Why Are Bikes So Much Fun? Because They’re Not Cars.

Oct 28, 2023

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By Charles Finch

TWO WHEELS GOODThe History and Mystery of the BicycleBy Jody Rosen

Books that offer the history of some single thing — salt, trees, sheep — trade in the currency of time. By tracking their subjects without special attention to mortal life spans, they can guide us deep into the fathomless parts of the millenniums, tracing our surprising points of contact with the daily life of a Phoenician, a Junker, a medieval king. On such a timeline, the banal sometimes becomes strangely magnificent, rife with inadvertent human meanings.

The bicycle was invented in 1817 — much later than salt, trees or sheep, if you look it up. Indeed, as Jody Rosen points out in his excellent new book, "Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle," "the first bike came into the world a decade and a half after the invention of the steam locomotive." It seems startlingly late for the arrival of such an intuitive and simple form of transportation, and that recentness suggests that, for all Rosen's dutiful consideration of the possible antecedents of the bike (an unconvincing image in a centuries-old stained-glass window in Buckinghamshire, England, for instance), he might be precluded from the effects that similar microhistories can achieve.

In fact, the opposite is true: The narrow subject and relatively brief time frame of "Two Wheels Good" make it a crystalline portrait of modernity, the vexed, exhilarating, murderous, mechanized world left to us by the 19th century. The bicycle has touched nearly every element of life on earth since then, it turns out. The Vietcong used bikes in their counterraids; Susan B. Anthony once commented that the bicycle had "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world"; it was a Parisian bicycle maker who patented the ball bearing, the so-called atom of the machine age. We even rode it into the age of flight, in a sense: The Wright brothers were bike mechanics.

The inventor of this wonderful machine was an oddball named Karl von Drais, who, on June 12, 1817, demonstrated his creation to a spellbound crowd in Mannheim, Germany. It was called the Laufmaschine, and it had no pedals.

Though von Drais himself found scant acclaim for the invention in his lifetime, his idea spread immediately and irresistibly. It was not even two years later that "velocipede riding was banned in London," Rosen informs us, a prohibition that didn't impede the British aristocracy in their passionate adoption of the new vehicle. (Early bikes were expensive — eight guineas, John Keats reported in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law.) In the book's engaging opening chapters, the author tracks the bike from the "primeval ‘running machine’" of von Drais (Lauf is the German noun for "run") to "the boneshakers and high-wheelers of the 1860s and ’70s" (those ludicrous penny-farthings, with the enormous front wheels) to "the so-called safety bicycle of the 1880s, whose invention gave the bike the classic form we recognize today."

From the start, as Rosen shows, the bicycle has magnetized political opinions. Its cheapness and mobility have aided insurgencies of every kind, whether feminism or socialism, and as a means of travel, it immediately challenged the moneyed holders of horseflesh, a "people's nag," or, as a famous ad from the manufacturer Columbia put it, "An Ever-Saddled Horse Which Eats Nothing." Rosen, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, amasses his examples of these issues expertly. "One of Adolf Hitler's first acts upon assuming power, in 1933," he writes, in a disquieting passage, "was to smash Germany's cycling union."

These political connotations survive into our own day, of course, with the crucial addition of the bike's negligible environmental impact. Those most likely to suffer the consequences of climate change are also those least likely to be contributing to it in their choice of conveyance. "Pedal-driven taxis jam the streets of Singapore and Manila," he writes. "Subsistence farmers in Vietnam, India and other countries use modified bikes to plow and till and harrow. In Peru, bicycles function as mobile fruit and vegetable stalls; in Zambia, cycles bring goods to marketplaces and the sick to hospitals. … It is pedal power that keeps cities running, that keeps commerce flowing, that stands between life and death." Around the world, "more people travel by bicycle than by any other form of transportation."

"Two Wheels Good" takes the form of bricolage, blending meticulous historical research, local reporting from bicycle-dependent locales like Bhutan and Bangladesh and personal memories of riding in New York and Boston. Rosen is arguably strongest in the first of these three styles, but the book excels across all of them and, in its curious, mingled character, calls to mind Bill Bryson, John McPhee, Rebecca Solnit — obsessives, for whom the material world and their own infinitesimal presence within it constitute the most natural subject of artistic inquiry.

Still, many readers — riding readers, perhaps — will find the most meaning in Rosen's carefully curbed but unmistakable personal passion for the bike. "Bike riding is the best way I know to reach an altered consciousness," he writes, "better than yoga, or wine, or weed. It runs neck and neck with sex and coffee." All enthusiasms are slightly daffy, and at moments Rosen reaches a kind of embarrassed nirvana as he contemplates his subject, lovingly describing a trick rider's stunts, traversing Dhaka by rickshaw or his own encounters with snow, car doors and, of course, drivers, too many obnoxious, unfeeling drivers to number.

Four wheels bad — that is the logical second half of the quote the book's title invites us to finish, after all. Should we as a species be riding bicycles instead of driving cars? Probably. "The automotive age is an age of carnage," Rosen writes. "Some 1.25 million people die in car crashes each year." Not just that, either: "Motor vehicles are the largest net contributor to climate change."

The ineluctable trouble is that cars have their own romance. "Two Wheels Good" does admirable battle with that fact without ever quite subduing it. Even China, which at its peak in 1996 had some 523 million bicycles distributed among its citizens, has submitted to a new "automobile frenzy," sending bike usage into a "precipitous decline." For all the charm, usefulness and elegance of the bike, we as a species seem to be drawn to its calamitously problematic successor.

I live in Los Angeles, where cyclists shoot down the curves of Griffith Park so swiftly that it sometimes seems a marvel that a single one of them makes it home alive. It's a driving city, and thus I am at present a driving person — despite wholly believing Rosen's contention that cities built around bikes would be "safer, saner, healthier, more habitable." Alas, we live in a different world from the one we want. "Ice is melting at the top and bottom of the planet," the author writes, "forests are aflame, political systems are fracturing, a pandemic has shaken daily life at its foundations, and amid the tumult, a new global bicycle culture is emerging."

The question is whether it's in time. Would it be surprising if, however it comes, we all met up after the apocalypse on bikes, humble, easy, indestructible? After reading Rosen's impassioned history, I was convinced of it. And there's a bike store nearby, too. I keep meaning to drive over there.

Charles Finch is the author of "What Just Happened," a chronicle of 2020.

TWO WHEELS GOOD The History and Mystery of the BicycleBy Jody RosenIllustrated. 396 pp. Crown. $28.99.

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