num_pages: 568
description: Cycling is such a natural activity for millions of people around the globe now it is difficult to imagine that a little over a century ago many regarded it as reprehensible revolting or indeed revolutionary. The best way to get a feel for what early 'velocipedists' encountered is to read the words of the times and this book gathers into one volume the most enlightening entertaining and extraordinary insights from contemporary sources.Stephen Channings earlier tome The Victorian Cyclist focused on one of the sport's pioneers  an anonymous author from Margate who described in great detail the routes he took around East Kent in 1886  and garnered universal praise for its wonderful writing and meticulous detail. Bicycle Beginnings now plays the spotlight over a wider domain excerpting hundreds of 19th century newspaper reports and letters to convey the atmosphere in which the first cyclists found themselves.The mammoth work (over 190000 words covering the period 1779 to 1912) contains race reports legal developments technical innovations and inventions records advertisements acrobatics clothing poems arguments for and against the new-fangled vehicles debates over women cyclists and a long travelogue Berlin to Budapest on a Bicycle capturing the excitement of a forgotten age of adventure on two wheels. Not all the inventions were two-wheeled however. This book also reveals the numerous variations that came into being before makers standardized on the shapes we commonly see tricycles ice velocipedes water-paddle hobby-horses These are explained with the aid of numerous illustrations covering the gamut from cartoons to technical drawings and photographs. Even the race reports demonstrate far more variety than we are accustomed to ordinaries (penny farthings) versus safety bicycles versus tandems monocycles dwarf cycles tricycles double tricycles four-wheel velocipedes horses ice skaters steamshipsRather than a single narrative to be read in one go it is an anthology of fascinating glimpses into cyclings golden age providing a new understanding of a bygone age of experimentation and much amusement whenever the reader dips into it.
language: None
title: Bicycle Beginnings: The Advent of the Bicycle or Velocipede… and what people of the 19th century were really saying about it
publisher: Ozaru Books