A Bicycle Race as Analogy for Federal Budget-Making (1898)

From the cover of Puck magazine, 1898 (cropped version)

Image of the full cover.

Item record from the Library of Congress
Title: A handicap needed / Dalrymple.
Creator(s): Dalrymple, Louis, 1866-1905, artist
Date Created/Published: N.Y. : Published by Keppler & Schwarzmann, 1898 January 12.
Medium: 1 print : chromolithograph.
Summary: Print shows a bicycle race on the "National Track" with the man in the lead labeled "National Expenses" easily outstripping the second bicyclist labeled "National Revenue"; a man labeled "Dingley" is giving the second bicyclist a push.
Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ppmsca-28769 (digital file from original print)
Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication.
Call Number: Illus. in AP101.P7 1898 (Case X) [P&P]
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Perhaps not surprisingly, I am more of a Krugman-ite in my economic views so I don't actually see that some imbalance in this race is a problem. It seems reasonable to me that some of our economic thinking today could be more advanced than the economic thinking of 1898, right?

I think it is correct that this is an analogy, but like most semi-educated folk (I have two masters degrees but was never able to open the door behind which I would have found a PhD) I am not always right in the simile-metaphor-analogy parsing process.

The illustration shows the Capitol dome off to the left; perhaps this "National Track" is supposed to be on Hains Point?

More Images of Cycling History to be Found Online

"Millions of historic images posted to Flickr" explains how the Internet Archive is harvesting millions of images from books digitized and online into a new Flickr account for Internet Archive Book Images.

At this point, having put "only" 2.6 million images online taken from books, it is not clear exactly which books were harvested from, but a simple search on "bicycle" produces interesting results.


A very early bike carrier for an automobile in use

The above image was found simply by browsing results of a search for the single keyword "bicycle" - the search looks at the title of the book but also (most usefully) text that is captured that appears before and after the image. This can be a somewhat "noisy" search but for bicycles it seems, mostly on point. The above image is amusing since the bicycle is being carried on the automobile as backup transportation, not to take the bicycle to some location to ride.

Speedway is a believer in the motor vehicle as the conveyance of the future, but in the present, that he may always feel safe from having to walk home, he has his motor car equipped in above fashion.

An early bike rack, from 1896

There are some problems, but not too serious. The two examples above were pulled from the trade journal, "The Wheel and cycling trade review," which Flickr identifies as being from 1888, but that is when the magazine started - these images are from 1896, which can be determined by looking at the links to the pages where the images appear in the digitized publications like this one.