The Coyote's Bicycle
“First, it is the most efficient device ever created for the conversion of raw human power into locomotion. And second, there is something special about the people drawn to tinker and wrench on them. The proof is all around us—from freeways to airports to factories of mass production. The greatest by-product of the instrument that Susan B. Anthony called the “freedom machine” is the diaspora of remarkable people who had been inspired by bikes and, as a result, created a lot of remarkable things.
Many of these we just don’t notice anymore. When I was about six or seven, I rode a hand-me-down bicycle with a metal seat and solid rubber tires. I loathed the tires because they spun out, absorbed little, and set me apart from the older kids on their pillowy and sleek pneumatic tires. But it turns out that solid rubber tires were an important gift, a great improvement over wood or steel wheels, given to us in the mid-1800s by Clément Ader—a Frenchman with a reedy mustache and eyebrows like a ...Muppet, who would go on to improve Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, install the first telecommunications system in Paris, and build three airplane prototypes that looked like nefarious and great-winged bats.MoreLess
Many of these we just don’t notice anymore. When I was about six or seven, I rode a hand-me-down bicycle with a metal seat and solid rubber tires. I loathed the tires because they spun out, absorbed little, and set me apart from the older kids on their pillowy and sleek pneumatic tires. But it turns out that solid rubber tires were an important gift, a great improvement over wood or steel wheels, given to us in the mid-1800s by Clément Ader—a Frenchman with a reedy mustache and eyebrows like a ...Muppet, who would go on to improve Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, install the first telecommunications system in Paris, and build three airplane prototypes that looked like nefarious and great-winged bats.MoreLess
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