Rejoinder

I do not have space to defend myself against the charge of being a naïve empiricist so I will restrict my comments to Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch's additional material. To begin, they say that nowhere did they claim that women actually rode the high-wheeled ordinary. This is true. What they wrote was "a young lady . . . wrote to a magazine in 1885 about having used a bicycle, which at that date must have been a high-wheeled ordinary." ¹ They also included the powerfully confusing illustration of Starley's Ladies Ariel—not one I would choose for a serious text on bicycle history.

I challenged their assertion that J. B. Dunlop, in 1888, conceived his pneumatic tire simply as an antivibration device. ² I certainly did not claim that "enhancing the speed was all that the pneumatic tire was about." My view is unaffected by their quotations from later tire patents, of which there were thousands in the 1890s. The facts are that in 1888 Dunlop secretly timed the racer Walter Edlin on the first prototype over a measured mile on the Shore Road; that in 1889 he supplied the first production machine to William Hume, specifically for racing at Belfast Queen's College Sports; and that during that summer Dunlop was involved in many other track events, particularly at Portadown. ³ This denies the suggestion that Dunlop was ambiguous about the air tire's speed potential. After the formation of the founder company in November 1889, Dunlop's personal views were subsumed in those of the controlling du Cros family, but they were cycle racers and convinced of the pneumatic tire's speed advantage. ⁴ Paradoxically, it was problems with tires for the road rather than for track use, antivibration rather than speed, which took time to resolve.

However, the most controversial new hypothesis raised by Bijker and Pinch is that it was the pneumatic tire that killed off the ordinary, rather than the solid-tired safety. Faced with the challenge that this is a fundamental misconception, Bijker and Pinch remain silent.

Woodforde's book was not considered bad in 1970, but Bijker's book, twenty-five years on, repeated all the errors and then added some. It also lacked Woodforde's style. Bijker and Pinch say that the test for SCOT is "whether it helps the researcher to make sense of case studies." Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs makes much less sense than Woodforde, and it seems that it is the "interpretive flexibility" introduced by SCOT which is the reason why. ⁵