Easter Cycling Events - 1897

In looking at American newspapers from the late 1890s, I found these two illustrations from the St Paul Globe and the Washington Times looking at cycling and Easter 1897.


An amusing illustration showing a variety of cyclists who would riding in an annual Easter cycling event

With an expectation that as many as 10,000 would be riding if there was good weather - that's a pretty high number. At the "opening of the Bicycle Easter Egg." From the St. Paul Globe, April 11, 1897.



In Washington the expectation was that "thousands" would be out riding - again, depending on the weather

From the Washington Times, April 18. 1897

Helmets & Choosing to Ride a Bike

The National Bureau of Economic Research, a think tank, has a new report about helmet usage and safety - "Effects of Bicycle Helmet Laws on Children's Injuries." Here is a summary:

Cycling is popular among children, but results in thousands of injuries annually. In recent years, many states and localities have enacted bicycle helmet laws. We examine direct and indirect effects of these laws on injuries. Using hospital-level panel data and triple difference models, we find helmet laws are associated with reductions in bicycle-related head injuries among children. However, laws also are associated with decreases in non-head cycling injuries, as well as increases in head injuries from other wheeled sports. Thus, the observed reduction in bicycle-related head injuries may be due to reductions in bicycle riding induced by the laws.

The report is interesting and some of what it says is of more general interest than just helmet usage by children. They aren't impressed with the rigor of previously done studies looking at helmet use by children (there are only two) and they take care to compensate for those errors. Their results suggest that the main reason why helmet laws reduce head injuries is more about reducing the amount of bicycling than by better outcomes from accidents thanks to wearing helmets. The last paragraph of the report concludes:

The findings from this paper indicate that while bicycle helmet laws are widespread and thought to be effective, the net effect of these laws on health outcomes is actually not straightforward. It is clear that there are offsetting behaviors and unintended consequences of these laws, and these effects need to be considered by policymakers.

My daughter some years ago, learning to ride and wearing a helmet - of course

While a rather indirect statement, the "effects" that they think "policymakers" (ie, legislators, mostly in state legislatures) should consider would be whether helmet laws are useful overall if the result is as much to reduce bike ridership as the means by which injuries are reduced. It seems hard to imagine anyone seriously advocating eliminating already established helmet laws for children (defined in a wide variety of ways, as the report notes) or opposing new ones, but it certainly seems worth looking at a study like this when considering mandatory helmet laws for adults.

Snowy Commute on March 25

This is just before I entered the (car) garage with this bike that I rode due to the snowy weather - I didn't downshift to the "small" ring in front which is completely covered in snow-ish something.



There was something not right with the smaller cogs in back, so I only used the large three and switched back and forth between the middle and large rings in front more than I usually would. So here the small rings are all covered in snow.

Late in the year for this sort of thing.

Peter Akmatow-Dombrowski, Russian Racer of 1896

From The Referee and Cycle Trade Journal issue for March 26, 1896.

RUSSIA'S FUTURE CHAMPION - Peter Akmatow-Dombrowski and His Many Brilliant Performances.

Peter Akmatow-Dombrowski, the subject of this sketch, will, it is safe to predict, play a leading role on Russian race tracks the coming season; in fact, there is little doubt that he is the best man on the track in Russia to day. He is a native of Kiew and twenty-one years of age. Although active at racing since his fifteenth year, he was not prominent until 1895, when at Moscow he came within a fraction of an inch of winning the Russian mile championship from Djakow.



This being the first time he had met the faster men of his country, his performance caused intense surprise. All previous minor events in which he started were won by him, this being his first defeat. He holds the Eussian unpaced records for the quarter, eighth, and half verst, and the quarter English mile.

Coverage of foreign cyclists and particularly outside of western Europe at this time was quite unusual.

"The Scorchers Have Taken the Town" 1897

Humor of sorts, apparently

From "The Wheel and Cycling Trade Review" issue for June 18, 1897.

When they whiz by ~

Mark, mark!
The dogs do bark;
The scorchers have taken the town;
Some in rags and a few with jags,
But every mother's son of them with a wild and almost uncontrollable desire to run somebody down.

I have blogged about what a "scorcher" was in the 1890s before.

American View of Russian Cycling, 1895

Американский обзор езды на велосипеде в России 1895


Article text from "The Referee and Cycle Trade", November 18, 1895

The full text of this (alas) unillustrated item is above, but I provide some highlights below.

CHANGING THE RUSSIAN - The Bicycle Said to Be Putting a New Face on Muscovite Characteristics.

. . . Not only does the new steed rule in the hurried Anglo-Saxon lands and in the busy Germany, but the Gaul and the Slav and the women of both have been swept away by the fashion and the Bois de Boulogne and the winding alleys of Yelaguine island are even as Battersea park. . .

and this extended reference to Tolstoy~

Carry the cycle into the world of thought; we can see at once that it has effected, or is effecting, a vast and subtile change. Already the mysticism of the Slav character must have received its deathblow. Introspection is essential to the mystic. Now, he who cycles (also she), if he introspects, is sure to be reminded with painful suddenness of the solidity of externals. Even a Russian mystic will become more practical after running into a steam-roller or down the bank of a canal. The familiar types of Muscovite fiction will vanish or remain but as fossils in a museum. The Tolstoic creed (which is not, by the way, the Tolstoic practice) of property, asceticism and non-resistance is blown to the winds in a sprint through the parks. Preach to a cyclist that all cycles, his own in particular, should be the property of everybody; that it is his duty to abstain from riding, especially on his own machine; and that he must take cheerfully the cutting of his tires—and in a second you will be preaching to the eddying dust, while the breeze bears back to you the lessening sound of a scornful toot.

Fanciful Bicycle Ad from 1896 - Egypt & the Pyramids

From "The Referee and Cycle Trade Journal." January 9, 1896.

This was a trade publication that normally did not have color advertising - at this time there was a bicycle show in Chicago, so apparently this company chose to pay for a "premium" ad.

The bookplate at the front of the bound volume which contained this issue identifies it as having been part of the Patent Office library collection originally, but it was apparently transferred at some point to the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian has been having some older materials digitized by the Internet Archive at the Library of Congress resulting in interesting "finds" like this.

Bordeaux-Paris Winner 1896 and Simpson Chain

The Jules Beau photo albums have wonderful photographs of cycling from the 1890s and intot he next decade. Here is link to volume 3 for 1896. Below is one of the photographs from it.


Arthur Linton, who tied for the victory in the 1896 Bordeaux-Paris race

Title : [Collection Jules Beau. Photographie sportive] : T. 3. Année 1896 / Jules Beau
Author : Beau, Jules (1864-1932). Photographe
Date of publication : 1896
Subject : Sports -- France -- 1870-1914
Subject : Cyclisme

Mr. Linton from Wales tied the race that year and was given flowers, according to what is in the album, from the Gladiator factory. This is another image that shows the Simpson bicycle chain that I discussed in a previous blog post.

Simpson Chain Shown on Gallica - 1896 Innovation

Two women riders, Lisette and Eteogella, riding bikes with "Chaîne à levier Simpson"

In this photo album with mostly photographs of then-famous French and other cycling racers there is this page with two photographs of women on bicycles (or more likely, what is one bicycle, a Gladiator) equipped with a "Simpson chain", which was considered a way of gaining a slight mechanical advantage over a traditional chain (that is a chain fundamentally the same as what we use today).

The chain consisted of a series of metal triangles with pins at the corners (see this illustration) so that along the inside it was much like an extended version of a present day chain (with the pins a bit further apart). Each link was matched by two other links extending out to a third pin. In the front the force was transferred the same as a bicycle today with teeth into the inside links, but at the rear the force was transferred by the pins on the outside edge. It gave the bikes that used them a distinctive appearance since the chain stood out.

Apparently there were match races to prove the superiority of this chain but ultimately not enough were convinced and people with some engineering experience decided that there was in fact no mechanical advantage to this chain. Certainly it added to the complexity of the drive train of the bikes that used it and to some extent the weight. There don't seem to be lots of photographs of this chain on the Internet on bikes, and although these are somewhat low resolution, they show it reasonably well.

Finding Lucien Lesna, French Cyclist

I browse bicycle-related items in the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) from time to time. Sometimes it is not that easy, given the descriptive metadata provided, to understand what or who some photographs are.


Identified in this Copyright deposit simply as "Lesna"

I happened upon this photo that came to the Library originally as a copyright deposit, presumably from the photographer's studio ("Van Norman Studio" that is applied to the photo). The only description that the Prints & Photographers had was his name, Lesna, which they did work out was his name.

Here is the minimalistic but better-than-nothing descriptive portion of record in PPOC:
Title: Lesna / Van Norman.
Creator(s): Van Norman, George H., photographer
Date Created/Published: c1898.
Medium: 1 photographic print.
Summary: Lesna on bicycle.

Now before I move on to what else I learned about Mr. Lesna (and how I learned it), a comment about this image. In the record, it says: Reproduction Number : LC-USZ62-99752 (b&w film copy neg.) What this means is that this image was not produced from the original photograph that was deposited at the Library of Congress but that at some point (decades ago, most likely) someone paid to have a copy made of that photograph for which there is a "b&w film copy neg."[ative] and that negative was digitized. This is a reproduction of a copy, not the original.

Also, the only JPEG provided on the Library of Congress site is a not-terribly-good 37 kb version - if you look at it closely, there are haloing artifacts and general mushiness. This was done years ago when smaller JPEGs seemed like a good idea for speedy delivery. If you look at the JPEG I produced with IrfanView from the TIFF that is also available on the LC site, it also has some mushiness issues (likely reflecting the copy negative and not the original) but you can certainly make out more detail. The smaller version embedded in this page looks nicely sharp compared to the slightly larger (in height/width in pixels) 37 kb LC version. So . . . it may be worthwhile if you want to look at details to use the TIFF (or create your own derivative) and not rely on the LC JPEG. But with a digital reproduction of a photographic reproduction you are only going to get so much detail in any event.


Haloing in LC JPEG visible around writing and spokes

So, knowing only that this was someone named Lesna who was in one of many towns named Springfield in the U.S. around 1898, how did I learn more? Like any sensible person, I started with Wikipedia. Simply searching "Lesna" brings up various towns - "Lesna" means "spring" (the season) in several Slavic languages and apparently is used for a town name. Searching "lesna cyclist" locates articles about several French bicycle races from the right time period where someone named "Lucien Lesna" won, for example Bordeaux-Paris in 1901. Alas Lucien Lesna has no article in Wikipedia - or rather, in the English Wikipedia. But in the French version there is a short article listing some of his victories (but no biographic info). And it has the same photo from LC. (The person who put it into Wikicommons also decided the LC JPEG was crummy and he or she produced a JPEG about the same size as the one I ended up with. Ha.)

With this knowledge that Lesna was a French cyclist, how did he come to be photographed in one of the many Springfields? Presumably he was on a racing tour of America. And in fact, a search of Chronicling America brings up this page with this headline: "MORE RECORDS SMASHED Michael Defeats Lesna in the Great Twenty-Mile Race. The Frenchman Makes a Gallant Fight" that is datelined "Springfield, Mass." September 16, 1897. (So apparently the photographer only deposited at LC the following year.)

Fifteen thousand people howled Jimmie Michael, the Welsh wonder, around the track at the bicycle races this afternoon for twenty miles until he finished over an eighth of a mile ahead of his rival, Lucian Lesna, and established a world's record for sixteen miles and upwards. The contest was a beautiful exhibition of bicycle riding and Michael's superior pacing and fine head work contributed to his victory.

Illustration for article in San Francisco Call about Lesna

Another article in the The San Francisco Call from June 4, 1897 describes his arrival in America from Australia.

LUCIEN LESNA, CHAMPION CYCLER - He Is the Greatest Long Distance Rider in the World. Arrived Here Yesterday From a Successful Pilgrimage to Australia. Can Ride Twenty Miles at a Two Minute Gait,and Now Holds All Australian Records - Lucien Lesna, the champion cyclist of France and also the champion long-distance rider of the world, arrived here yesterday morning on the steamer Mariposa from Australia and is stopping at the Palace.

Thanks in part to Mr. Lesna's uncommon name and in part to the large amount of newspaper content digitized and searchable, it is possible to find out rather a lot!

Contented Woman Cyclist (1896 Poster)

Ride a Stearns [bicycle] and be content

From the Library of Congress' poster collections.

Title : Ride a Stearns and be content / J. Ottmann Lith. Co., Puck Bld'g, N.Y.
Creator(s): Penfield, Edward, 1866-1925, artist
Date Created/Published : [1896]
Medium : 1 print (poster) : chromolithograph ; 152 x 116 cm.
Summary : Poster advertising Stearns bicycles, showing a woman cyclist.
Reproduction Number : LC-USZC4-6645 (color film copy transparency)

This is a scan of a color transparency copy of the original and not a direct scan of the original item. I have cropped and rotated the image that is on the LoC site, which is here.

what is not so clear to us today from the poster is that the rider is coasting - since this is a "fixed gear" where is no coasting with feet on the pedals. In order to coast, you put your feet up on small posts on either side of the fork (that are not visible, but are there) while the pedals continue to go around.


A clearer image of coasting from 1896

In the example above, you can see that this bike does have a single brake for the front wheel, which is a "spoon brake" that is activated by a rod that presses down against the front tire. Trying to stop a coasting bike that didn't have a brake would involve somehow getting your feet back on the spinning pedals - not so easy.


Another woman rider coasting - she looks happier than just "content"

Argyle Armada: Behind the Scenes of the Pro Cycling Life (Book Review)

Argyle Armada: Behind the Scenes of the Pro Cycling Life by Mark Johnson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Mark Johnson is a journalist and photographer for VeloNews, part of the same company that published this book. He is certainly well qualified to write something like this. The short description is that Johnson was "embedded" with the Garmin-Cervelo team for the 2011 pro cycling race season, taking photographs and interviewing riders, coaches, and others as the season progressed, then publishing the results as this coffee table book. Johnson says nothing controversial (at least from the team's point of view) and in the preface Johnson notes, "Neither Slipstream [the team's parent company] nor Garmin commissioned this book, but it is nevertheless an outgrowth of my long relationship with the team as a freelance writer and photographer." So this is not anything like Wide Eyed and Legless (from 1988) where an "embedded" journalist had much to say about a British team's Tour de France campaign that the team was probably unhappy about.

Most of the book's chapters are a chronological presentation of the season, starting with training and ending with the Vuelta and races in Quebec and Montreal. A final chapter, in some ways more interesting than the rest of it, is called "the business of pro cycling" that lays out in more detail than one might expect the economics of Garmin-Cervelo operations. The book runs about 200 pages with somewhat over half the space devoted to photographs rather than text. There is a good index, which is helpful in something like this.

This team is known for its unusual approach to fighting doping and that it started its anti-doping more aggressively and openly earlier than most teams. The team director, Jonathan Vaughters, talks about this generally and the topic comes up in different parts of the book. Even though things have changed with fallout from Lance Armstrong's confession, those parts of the book seem relevant.

While I was happy to get this book from the library and to page through it looking at the photos, it took me a long time to get through all of the text (which I eventually decided I should read from start to finish). Johnson's writing seems a bit stiff in this extended book-length presentation compared to his usual much shorter news items in VeloNews. Also Johnson of course had no control over the flow of the season and much of team's greatest successes came early - the narrative doesn't build to some particular success (or for that matter, failure). I also have some quibbles with the photographs - many are action shots using very wide angle lenses which I (personally) don't like all that much and because there are so many photos in what is a small-ish coffee table format book many group shots are reduced to small sizes that make me wonder if it wouldn't have been better to have fewer larger photos.

The last chapter and comments throughout the book make clear the importance of the business aspects of this team (and one assumes, to a greater or lesser degree, other teams). The mention in various places of efforts to provide special services and activities for sponsor representatives, for example. And the analysis by Vaughters of how valuable the team is for its sponsors relative to the absolute dollar cost of the team compared to other teams - Garmin was a low cost team compared to the highest spending teams but was in fourth place (out of 18) for "sporting value." Somewhat complex financial issues are laid out - for example, rider salaries are a huge part of the operational cost of cycling teams and Garmin relies on a balanced approach and avoids paying "star" salaries - this also means that if they lose a star rider who has "points" that count towards the team's WorldTour points total (that is vital to it keeping its team license) the team will not be endangered in staying part of the circuit, which is good for all the riders (and something they understand).

Johnson has a video about this on the VeloNews site.

View my reviews of cycling books.

OK Why DId I Believe Lance ?

I was surprised to see an extensive story in the NYTimes about people who had different things related to Livestrong tattooed onto themselves and what these people think about having done that given that Lance is a cheat (to use the shortest possible summary of his situation). Apparently the "Lance story" (or Lance stories) is not going away any time soon. (The folks with Livestrong tattoos state that the tattoos are about cancer survival, not Lance. By the way.)



I started thinking about why back in the early 2000s, when I was paying some (although not that much) attention to Armstrong and the Tour de France annual victory that I believed he wasn't doping. Looking back today, this is what I remember thinking:

* It's a kind of cancer survivor justice - that a guy would come back from cancer and become the best cyclist in the world seemed cosmically right. This is just an emotional reaction, of course.

* After cancer, Lance was able to mold the "new Lance" perfectly for winning the Tour de France - I remember reading (probably in one of his books) that his pre-cancer physique was more suited to a triathlete than a general category stage race cyclist, but when he recovered from cancer he changed that. There is likely some truth to this but of course by itself it wouldn't make him better than anyone else for seven years.

* Huge VO2 max - I know I read more than once that Armstrong had unnaturally large oxygen capacity. Surely that's important? Of course since then I have read that it wasn't that much greater.

* High cadence - in addition to reading about his high oxygen capacity, one would see comments praising his unusually high cadence. More efficient, or something.

* American ingenuity - notwithstanding that his team sports director was Bruyneel (not American) I think I felt that Armstrong's success was a modern example of an American coming up with solutions that others had not seen in order to succeed. Armstrong talked about the importance of small advantages that cumulatively can mean success. Better equipment, better training, better diet - it all adds up to victory! Well, it sounds good.

* Focus on the Tour de France exclusively (or so it seemed) - of course Armstrong was in other races, but they were almost part of a training program for the Tour de France (in effect). He certainly didn't race as difficult a schedule as most riders - of course now it turns out (thanks to Tyler Hamilton for explaining this) that this was part of his blood bag management and otherwise to avoid too much exposure to doping tests. So it was part of his "focus on the TdF" strategy but not in the way I had hoped.

As I look back, the way conversations went, my summary feeling was that if you looked around for reasons (see above list, plus others I'm probably forgetting) it didn't seem impossible that Lance was clean. If anyone could do it, he could. That kind of thinking.

Eventually I became disillusioned because even though I thought it was possible that he was clean, it seemed like his team (Landis, Hamilton) wasn't and given Armstrong's personality it was hardly possible they were doping without his knowledge and even support and encouragement. So if Armstrong was winning with a team of dopers to support him (since bicycle stage racing is a team sport, really), that almost seemed worse than if he wasn't himself doping. To me, anyway.

And now when we read Hamilton, we see that the advantages from EPO and blood doping were far greater than a single percent improvement in performance that Lance talked about - he describes races where Bjarne Riis moved back and forth in the peleton as if on a motorcyle, effortlessly, clearly enjoying a PED-fueled advantage more like ten percent than one percent. This turns out to be the kind of gain in advantage Armstrong was seeking, not just a little bump from more aerodynamic helmets and the like.


Wearing my Astana jersey that arrived in the mail the day before Vinokourov was busted in the 2006 Tour de France

Modern Snow Bike

K-Trak Snow Bike System

In my two previous posts, here and here I have looked at 100+ year old ideas for how to get around on a bicycle in the snow and ice. Aside from the simple approach of using studded tires on a bicycle (which works for most urban snow) there is also the above snow bike inspired by a snowmobile.

1896 Ice Bike Demonstrated by Woman Rider

Short article about ice bike demonstration in The San Francisco Call, January 19, 1896.

An Ice Bicycle.

A bicycle has been invented for traveling on ice or snow, says a New York paper. The long runner or skate, which replaces the front wheel of the bicycle, in itself is made for ice alone, but when the machine is used on snow-clad roads a metal shoe is fitted over the skate, and it is claimed that the machine will carry a rider over the ground, or rather snow or ice, at a greater speed than the regulation wheel.



Miss Davidson, who is young and enthusiastic, mounted the ice wheel at a rink last evening with but little difficulty, and, after a few "wobbles," started off around the rink gracefully. The half dozen spectators were astonished at the perfect work ing of the machine. After two or three turns about the rink Miss Davidson did a few fancy moves and then dismounted.

Converting Bikes to Snow/Ice Use - Patents

Snow Bike Patent, 1900

"The invention contemplates the employment of a bicycle of any preferred style, in combination with supporting sleds or runners and means for imparting motion thereto." and . . . "The rotary motion of said shaft is converted . . . to a reciprocating motion upon the part of the push-bars, which are alternately projected and retracted, engaging the snow or ice at each stroke, and so propelling the vehicle."

Apparently the idea was to propel the bicycle as though it was someone's crazy version of a cross country skier, in which the poles do all the work.


Snow Bike Patent, 1900 - augmented wheels

To make this work, rather elaborate changes are made to the tires, fixing a set of teeth to the outside edge of the tire. Uhm, wouldn't it have been easier to run the chain down directly to do this??

The "ice velocipede" below looks more sensible, although since it preceded the above by six years, apparently it hadn't caught on.


Ice Velocipede 1894

The object of the invention is to provide a new and improved snow and ice velocipede, which is simple and durable in construction, and arranged to enable the rider to travel over the snow and ice at a high rate of speed. and The invention consists principally of single front and rear runners supporting the frame, and connected thereto by horizontal pivots and a propelling chain mounted to travel along the rear runner and driven from the crank or pedal shaft through the medium of a sprocket wheel mounted on the pivot connecting the said runner with the frame. (Crazy way to write.) and The propelling chain is provided with spikes or blades adapted to pass into the snow or ice, so as to propel the vehicle forward. Aha! Well, it might work. But again, we don't see these around . . .


Snow Shoe Attachment for Bicycles

This is the simplest of the bunch, although it seems likely to have traction problems.


Traction Vehicle

This isn't actually a patent for a snow bike (snow isn't mentioned in the patent) but rather a tracked bicycle that could, presumably, have been used on snow as well as on other difficult terrains. (Also it seems to be a purpose build device rather than a conversion.) Could this be used for cyclocross? Again, we don't see these around today, do we. Presumably the energy required to get this to move at all was a bit of a problem.

Keep in mind these are 110+ year old patents - what is interesting is that there are plenty of patents from the last 20 years that aren't that different. Go to Google's patent search and simply search on "bicycle snow" and see what I mean.

Washington Post Doesn't Know What Bike I Want

Recent ad on WashingtonPost.com providing a crazy assortment of bikes

I have burst out laughing when I have spent ten minutes gazing thoughtfully at some bike wheels on Amazon.com and then a while later, a sidebar ad on WashingtonPost.com tries to interest me in the very same bicycle wheels on Amazon.com. Well, uhm - I haven't changed my mind, as a matter of fact. Still don't want them.

This assortment, however, was quite amazing. What algorithm is behind this sort of thing?

A road bike called the "Tour de France" for . . . $209.99. Well, sure if you want a bike that allows you to answer the question, "do you have a bike" in the affirmative but don't plan to ride it. Because that's what a bike like this is intended for - not being ridden.

Then next up, a Pinarello Dogma - only $13,200!! What ?!? I don't pay attention to this market, so I can't say if this is a "good" price or not but that I'm not buying any bikes that cost more than the last new car I bought, I'm pretty sure of that.

Logically what should be in the third position here after the total crap bike and the bike that was hand carved by the most experienced Italian carbon-fiber-carvers would be the "just right" bike priced somewhere in the real world at around $800 - $1,200. But no, the algorithm goes completely off the rails and offers an even crappier bike. Regardless of price and anything else, there can be no worse a bike than one that is named after a car - and not just any car, but a monster SUVs, the GMC Denali. Who buys bikes with names like that? (I am not denying

I guess I should give them credit for somehow detecting my interest in road bikes over mountain bikes, but other than that this seems pretty clueless.

Don't get me wrong, monster SUVs have their time and place. But I have trouble seeing the connection between one of them and a road bike, in a good sense anyway.


On a visit to Iraq some years ago, GMC Suburban vehicles made sense for my travel plans - otherwise not so much

Holy Spokes! A Biking Bible for Everyone (Review)

Holy Spokes!: A Biking Bible for Everyone by Rob Coppolillo

My rating: 1 of 5 stars



The WashCycle blogger gave me a review copy in return for which I wrote a review that is posted there

View all my reviews on Goodreads of cycling related books (including this one).

Latest In Bicycling Costumes for Women (1895)

From a long Los Angeles Herald article from August 4, 1895.


Illustration that accompanies the article

SHE DESIGNS BICYCLE SUITS - That is How a Chicago Woman Is Coining Wealth - SHE IS AN ARTIST IN THIS - Tells Fair Bicycle Riders the Kind of Clothes They Ought to Wear. Says Bloomers Will Soon Be the Street Costume.

This article is quite long, so I will only reproduce some of the text here - the full text is available in the online digitized version.

A clever little woman on the West Side is proving herself a benefactress of womankind and, at the same time, earning a good living. Her name is Helen Waters. She designs bicycle costumes for women, says the Chicago Times-Herald, Mrs. Waters is a petite young woman with big brown eyes and a "wide, kind smile." She is extremely brisk and energetic, and possesses some original ideas as to the proper garb for women who ride. She is a member of the Illinois Cycling club, and is a skillful and rapid rider, although she does not aspire to record-breaking honors.

. . . . .

"Do you mean to say that bloomers will be worn us a street costume next summer?"

"I don't wish to be too hopeful, but things look that way to me. I, for one, will be glad if it is so. A woman who has once worn bloomers dislikes to put on skirts. I know it from my own experience and that of others. As you see, I wear them about the office all the time and have even ventured to wear them on the street cars to and from my home. However, occasions arise when 'discretion is the better part of valor,' and then off go bloomers and on goes the skirt. I hope you won't laugh at me when I say I find the skirt uncomfortable."

This kind of cycling human interest story was common during the high years of the cycling craze in the 1890s. The article is about a woman in Chicago but was published in Los Angeles, likely published in numerous cities through some then-publication network for these kinds of not-very-time-sensitive stories. This particular story had two different elements of interest - the subject's changing of women's attire and her financial success, earning a "good living."

Cracked Rim & Brake "Dirt"

Riding in snow and ice even with studded tires can be challenging - also if one has any sense, it is important to clean up the bike fairly soon after to get the road salt mix residue off the bike. Wheel spokes in particular are vulnerable to the corrosive effects of that stuff; I am embarrassed (I guess) to admit that one year I rode in some bad weather and then parked the bike in my shed and forgot to clean it - much later I discovered the road glop had eaten its way into several spokes enough that when I gave them a wiggle, they snapped! Lesson learned. Ouch.


Crack discovered while cleaning the rim

So I took the old mountain bike (a Giant Boulder SE, more than ten years old) that I rode in the snow and cleaned it up and while cleaning the rear wheel I found that the rim had a crack in it. Aggh! What I actually had found, as revealed in a helpful comment (below) is an artifact of the manufacturing process that I had not noticed before. Oops.


Not surprisingly the crack goes through to inside of rim

Fortunately I have another mountain bike around that I can borrow a wheel from, but I will have to buy a new wheel.


In gloppy weather, brakes make a mess of rims

I didn't need to clean the other side of the wheel now! You can see just how much of the brakes end up on the rims in sloppy weather. I suppose I could buy better brake pads, too.

Anyway, this provides something of an answer to the question of why one gets something better if you spend more on a bike. This is a perfectly OK entry level Giant mountain bike but aside from being fairly heavy none of the components are terribly good (although none are terrible, either). In short I am not particularly surprised to have a cracked wheel on a bike like this. The question arises, at least in my mind, of whether I now take back this comment about low cost bikes and their quality quotient. After some ten minutes of contemplation (intermittently) I guess I would have to say no. I don't.

Snow Ride Home - Outrunning a Cervélo

Snow-enabled old mountain bike with studded tires in front of house

There was a rather indefinite forecast that there might be snow this afternoon - so I rode this rather heavy old bike with studded mountain bike tires that are about two inches in diameter. If there is ice and snow, they are good to have, but this morning it was mostly clear, so the bike felt like a burden. However a couple of years ago I fell during a snow storm ride so I am trying to be more cautious.

Coming home I was glad to have this bike with its studded tires. The icy spots visible this morning were now covered in snow so it was harder to avoid them but with these tires it isn't necessary. I trundled along at a steady if slow pace. The most annoying aspect was the strong wind from the SW (or thereabouts) along the river.

Just on the DC side of the 14th St Bridge there was a rider in his sorta winter racing/training kit on a Cervélo who let me go ahead of him. Really, a Cervélo in the snow? So this will be the one time I completely drop a character on a bike like that. And while riding a heavy crap-cycle - that uh happens to have the right tires. So maybe not so crappy.


Made it home! Let the weekend begin ~

At Work After First Snow Ride of Year

Presumably not too old for this yet

But it did take a full hour. Same spinning, but bike going a lot slower.

Racing Without "Stimulants" Over 100 Years Ago

Doping in cycle racers has been well documented going back into the 1890s. Whole books have been written about Choppy Warburton, the Michele Ferrari of his day.

Famous racer from over 100 years ago, Bobby Walthour provides an example of discussion of doping in the press over 100 years ago, in 1901.


From "The World", December 1901, showing Madison Square Garden for a six race. At bottom, rider Bobby Walthour says he'll ride without "stimulants"

BOBBY WALTHOUR SAYS HE'LL WIN RACE WITHOUT STIMULANTS

"No, we do not take stimulants in any form, unless it is coffee now and then when we grow a bit sleepy. On the other hand they tell me that these foreigners use drugs. They use strychnine, which is a muscle stimulant. It is a bad business for them and sooner or later they will feel the bad effects of it."

"A man to do well in a race of this kind must keep his body clean and well nourished, and once he begins to take alcohol or strychnine he might as well just stop. I think we will win without much difficulty."

Inaugural Simplicity - 1895 View

A CHANCE FOR IMMORTALITY

From The St. Paul Pioneer Press.

The next President of the United States will have a glorious opportunity to emulate Jeffersonian simplicity by riding to his Inauguration on a bicycle and going through the ceremony with his trousers tied in at the ankles.

New York Tribune filler item July 28, 1895.

The Secret Race by Tyler Hamilton & Daniel Coyle (Book Review)

The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs by Tyler Hamilton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


If I am going to review this, I should do it before Lance Armstrong's tell-all confess-all admit-all interview with Oprah is broadcast later this week. I gave this four stars because for the first 220 pages or so it is very engaging and moves along - the last fifty pages bogged down so much that it took me several days to push through to the end.

One hopes that most people who read this aren't just interested in descriptions of Lance Armstrong being bad, but both Hamilton and Coyle are well equipped to write about that. All things considered the book is a good combination of telling the story of Hamilton's bicycle racing career as a story unto itself, describing how doping became an integral part of his success, and including first hand descriptions of Lance Armstrong's race career, how he ran his team, interacted with other racers, and what his team's doping program was like.

Unlike David Millar's recent Racing Through the Dark tell-all reformed bike doper book, Hamilton clearly understands that most readers are not terribly interested in his full life story so he keeps the description of his life before racing short. The section about when he was part of the Postal Service team himself has the best descriptions of the culture of Lance's team and how the doping program (which is what it was) worked. After that, the description of his riding with CSC is interesting because Bjarne Riis, the team director, was (and is) an unusual individual and because Hamilton did well with CSC, although injuries kept him from doing much better.

Hamilton does a good job of making it clear how EPO and the "blood bags" (transfusing one's own blood during a race, drawn earlier) represented a huge improvement over previous doping, such as taking amphetamines, and how it making literally impossible to succeed in a world in which some races did take EPO and others didn't.

After describing being busted (the first time), the book becomes less interesting - particularly after he manages to win the U.S. National Road Championship in 2008 but then get busted again. His dog dies, his wife divorces him, he's a busted doper cyclist - life is not so good. But then he gets a new dog, new wife, and a new job and he tries to convince you, the reader, that life is now good (if not better). This last part is the hardest to get through and not particularly convincing or compelling.

There are a several things to read available on the Internet about Lance and doping and cycling racing that are more focused (and available free). The "reasoned decision" of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) is a book length PDF that describes year by year Lance's doping and the Postal Service (later Discovery) doping program (if you will). It is all about Lance and doping. If that is really what is of interest, it is more useful to read it than a book that in the end is more about Tyler Hamilton. A drawback of the USADA report is that it has no literary style, so to speak - it reads a like a government report (which is what it is).

Another interesting read is the transcript of seven hours of interviews with Floyd Landis by Paul Kimmage, The Gospel according to Floyd from November 2010.

One sees a number of patterns reading all this stuff. One is that part of Armstrong's success (at doping, and otherwise) was that he hired the best people to support him, including the medical people for the doping. Hamilton suggests that one of his own problems was that his doping doctor simply wasn't very good organizationally so he probably was been transfused with someone else's blood rather than his own because his medical "team" screwed up. Also, both Landis and Hamilton were quick to defend themselves against doping charges because in both cases they were absolutely sure that the charges were wrong. Landis knew he had done EPO and blood bags but not testosterone, and Hamilton was convinced he had only received his own blood back, not someone else's. The charges were wrong - that this didn't mean they were innocent otherwise seemed difficult for them to integrate into their thinking until quite some time passed. Finally, both felt that ultimately that they were ruined because unlike Armstrong they didn't have the connections and power to make the doping charges "go away" in the way Armstrong had in the past (according to them).

Some of Hamilton's anecdotes are pretty amusing - sort of. For example (and I suppose this is a spoiler) he suggests that for his second tier riders, other than his "A team," Armstrong was cheap - while he had the latest and best that Trek had to offer, most of his team didn't. One Postal rider, for example, "accidentally" backed his car over his crummy old Trek he was given in order to get something better. It's apparently not enough to work on Armstrong on the big moral issues, he wants him to look small in as many ways as he can. Hmm.

Certain details described give this book a sense of veracity that is absent in say Millar's book. (Not that Millar's isn't true, he just didn't include such things.)

* When new doping technology with good results would appear, it would be obvious because one rider or sometimes a team would suddenly perform otherwise superhuman feats, with little shame even though it was understood that this would be received as a new doping advance and not as some kind of training accomplishment. He mentions Bjarn Riis specifically, moving back and forth in the peleton as if riding a motorcycle on one occasion.

* Doping works best with coaching - with Postal, Hamilton didn't take full advantage of receiving a blood bag (his own blood drawn earlier and then transfused back in to increase his blood's oxygen carrying ability) because no one explained that the next day or so his body would not "read" this correctly and he would feel bloated and less powerful but that he could ride through that feeling - Bjarn Riis of CSC provided that valuable coaching advice.

* The "technology" of doping was constantly advancing, which gave an advantage to people like Lance who were at the cutting edge of such things. The first use of blood bags involved using only fresh ones, which had to be done within four weeks, but not long after it was possible to have one's blood acceptably frozen and then reuse that, simplifying the race calendar choices since there is a problem with giving your blood to use it later - if you just had a pint of blood drawn, your race results (if you are forced by your team to ride) in that situation are terrible.

And more. Those tidbits are interesting. And go along with Landis and the USADA report have to say.

When I reread my review of Millar's book, I remembered that one of the big negatives was his offering at least a half a dozen explicit answers to the question, "why I decided to dope." By contrast (unless I missed it), Hamilton doesn't do that even once. I believe his thought was more that you read his book and you decide.

Until Lance comes out with his version of all this, checking this out from a library for a quick read doesn't seem like a bad idea.



View all my reviews

Parents, Guns, Bicycles in 1938

From a series of interview extracts described as "parental problems" from the Library of Congress American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940. The collection is described as follows: "These life histories were compiled and transcribed by the staff of the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers' Project for the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA) from 1936-1940." The materials are presented with images of the typed interviews as well as searchable full text.

My son, now a boy of seventeen years of age, had his heart set upon a gun. He implored us to give him a gun as a birthday present. We, being rather 'modern' and against lethal firearms as a means of developing youngsters, were opposed to giving him a gun and at last persuaded him that a bicycle were a better present-even though it cost us more. But our neighbor's case was different. Their son, a chum of our boy, wanted a bicycle. The mother, however, remembering a bad accident that once happened to someone she knew was in fear of a bicycle but had no objection to a gun. So their boy, wanting a bicycle, got a gun. Our's, wanting a gun, got a bicycle. Both boys, as things turned out, were quite pleased, for by exchanging their gifts each had, frequently enough, the present he at first desired. And we, baffled parents, had no alternative but to philosophise upon the irony of things.

The typed page from which the above text was taken

The document makes clear that the person interviewed was in New York City and that the interview was done in August of 1938. Presumably the name of the "worker" is that of the writer, not the interviewee.

STATE New York
NAME OF WORKER Wayne Walden
ADDRESS 51 Bank St. N.Y. City
DATE August 26, 1938

Circuses & Bicycles 1900

Someone at work knows I am interested in historical images of cycling so she emailed me a link the this image in the National Library of Ireland's Flickr area.


Photo from the National Library of Ireland

Title - Mr Minton ? & Mr Lloyds, Circus on spiral rail, circa 1900
Main Author - A. H. Poole Studio Photographer
In Collections - The Poole Photographic Collection
The National Library of Ireland

I have to say, this is not exactly the most impressive feat involving a bicycle, but for a small circus . . . in fact, it would seem like setting up that spiral would have been a lot of work, so one guesses that they did something with it beside have this guy ride the bike up it. And what happens at the top, anyway?

A Library of Congress search for "bicycle" and "circus" brings up mostly posters.


Cropped and rotated image of 1900 circus poster from Library of Congress online presentation

Title: The Adam Forepaugh and Sells Brothers, America's greatest shows consolidated--The miraculous Melrosas
Date Created/Published: Buffalo, N[ew] Y[ork] : Courier Company Lith. Dept., c1900.
Medium: 1 print (poster) : chromolithograph ; 71 x 105 cm.
Summary: Poster showing circus performers riding bicycles on tightropes.
Reproduction Number: LC-USZC4-10501 (color film copy transparency)

Most (if not all) of the LC digitized circus posters are like this one, taken from a color negative that was produced before digitization from the original was more commonplace. I rotated the image (deskewed) and took out the color bars. The LC version is here.

1897 View on "Woman and the Bicycle"

This book, The Out of door library. Athletic sports. published in 1897, has several chapters about cycling, including "Woman and the Bicycle" by Marguerite Merington. Apparently Ms. Mergington was a playwright. And the bibliographic record tells us that "The chapters in this volume originally appeared in Scribner's magazine."



The text is a little high-flown, or something.

Woman and the Bicycle
By Marguerite Merington

The collocation of woman and the bicycle has not wholly outgrown controversy; but if the woman's taste be for the royal pleasure of glowing exercise in sunlit air, she will do well quietly but firmly to override argument with the best model of a wheel to which she may lay hand.

Never did an athletic pleasure from which the other half is not debarred come into popularity at a more fitting time than cycling has to-day, when a heavy burden of work is laid on all the sisterhood, whether to do good, earn bread, or squander leisure; no outdoor pastime can be more independently pursued, and few are as practicable as many days in a year. The one who fain would ride, and to whom a horse is a wistful dream, at least may hope to realize a wheel. Once purchased, it needs only to be stabled in a passageway, and fed on oil and air.

No, this is not nearly as readable as Bicycling for Ladies written by Maria Ward and published in 1896.

Interesting that the text does reveal something about the anticipated pace of riding for a woman rider:

An hour of the wheel means sixty minutes of fresh air and wholesome exercise, and at least eight miles of change of scene; it may well be put down to the credit side of the day's reckoning with flesh and spirit.

Also, as usual much time is spent discussing the best attire for women riders. Here the author indicates that for some riders, special attire was not practical since they might be riding to or from work (for example) that would obviate the ability to wear anything other than clothes suitable for the destination - and that this is OK.

Short rides on level roads can be accomplished with but slight modification of ordinary attire ; and the sailor-hat, shirt-waist, serge skirt uniform, is as much at home on the bicycle as it is anywhere else the world over. The armies of women clerks in Chicago and Washington who go by wheel to business, show that the exercise within bounds need not impair the spick-and-spandy neatness that marks the bread-winning American girl.

The phrase, "armies of women clerks" reminds me of the 1899 video of Parke-Davis employees leaving at the end of the work day that shows a fair number of bicycle riders, both men and women - dressed not in special cycling clothes but in their regular work attire (or so it appears).


As usual, poor cycling posture is subject to criticism, but a man is used to model this rather than a woman

The Bicycle - the Great Dress Reformer (1895)

As noted in any earler post, the Library of Congress has digitized many of the "centerfold" color illustrations from Puck magazine - this one from 1895 demonstrates how both men and women's attire were affected by the interest in cycling. And 1895 was not yet the height of the cycling craze.


Both men and women's attire were affected by the "bicycle craze"

Title - The bicycle - the great dress reformer of the nineteenth century! / Ehrhart.
Creator(s) - Ehrhart, S. D. (Samuel D.), ca. 1862-1937, artist
Date Created/Published - N.Y. : Published by Keppler & Schwarzmann, 1895 August 7.
Medium - 1 print : chromolithograph.
Summary - Print shows a man and a woman wearing knickers and bloomers, standing with a bicycle between them, shaking hands; to the right and left are examples of nineteenth century fashion.
Reproduction Number - LC-DIG-ppmsca-29031 (digital file from original print)
Notes: Title from item.
Illus. from Puck, v. 37, no. 961, (1895 August 7), centerfold.

Full record and TIFF.

Bicycle Metaphor for "In with the New Year" (1898)

The Library of Congress has digitized many of the "centerfold" color illustrations from Puck magazine including this one that shows a young woman riding in on a bicycle as the arriving new year 1898.


1898's arrival will (hopefully) drive out "Bryanism" and "hard times"

The text reads, "Puck's greeting to the new year - Good luck to you! No punctures, no breakdowns, and easy roads!"

Title - Puck's greeting to the new year / Ehrhart.
Creator(s) - Ehrhart, S. D. (Samuel D.), ca. 1862-1937, artist
Date Created/Published - N.Y. : Published by Keppler & Schwarzmann, 1898 January 5.
Medium - 1 print : chromolithograph.
Summary - Print shows Puck holding a lithographic pen, greeting the New Year, a young woman labeled 1898 riding on a bicycle and spilling flowers from a cornucopia straped to her back; an old woman labeled 1897 rides off on a bicycle into a dark and dismal background, stirring up a cloud of dust labeled "Bryanism" and "Hard Times", and showing two furies.
Notes - Title from item.
Illus. from Puck, v. 42, no. 1087, (1898 January 5), centerfold.

From the Library of Congress - full record and TIFF version. The cataloger who created the records (such as the one above) has a blog post at the Library of Congress site about the Puck collection that this comes from.

After having created this entry, I realized that "Puck's greeting" (Good luck to you! No punctures, no breakdowns, and easy roads!) was the same as a title of a blog post from a fellow in England who covers some of the same 1890s-1900s bicycle topics that I do - oops. (His blog appears in "my blog list" but that doesn't mean I look at the entries all the time.) Well, I have presented an image of the full layout of the magazine pages and provided the full record as well as a link to the full record so my post is a little different. And different people can independently come to the same idea.

Blog Stats - December 2012

I took up this blog for various reasons - one was that I kept bumping into "factoids" about cycling history that I felt others would find interesting; also, I thought it might teach me a few things about using certain web-based resources (that otherwise I imagined I understood but didn't have hands on experience with).


From the Blogger stats for wheelbike.blogspot.com as of 12/31/2012

I started the blog in May 2009. Some time during the past six months or so, there was a day when I went into Blogger and my blog posts had mostly disappeared. Given how much time I have put into creating them and that I don't have them backed up locally in any way, I remained remarkably calm - anyway, later the same day the posts reappeared, however it now appears that the dates were somehow screwed up. Blogger's cumulative page views now thinks I started getting page views in 2008 when the blog only started in May of 2009. (I hadn't noticed this until now.) Conversely now none of the blog posts themselves are dated before July 31 2010 - during the first bunch of posts (as dated now), there are many instances of multiple posts on one day, which I don't think I was doing. So somehow the dates assigned to the posts got messed up. Since all the posts still seem to be there, I guess that's not a big deal, but it's . . . weird.

I had a blog post in June 2011 when I talked about having blogged for two years with some statistics - this earlier post confirmed I wasn't losing my mind.


Blogger stats from March 2012, when the blog had a lot of growth

Since April 2012 I have had a significant drop in average daily page views - it was around 150 per day and now it is more like 90-100. Most of my page views are driven by Google searches, so I can't imagine what change occurred that drove the page views down. I have only added "content" that can be the target of searches . . .


Pages with highest number of page views

One change I made in 2012 was to add the "widget" on the right with "popular posts" that drives traffic to those pages from any blog entry that someone comes upon from searching. The Soviet time trial blog entry is by far the most viewed because (apparently) it attracts interest from visitors who came to look at something else but I also see it as a search target (see below).


Highest number of fixed search arguments that brought in users

Of course there are many variants that I see of these search arguments. ("Bicycle patents" or "old bike patents" and so on and not just "bike patents.")


Mostly North American users but a fair number from elsewhere