An Alternative History of Bicycles and Motorcycles: Two-Wheeled Transportation and Material Culture by Steven E. Alford, Suzanne Ferriss (review)

If there is an “alternative” history there also must be a “standard” history of bicycles and motorcycles. Such a history would likely use an evolutionary perspective that traces the key improvements that made bicycles faster, safer, and more comfortable: e.g., following the invention of the wooden “bone shaker,” two-wheelers became practical vehicles after acquiring pedals, chain drives, pneumatic tires, brakes, and gearing. Its success then made it inevitable that the bicycle would be transformed into the motorcycle by fitting it with the newly invented internal combustion engine. A history of this sort would concentrate on these innovations along with the people and business firms that created them.

In An Alternative History of Bicycles and Motorcycles, Steven E. Alford and Suzanne Ferriss take a different approach. In titling chapter 2 they appropriate the mantra of the social constructivist perspective on the history of technology: “It could have been otherwise.” How the configuration of bicycles and motorcycles might have been different is never spelled out, and doing so may in fact be an impossible task. Rather, in the place of such speculation, the authors examine the evolution of bicycles and motorcycles as products “of a synergistic set of developments in material culture, understood not simply as physical products but as the social, intellectual and political processes that undergird them” (p. 8).

The book begins with a brief history of two-wheelers. The first commercial success was the “ordinary,” a high-wheeled bicycle where an aura of speed mixed with danger made them especially attractive to young men. In contrast, alternative designs such as tricycles were seen as too sedate, preventing them from gaining a significant market share. Speed, however, could be combined with safety following the invention of the Rover “Safety Bicycle”: a vehicle with equal-size front and rear wheels and a chain drive connecting two sprockets, an arrangement that allowed high speeds without placing the rider over a gargantuan front wheel.

After its emergence in 1885, the Rover set the standard for a bicycle’s appearance that remains with us today. Recumbent bicycles have their adherents, but their deviant form prevents their widespread adoption. The same could be said of motorcycle design, where engine position along with the arrangement of the seat and handlebars continue the pattern set in the early twentieth century. So strong are perceptions shaped by long-held cultural conventions that some of today’s motorcycles sport a dummy tank between the seat and the handlebars even though the fuel is kept elsewhere.

The following chapters delve into some essential elements for the construction and operation of cycles: roads, rubber, steel, and textiles. The last of these includes a discussion of motorcycle clothing, and also covers the sewing machine industry’s contributions to bicycle manufacture. It then takes an unexpected turn by presenting contemporary speculations on the effects of sewing machine operation and bicycle riding on women’s health and behavior, and specifically on the autoerotic potential of these machines.

The theme of gender is continued in the following chapter. It qualifies the common observation that bicycles were an essential force for the emancipation of women by noting that bicycle riding was only one element in a larger set of emancipatory efforts. It also makes the important point that until the last decade of the nineteenth century, bicycles were expensive items, available only to well-to-do individuals, and therefore unavailable to most girls and women.

The chapter concludes by bringing the story into the recent past, noting the influence of Japanese motorcycle manufacturers in changing the image of motorcycles and motorcyclists. Here the authors miss an opportunity to report how social changes may promote a technology when they fail to mention an important reason for the growth of motorcycling in the 1960s and 1970s: this was the era when the postwar baby boom generation came of age, and...