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

Modern "Commuting Wool Top" (Shirt)

For Christmas I received a very nice cycling shirt, made of Merino wool by Bontrager (which is part of Trek). I was a little surprised - I didn't realize that they made anything like this. I googled the full name of the thing and found it on their site and in various outlets, although I get the impression it may be discontinued - it was half price at several places and on the Bontrager site I was unable to find it either using browse or their search.

Perhaps Bontrager couldn't figure out how to market what is quite useful simply as what it is - a wool cycling shirt. They seem to have wanted it to serve as a fashion statement "on and off the bike."

On the bike, to the office, to the market, to the pub, around the city. If that sounds like you, then the 100% merino wool long sleeve Commuting Wool Top has the go-anywhere fashion and on-bike performance you need to transition seamlessly from riding your bike to looking right at home, no matter where your bike takes you.

The Bontrager wool commuter "top" (shirt)

In the list of "features" they continue to focus more on form than function: "Midweight, casual, high-collar long sleeve wool top for short commutes and trendy destinations." The "high-collar" part is simply a collar designed with buttons so that it can be buttoned up to create a high collar for windy or cool conditions - clever. There is also a single buttoned pocket on the back, off to one side, since cyclists may not have pockets in their shorts.

Certain features are pointless or silly - yes, there is a reflective edge to the one pocket, but in the dark this would contribute effectively zero. Even stranger are the epaulettes - are those a fashion feature for the hipster (or whoever) at the pub, around the city, etc.? For men I associate epaulettes like these with tour bus drivers and the like. And I don't understand why they don't call it a shirt or a jersey instead of a "top."


Now here are some epaulettes

The shirt is also a bit oddly sized, even by the standard of cycling clothing. I received and XL, which fits just right - but I am usually a medium for shirts, not large, so to have an XL fit is a little unusual. The site does say, "If you prefer a slightly roomier fit or are in-between sizes, consider ordering one size up" but this seems more than that - also the only sizes available are XL and XXL.

The MSRP is $79 which isn't that bad in my mind (given what I paid for a Merino wool "base layer" shirt last year) but it seems to be available from some outlets for half that, which seems a great deal.

Sarah Grand & Cycling - A Later View (1899)

Sarah Grand was a British feminist who traveled in the United States to lecture (and presumably sell more of her books). In an earlier post, I looked at an 1897 article about her suggestions for optimal cycling attire for women. (This article was published as filler material in a number of newspapers in the United States.)

I have since found a similar sort of filler item, but a shorter one from 1899, Sarah Grand and Her Bike, that uses a photo of Ms. Grand to demonstrate that she was not a "new woman" who practiced what she preached - she did not "ride in bloomers or trousers."


Illustration with article from the Kansas City Journal., June 04, 1899

SARAH GRAND AND HER BIKE
The Creator of the "New Woman" Does Not Hide in Bloomers or Trousers.
From the New York Journal

Sarah Grand, the author of "The Heavenly Twins" and the creator of the new woman in literature, rides a bicycle. We might expect her to ride in bloomers or trousers, or some other garment unlike any thing worn by the "old" woman, but instead of that we find her dressed in skirts of a decorous and graceful length.

Mme Sarah Grand has had herself photographed in bicycling costume just as she is about to mount her wheel. She has had this done because she wishes the public to know just what an ideal new woman looks like. You may see her on this page.

Sarah Grand is entitled by marriage to bear the good old Irish name of "McFall," but with curious taste she prefers the remarkably pretentious name of "Grand." Her husband was an army surgeon and she was separated from him. It is said that he was the original of the wicked colonel In "The Heavenly Twins," who was fond of long glasses of brandy and soda and of pretty girls, and for these sins was boycotted by his voting wife and brought to a sudden and terrible end by the author.

Sarah Grand is engaged regularly in literary work, but she achieved no success comparable to that of "The Heavenly Twins."

The full article as it appeared

A little research reveals that the photograph of Sarah Grand that was the basis for the newspaper illustration, claiming to show her as a "new woman" not wearing her suggested cycling attire was from 1896, before she made her declaration against using traditional women's clothing for cycling.