-horse clash set the modern world against the old days and old ways, urbanity against agrarianism, machines against nature. It was an argument about progress and obsolescence. It brought heady hopeful visions crashing into dire apocalyptic ones.
It was not the first such drama to hit the nineteenth century. Similar controversy had erupted decades earlier with the arrival of the steam locomotive, which was likewise branded “the iron horse.” But in that case, the analogy was imprecise. A train traveled on tracks, shuttling between fixed points, carrying passengers en masse. The bike was personalized transport, “a single horse that obeyed only one master,” as the historian David Herlihy has written. Like a horse, a bicycle could take you door to door or—in the conceits of poets, at least—over the hills and far away:
The shadow of my silent steed
Flies over hill and vale
As swiftly as the clouds that speed
On Notus’ fav’ring gale.
No whip, no spur, its sleek thigh wounds;
Nor galls the chafing rein;
But free as Helios’ steed it bounds
Across the shining plain.
The comparison made sense. A bicyclist straddled his machine like a horseman astride his mount; to this day, the cushion attached to a bicycle’s seat post is called a saddle. In early cycling literature, writers ascribed horsey qualities to bikes: “[The velocipede] is light, and little, and leans lovingly against you for support. Its gait is uniform and easy”; “It quivers like an animal under its thick skin of nickel and enamel; it whinnies at times”; “It runs, it leaps, it rears and writhes, and shies and kicks; it is in infinite restless motion, like a bundle of sensitive nerves; it is beneath its rider like a thing of life.”
The first generations of cyclists, who learned to ride as adults, construed the bike as horselike in its unruliness. Like a mustang, a bicycle needed to be “broken.” Bicycles, wrote Jerome K. Jerome, “will try all the lowest dodges to get rid of their riders; they try to climb up the sides of houses and walls; lie down in ditches; stand on their heads for no apparent reason; buck-jump; wage war against cabs and omnibuses; and do everything they can think of to make it unpleasant for their rider until he shows them he means to be obeyed.” In “Taming the Bicycle” (1886), Mark Twain recounted his struggle to master his high-wheeled ordinary. Twain wrote: “Mine was not a full-grown bicycle, but only a colt—a fifty-inch, with the pedals shortened up to forty-eight—and skittish, like any other colt.” This horse was prone to throwing its driver:
Suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the bit in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone, defying all prayers and all your powers to change its mind—your heart stands still, your breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work, straight on you go, and there are but a couple of feet between you and the curb now…. You whirl your wheel away from the curb instead of toward it, and so you go sprawling on that granite-bound inhospitable shore.
The bicycle posed peril of a different sort to those whose livelihoods were dependent on horses. A satirical etching from 1819, at the height of England’s velocipede craze, depicts a blacksmith and a veterinarian taking revenge on the newfangled “horse” that requires neither shoeing nor medicine. The blacksmith is shown smashing the vehicle with a hammer; the veterinarian glowers over the crashed rider—a dandy, of course—while administering a dose from a giant syringe.
The scene was imaginary, but it reflected real anxieties. From the start, the bicycle was touted as a cost-effective alternative to horses. “What an expense would be saved in feeding, littering, farriering, and doctoring!” wrote a London velocipede enthusiast in 1819. “A glue-pot, hammer, bag of nails, and a little oil, would supply every want; if the head of a dandy charger were shot off, the rider would only have to dismount and nail it on again.” A half century later, J. T. Goddard, one of the bicycle’s first self-styled historians, expressed a similar sentiment: “We think the bicycle an animal, which will, in a great measure, supersede the horse. It does not cost as much; it will not eat, kick, bite, get sick, or die.” Bike manufacturers seized on this sales point. A famous Columbia Bicycle advertisement hyped the company’s high-wheeler as “An Ever-Saddled Horse Which Eats Nothing.”
Not everyone was buying the comparison. In 1868, a New York journalist scoffed at the idea of a bicycle race, envisioning a horse race without horses: “We may imagine the race courses devoted to contests of this description, with hundreds of excited gentlemen beating each other over the head with their whip handles, instead of their horses.” A French cartoonist went further, depicting cyclists churning around a track while racehorses take in the contest from the grandstand, lounging beneath parasols. Others spoofed the idea of bicycles engaged in equestrian activities associated with elites, like polo and hunting with hounds.
But reality outpaced parody. In 1869, a tournament hosted by the Liverpool Velocipede Club included cycle-mounted fencing, jousting, and javelin throwing. Bicycle polo clubs proliferated in the United States and Britain. Bikes infiltrated country gymkhanas, replacing horses in such games as tent pegging and Maypole plaiting. On the estates of the gentry, bicycles were fashionable. An 1895 dispatch on cycling in Paris noted the trend: “A new race of servants has come into being—the bicycle groom…. In great country houses the post is no sinecure as guests come in droves, and all of them can ride.”
A humorous trope of the period pictured the cyclist as a modern-day knight-errant, perched on “no steed but trusty Wheel.” The most famous example is again found in the pages of Mark Twain: the scene in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) where a detachment of cycling Lancelots—“five hundred mailed and belted knights on bicycles”—stream into view. But once more, truth surpassed fiction. The French army deployed bicycle soldiers for reconnaissance missions in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. By the 1880s, the armed forces of every major European nation had bike battalions. The relative merits of bicycle cavalries and the traditional kind was a subject of much discussion among military strategists. An editorialist in the Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, writing in 1896, judged bicycles superior to horses in several crucial areas: “When the horse is badly injured he becomes an encumbrance…. [A bicycle] is, moreover, easier to conceal, and more apt to be found in its place of concealment on the return of its owner.”
The greatest military benefit offered by bikes was in the area of stealth: “The bicycle is noiseless, thus possessing a manifest advantage over the horse, both as to foot beats and neighing.” On the battlefield, riders of the silent steed could take their foes by surprise. A crucial testing ground for the military bicycle was the Second Boer War (1899–1902), that grubby competition between the British Empire and the two Boer Republics for dominion over Southern African land and the diamonds and gold beneath it. When British Army infantrymen outfitted with folding bicycles first appeared in the war theater, an Orange Free State soldier joked, “Trust the English to invent a way of traveling while sitting down.” But both the British and the Boer sides learned that bikes were suited to the terrain and tactics of that conflict: troops moving more quickly than on foot and more quietly than on horseback could flourish, outflanking the enemy and staging sneak attacks.
It was the Boer army’s bicycle reconnaissance outfit, the Wielrijders Rapportgangers Corps, that pressed the advantage. Their leader was Daniel Theron, a cunning and fearless commando who had earlier won renown as a “crack horseman.” Theron’s men tormented the British, pushing their bikes through dense brush and across open fields, staging ambushes on key positions, blowing up rail yards and bridges, capturing hundreds of enemy soldiers and officers, and freeing Boer prisoners of war. Lord Roberts, the British commander in chief, called Theron “the hardest thorn in the flesh of the British advance.” Roberts deployed 4,000 troops to eliminate the Boer unit of just 108 cyclists and placed a bounty on their commander’s head. Theron was finally killed in September 1900 when he encountered members of Marshall’s Horse, an elite British cavalry unit, while scouting alone behind enemy lines. Theron did not go quietly. He shot seven British cavalrymen, killing four, before falling amid “an inferno of lyddite and shrapnel.” The Brits had learned their lesson: shortly after Theron’s death, they quadrupled the size of their bicycle force.
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Among civilians, another battle raged. Equestrians had their maxims and gibes: A horse doesn’t fall over when it stands still. You cannot pet a bicycle. A horse always shies away from an oncoming object; a bicycle always shies into it. Bike partisans retorted: A bicycle never needs to be lassoed. Bicycles don’t foul the roads with manure. Bicycles don’t drop dead and leave behind a rotting carcass. The quips resonated with more high-minded arguments. Progressive reformers, who pushed for sanitary conditions in cities, preferred bicycles to horses, which polluted streets and could spread disease. Reformers also embraced the bicycle on the grounds of animal welfare. Charles Sheldon, the American Congregationalist minister whose 1896 novel In His Steps popularized the phrase “What would Jesus do?,” took the position that the bicycle was the ethical choice: “I think Jesus might ride a wheel if He were in our place, in order to save His own strength and the beast of burden.”
The bicycle’s association with feminism disposed traditionalists toward the horse: it was pointed out that a woman on horseback could sit sidesaddle, allowing her to wear a long dress, rather than the bloomers favored by the bicycle-riding New Woman. Cycling advocates, meanwhile, championed the two-wheeler as an alternative to emasculating travel by horse-drawn carriage, that “luxuriously effeminate style of locomotion.”
Much of the talk about bikes and horses revolved around social class. It took decades for the dandy horse to become “the people’s nag”—for the plaything of Regency elites to evolve into an affordable, democratic horse alternative. The boneshaker velocipedes and penny-farthings of the 1860s and ’70s were haute bourgeois status symbols. The change came in the 1880s, with the arrival of the safety bicycle, which brought affordable two-wheelers to the masses. Of course, bikes remained popular among the well-to-do, as the bicycle grooms of Belgravia and Berkshire could attest. But as bicycles proliferated across the social spectrum, the horse was held up as a marker of class distinctions. An 1895 newspaper editorial typified the snobbery of certain bicycle critics: “One of the most interesting things in life…is the young man who never rode a horse more than two or three times in his lifetime expatiating to all his friends on the great saving that he makes in the hire of horses by owning a bicycle.”
Behind such supercilious pronouncements, we sense alarm and, perhaps, dread. The frenetic action on fin de siècle roadways—bikes swarming and darting alongside horse carts on streets thick with traffic—foretold further upheavals, a more fluid and hectic social order. The horse-drawn carriage represented gentility, ancient hierarchies, time-honored entitlements; the bicycle was anarchic and insurgent, an agent of chaos and change. “What is the one symbol that used to mark the rich man from the poor man?” asked John D. Long, the U.S. secretary of the navy, in an 1899 speech. “The rich man could ride while the poor man goes afoot.” Now, Long said, that divide had been eradicated: “The man who owns a bicycle rides his own steed. He throws dust in the face of the man in the carriage.”
The bike-horse showdown was not just metaphorical and rhetorical. In Europe and the United States, a political and legal argument revolved around questions of taxonomy: What exactly was a bicycle? Was it a mere plaything? Or was it a lawful and legitimate vehicle, a “carriage” in its own right? In American cities, ordinances banning bicycles from streets and parks were challenged by activists in court and, often, on the roads themselves, through direct action and deliberate defiance of laws.
A complaint leveled at bicycles was that they frightened horses. The bicycle’s silence was regarded as a menace: bikes were prone to stealing up on horses, causing accidents and sowing mayhem. It was said that bicycles spooked horses, drove horses “crazy,” caused horses to throw riders and crash tow carts. The prerogatives of horsemen were aggressively enforced by teamsters, hackney cab drivers, and others who made their living in the horse-and-wagon trade. Coachmen placed their carriages at right angles to the road to prevent cyclists from passing, organized blockades, and turned their horses into the paths of cyclists to strike them down. A cyclist who left a bike unmanned at the curbside might return to discover that “a teamster’s horse [had] knocked it over and trampled upon it until it almost lost all resemblance of a bicycle.” In 1895, a New York City teamster, Emil Rothpetz, was arrested for spitting at cyclists from the rear of a fellow horseman’s vehicle. The presiding judge remanded Rothpetz to prison for four days, expressing hope that the sentence would serve as an example to the many truckmen “who appear to take delight in annoying those who ride the wheel.”
The road rage ran in both directions. In the cycling press, reports of accidents and infamies perpetrated by horsemen were standard fare. The American touring cyclist and writer Lyman Hotchkiss Bagg, a prolific chronicler of his bicycle travels under the pen name Karl Kron, was an acidic disparager of horses and their drivers. In his 1887 tome Ten Thousand Miles on a Bicycle, Bagg wrote, “Delight in the dangerous pastime of driving skittish and unmanageable horses would be worth no more than a passing remark, except for the fact that the mere act of purchasing a horse creates the curious hallucination that he simultaneously purchases an exclusive right to the public highways.” The epithet Bagg coined for entitled horsemen is with us still: “Road hog.”
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The bicycle-horse rivalry did not escape the notice of entrepreneurs and impresarios. There was money to be made. Beginning in the 1880s, Americans packed indoor arenas and outdoor fairgrounds to view races between bicycles and horses. These events were often promoted as symbolic showdowns: “A contest between the old and the new, a trial between the most primitive form of aided progression and the most modern of all mechanical motive powers.” In one famous race, held at San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Pavilion in the spring of 1884, the horseman Charles Anderson faced the cycling team of Louise Armaindo and John Prince. The match was a test of strength and stamina that followed the model of a six-day bicycle race, unfolding in daily noon-to-midnight stages over nearly a week, with the winner determined by the total number of laps completed and miles covered. The horseman rode on an outside track that edged close to the grandstand; the cyclists raced on a separate inside track marked in chalk on the pavilion floor. The ultimate victory went to Anderson, who completed a total of 874 miles to his opponents’ 872. But it was Armaindo, a Canadian racing cyclist known for flamboyant showmanship, who captivated the crowd and the press. “Her mighty limbs sent the bicycle spinning round the track,” the Daily Alta California reported. “It was funny to see the horses stare with open eyes full of wonder at Armaindo, as her bright machine flashed past them.”
Bicycle-horse races were also popular in Britain and Europe. Sometimes these competitions served as proxy geopolitical skirmishes. In 1893, Samuel Franklin Cody, a Buffalo Bill imitator from Iowa who called himself “the King of the Cowboys,” barnstormed England and the continent, challenging leading cyclists in a series of races that attracted throngs and inspired blanket newspaper coverage.
Cody had a flair for self-promotion. He wore a broad-brimmed hat and a buckskin jacket and had a drooping mustache; he regaled interviewers with tall tales about rustling cattle and battling Sioux Indians. His most celebrated race took place in October 1893, when he faced off against the French racer Meyer de Dieppe, in a match that drew thousands to the Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret. The contest played to European prejudices, casting the New World as old-fashioned, a land where colorful yokels roamed the open plains on horseback. Europe, by contrast, was the home of the bicycle—the place of urbanity, technology, the future. Perhaps this took the sting out of Cody’s defeat of Meyer in the Levallois match and his many subsequent triumphs on his European tour. These victories reportedly earned Cody a small fortune from both prize purses and his own side wagers. Cody also gained a new nickname: newspapers now hailed Le roi des cow-boys as Le tombeur de vélocipédistes.
But cyclists would inherit the earth. At least it seemed that way in the 1890s. In the United States, bicycle activism reached an apotheosis during the 1896 presidential campaign, when Republican William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan competed to win the endorsement of the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) and secure the votes of the “bicycle bloc.” Founded in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1880 by the Columbia Bicycle mogul Albert A. Pope, the LAW consolidated the bicycle lobby by bringing thousands of local cycling clubs under the umbrella of a national organization. In its early years, its membership was composed largely of genteel gentleman cyclists. (Members included John D. Rockefeller, John Jacob Astor, and other Gilded Age titans.) By the time of the McKinley-Bryan race, the LAW was powerful and populist, with a membership of more than one hundred thousand. It was also racist. The group’s constitution, ratified in 1894, prohibited membership by non-whites; because the LAW was also the governing body of U.S. bicycle racing, non-white riders were banned from most American cycling competitions. The 1897 edition of the LAW’s annual meeting, a four-day gathering in Philadelphia, concluded with a “great bicycle parade” in which twenty-five thousand members rolled through the streets in costume; many riders wore blackface or impersonated other ethnic and racial types, including “Japs, Indians, Esquimaux…and South Sea Islanders.” (For decades, minstrel-show performances were staples of LAW events held by both local chapters and the national organization, and many LAW-affiliated cycling parades and protests featured members riding in blackface.) The LAW dissolved and was revived two times over the decades, but it wasn’t until 1999 that the organization (now the League of American Bicyclists) formally repealed the racial prohibition.
If the LAW wasn’t socially progressive, it was politically savvy, and prescient. Its membership united behind the organization’s defining mission, the Good Roads Movement, a push to clear the “sand, gravel, mud, stones and muck holes” and thread the vast nation together, connecting American cities to the countryside with a network of safe, smoothly paved streets and highways. A similar effort was under way in England; Europe was decades ahead in paving over existing road networks with macadam. But in the United States, the condition of the roadways, particularly outside urban areas, was dire. “No nation can advance in civilization which does not make a corresponding advance in the betterment of its highways,” wrote Pope in an 1893 open letter to Congress. The language is noteworthy. The goal, the LAW emphasized, wasn’t merely to modernize the United States but to civilize it, to bring the young country onto equal terms with Europe and to continue the expansionist “advance” of the settler colonial state. The fact that many of the existing roads on the North American continent were Indian trails was unstated but implicit. As was the fact that, for a bicycle mogul like Albert Pope, good roads meant great business.
Now largely forgotten, the Good Roads Movement was one of the most consequential activist crusades in American history. Certainly it had momentous consequences for bicycles, horses, and their respective places in American life. The bicycle’s “natural home” was in the city; to build bike-friendly roadways that stretched into the hinterland was to extend the bicycle’s dominion, an incursion of the two-wheeled horse into the domain of the four-legged one.
In the mid-1890s, the horse was in decline in the United States on several fronts. The market for horses was depressed; the cause was widely believed to be the bicycle boom. In 1897, the New York Sun reported on slumping sales of hay, ascribing the downturn to “the bicycle, which has to a great extent superseded the use of horses.” Bicycles were said to be behind the faltering businesses of livery stable owners and carriage builders. It was reported that horse tradesmen were shifting to the bicycle business: “The saddle- and harness-makers are…turning their attention to the making of bicycle saddles. Riding-academies have been turned into bicycle schools.”
Historians recognize that the bicycle’s role in this shift may have been overstated, that other factors—the general deflation of the 1890s, and the rise of electric streetcars to replace horse-drawn trains—were perhaps greater contributors to the horse’s decline. But at the turn of the century, the issue was viewed in stark terms: “The bicycle has come to stay and the reign of the horse is over.” In this period, the horse assumed a new character in the popular imagination, alternately idealized as sweet nature incarnate, a gentle frolicker of the fields, and disdained as “an untamable beast,” “a willful unreliable brute” that brought filth and disease to cities and “belongs in the country.” Whether you hallowed or scorned the horse, there could be no question that the creature was out of step with the times, an impediment to the progress the bicycle represented.
Of course, the parade of twentieth-century progress was not to be led by bicycles. The first Ford Model T rolled off a Detroit assembly line in 1908. The following year, just 160,000 bikes were sold in the United States, down from sales of 1.2 million a decade earlier. In Europe, it took longer for the bike to be shunted to the margins, but the advance of motor vehicles proved inexorable. The future belonged not to the silent steed but to the four-wheeled “horseless carriage,” with its roaring, revving internal combustion engine.
Today’s debates about bicycles and cars reiterate many arguments made in the bike-horse battles. Car culture regards bicycles as relics and nuisances, slowpokes cluttering the roads. Bicycle partisans state their claims in familiar moral terms. Like the late-nineteenth-century cyclists who reviled horses as polluters, today’s bike advocates cite the ruinous effects of cars on public health and the environment. Another frequent complaint: the “infernal noise” of car-clogged cities, said by cycling advocates to be the cause of “stress-related illnesses.”
As for horses: they have receded from our transportation debates, but they linger in collective consciousness. Automobile manufacturers still measure the capacity of their engines in units of horsepower. The horse has continued to haunt the story of the bicycle, too. In the United States, in the 1950s and ’60s, the horse reemerged as a marketing angle in a bicycle industry focused on children. Manufacturers sold “boys’ bikes” under names like the Bronco, the Hopalong Cassidy, and the Juvenile Ranger, evoking a mythic West roamed by wild mustangs and the heroic men who could subdue them. The bicycles were available in colors such as “Stallion Black” and “Palomino Tan”; many bikes came equipped with “cowboy” accoutrements. The Monark Silver King Company’s Gene Autry Western Bike featured a rhinestone-studded frame, horseshoe-shaped safety reflectors, a fringed saddle blanket, and a “genuine leather holster with Red-handled official Gene Autry pistol.” Suburban kids, riding bikes they pretended were horses, dreamed of the untamed frontier that had vanished beneath tens of thousands of miles of asphalt and concrete—the Interstate Highway System, a network of good roads vaster, and more inhospitable to bicycles, than the visionaries of the League of American Wheelmen could ever have imagined.
Comedy is a form of historic preservation. The bike-horse discourse of decades past resurfaces these days in the form of a visual pun. Over the years in New York City, I have encountered several bikes fitted at the handlebars with plastic horse heads. The gag is not unusual. On the internet you can find photos of cheeky bike-as-horse makeovers, bikes rolling along the route of Critical Mass rallies with papier-mâché pony heads leading the charge, bikes with children’s hobbyhorses strapped to the top tube, tricycles with stylized horses’ tails trailing between the rear wheels. Bicycle-unicorn crossbreeds are also big.
A few years back, a London design firm began marketing a device billed as “the leading bike-horse hybridiser in the world.” The Trotify is a small component that attaches to a bicycle’s front brake mount, where it claps together two pieces of coconut shell as the bike rolls forward. The sound that is produced is eerily identical to the one made by a cantering horse. This effect may startle fellow cyclists, who hear the clatter of hooves bearing down fast from behind. The silent steed is silent no more. While the bicycle’s wheels spin almost noiselessly, the Trotify beats out an ancient rhythm, a song from yesteryear: clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop.