Sweet Chariots

Bicycle
By David V. Herlihy
Yale University, 470 pp., illustrated, $35

There, on the second page, is Albert Einstein, feet on the pedals and wearing the round smile of a blissful child. The shaggy-haired deviser of E = mc2 (energy = mass x speed of light squared) has clearly come up with a second equation: B = fh2 (bicycle = freedom x happiness squared).

In modern times such a formula applied chiefly to the child. The happiness part is clear to anyone who, at 5 or 6, felt the training wheels lift suddenly from the ground; with the sensation, no doubt, of a fledgling gull whose arduous flap-flap volatilizes into flight. Not that contemporary adult cyclists have no pleasure, but it's not as free-floating; being tied so often to some purpose beyond noiseless speed and wind in the face: self-challenge, for instance, the cardiovasculars, ecologic virtue.

As for freedom, the bicycle was how you got away from home to explore, hang out, or maybe just get your paladin self -- in disguise -- to school. Not so much anymore. Bikes are less seen these days in front of my neighborhood convenience store where children go for treats and tooth rot. Freedom is now largely with the screen: a virtual means of getting away, and no skinned knees.

David Herlihy has written a lengthy history of the bicycle, detailed to a fault -- and it can be one -- and profusely and charmingly illustrated. For instance there is a mid-19th-century French cartoon showing horses sitting in the stands at a track to watch a clutch of men race by, pedaling their iron-wheeled monsters. It reflects the occasional bemusement voiced in those early days (and half a century later, when the Chinese emperor beheld his first cyclist) that humans should be doing their own transportation work instead of leaving it to animals.

Herlihy goes back to the early 1800s, when a German official, Karl von Drais, devised what became known as a velocipede, a two-wheeled affair upon which the rider sat, feet touching the ground and walking him along. It seems a small advance, but it had the advantage of taking weight off the legs and allowing a brisk 6-miles-per-hour pace. It also looked funny (those illustrations again), and country people would gawp and occasionally throw stones. It was never more than a fad.

The first big step came only after another 50 years or so. French inventors attached pedals directly to the front wheels, thus allowing mechanical propulsion. More significant, or at least more beguiling, was the counterintuitive discovery (it originated with the velocipede rider lifting his feet as he coasted downhill) that a little speed was enough to keep unlikely balance atop two wheels.

Heavy and iron-rimmed, the machines were called boneshakers for obvious reasons. They became popular, nonetheless; though at roughly $150 in the United States they cost too much to be more than a sport or pastime for the relatively well-off. They were gearless but one of a gear's functions -- greater speed for each turn of the pedal -- was achieved by making the front wheel progressively bigger until the rider was perched, in seeming absurdity if not peril, 5 feet or more above the ground (once more, those illustrations).

There were races, displays, and challenges, with one touring club cycling the length of England from London to John O'Groats. The penny-farthing, as the English called it for its huge front wheel and tiny rear one, became something of a craze though still among the relatively few.

Only with Britain's invention of the Rover at the end of the 1880s did today's bicycle begin to take shape. Its pedals connected to a rear-wheel chain drive, and soon a rudimentary gear system was installed, eliminating the need for monster wheels. Hollow rubber tires appeared; then Michelin developed an inner tube. The company organized a mini-Tour de France, and scattered tacks along the route to demonstrate the admirable celerity of tube-changing.

It was boom times through the 1890s, followed by a lower but steady rate of sales. The steadiness was supplied, once prices dropped, by a whole new clientele of workers and clerks, and soon bicycles became normal urban transportation. At least until the birth of the automobile, the ultimately lethal stepchild that availed itself of the same precision machining, benefited from the improved roads, and turned bicycle repair shops into service stations. Henry Ford started as a bicycle mechanic (so, in the bygone era of tinker technology, did Orville and Wilbur Wright).

Herlihy takes the improvements into the present with the slim 10-speed bike, the anorexic racing bike -- mosquito at jet speed -- and the knobby (who needs roads?) mountain bike. Seemingly he has amassed everything ever printed or drawn about the bicycle, to the point where, amid a whiteout of clippings, the research sometimes threatens to obscure the history. The history is good, though; even better are his social reflections and the further reflections they instigate in the reader.

There may be a billion bicycles in China, but the cars are coming. Yet what would happen, even in our own cities, were oil to go on skyrocketing? Here, a Herlihy reflection concealed within a factlet: Only one-third of the automobile gas used in the United States goes for trips longer than 3 miles.

But -- should you begin to daydream -- what about rain and snow? For the last time, the illustrations. A carnival of a photograph displays a Shanghai street choked with cyclists, each entirely covered by a flowing, all-enveloping (head, hands, feet) rain cape. Perhaps the future is a collective fog, and quite likely dark -- but those cyclists are individual, hilarious sunbursts of color.

Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.