Peddling Bicycles to America: The Rise of an Industry (review)

The bicycle industry’s flame burned brightly in the late 1800s, and the man most famous for fanning that flame was Albert A. Pope. Bruce D. Epperson spent two decades studying the industry and the man, yet, to his credit, he glorifies neither of them. Instead, through a rich and lively narrative complemented by solid analysis, Peddling Bicycles to America explains how “the American bicycle business did not define the technological or industrial trajectory of the Gilded Age; it was, instead, defined by it” (p. 246).

Bicycles offered new possibilities for human-powered speed, but developing, making, and marketing them presented endless challenges. Epperson fully recognizes the complexity of the system in which those challenges converged. His legal training serves readers well because patents, corporate structures, and lawsuits figured prominently among the challenges his actors created for each other. For example, Pope’s mistake regarding an air-rifle patent preceded his bicycle making and taught him “a level of sophistication in patent matters that was exceeded only by his ruthlessness and tenacity” (p. 22). Thus armed, Pope attempted to dominate the bicycle industry through patent wars that began in 1878 and, in 1892, reached the United States Supreme Court. “Utterly routed” in the end, Pope learned that a collection of patents was only as good as its weakest link (p. 32). The final suit cost all parties a half-million dollars that would have been better spent on production.

Lawsuits and Pope’s myriad other maneuvers remind us that enthusiasm for new technologies may be enthusiasm for a goose that might lay golden eggs. Fervor like that can put such a goose at risk. Accordingly, one of the strengths of Peddling Bicycles to America is its intertwining of technological and business variables, showing how entrepreneurs and technical specialists sometimes worked at cross-purposes. Batch production characterized bicycles’ first half-century, and the industry’s dependence on skilled labor to build complex machines on demand rewarded, for instance, caution regarding the size of production runs and close attention to retail outlets. Choosing bluster over finesse in these and many other arenas, Pope’s attempts at oligarchy failed dismally and cost the field dearly.

The politics of sidewalks, roads, and tariffs complicated the bicycle system. Interestingly, Epperson’s examination of legislation and road building gives the bicycle lobby less credit than usual for road improvement. Tariffs aided in competing with technologically superior European, especially British, innovators and manufacturers. The book’s technological detail is vast, including factory layouts and construction, machine tools and their functions, bicycle parts and their construction. Importantly, Epperson demonstrates connections with sewing-machine manufacturers, who provided models for business practices, plus many of the tools and skills, even some of the factories, for producing bicycles in the early decades.

Promoting a new, expensive, and dangerous technology raised yet other challenges, and manufacturers assiduously built networks of salesmen and retailers, while advertising profusely. Peddling Bicycles to America explains their advertising and marketing strategies, but its many illustrations include no ads, not even the elaborate and once-ubiquitous lithographs, large and small, that helped to spread the bicycling contagion beyond magazines and newspapers. Neglecting these ephemeral forms underestimates that era’s promotional spending and its infiltration into popular consumer culture.

Overall, Epperson presents his case with almost encyclopedic density. His research ranged widely, including into Canada, and produced a multitude of materials that he gracefully weaves into the narrative. Expansive acknowledgements chronicle his adventures in gathering letters, images, catalogs, trade journals, many kinds of numbers, and so on from archives, libraries, historical societies, courthouses, colleagues, descendants, and even the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. This wealth of interesting material sometimes draws Epperson down the paths of anecdote and minutiae toward distraction. In a Pope biography, for instance, pages on nephews and children, houses, land dealings in the West, his family’s Civil War experiences, and so forth would have been suitable. They do not, however, add...