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cc >> Welcome to University Place Presents. I'm Norman Gilliland. It was cheap. It was clean. It was economical. It was wholesome. It was the bicycle. And it swept through the United States in the late 19th century, and in particular in Wisconsin. My guests today are Nick Hoffman and Jesse Gant. They're the co-authors of Wheel

Fever

How Wisconsin Became a Great Bicycling State, and we're going to find out that Wisconsin indeed had something in the air, and I suppose on the ground too, when it came to making the bicycle number one as a form of transportation. Welcome to University Place Presents. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> What got you interested in the history of bicycling, especially in Wisconsin? >> Well, I was living in Goshen, Indiana, about four years ago where I was the director and curator of a county museum. And Jesse and I knew each other all the way back to graduate school. We both for one year overlapped at UW Milwaukee. And from that time we both have always been interested in doing a public history project together. So Jesse would visit me occasionally when I lived in Goshen, and we were actually driving through the countryside and we noticed there's a large Amish population around Goshen, Indiana. And a lot of the young Amish men and women were bicycling almost exclusively as their transportation as they would go to their factory jobs and then back to the farm. And that just kind of got us talking, and we spent that weekend actually writing our book proposal to the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. We had it delivered to them by that Monday, and by about the end of the week or the week after, we had our proposal accepted and we writing about bikes. >> Bikes in general though? What sort of proposal was this? >> Originally the Wheel Fever book was designed to be a much more comprehensive 19th century to the present sort of book, and very quickly we recognized that we were never going to make it out of the 19th century with the source material we discovered. I was working at the Historical Society Press, as Nick mentioned, and sat in one of the richest libraries in North America in terms of photographic evidence and manuscript collections and especially with collections documenting state history. So it was very sort of lucky in some ways that we had such a great archive to draw from. >> And we were aware that there was a great story to tell in that time period for cycling. Jesse and I both kind of researched other topics that covered this broad time period. And so cycling was always coming up in our research, whether Jesse was looking at Grand Army of the Republic parades there was always bicycles involved in that. >> Really? >> Or myself researching the glass industry in Milwaukee. The glassblowers were always biking to and from work. So we encountered it before we really thought about this book. >> Yeah, I'm writing a dissertation about the Civil War era, and I kept seeing bicyclists at veterans reunions and tagging along with the veterans at Decoration Day parades. It's another avenue into the stories we wanted to tell. >> In some ways it seems like an improbable invention. It was so different from what had become before, especially the two wheel. We're talking about bicycles, that implies two wheels, but there were other, of course, hybrids and versions of it as well. But where did the idea come from? >> Well, early in the 19th century, there was a model called the hobbyhorse, which was this machine that had no pedals. You basically just sort of straddled two wheels with a small wooden frame connecting them, and you kind of push yourself along with your feet. There's stories of the wheels being lubed with bacon grease and all these things. But the idea of a sort of private individual self-propelled machine is actually quite old and has been sought for quite a time. Horses create a lot of different kinds of dependencies. You've got to feed them and take care of them, so the bicycle kind of answered that need initially. >> So was the bicycle originally a thing for the middle classes? >> Early on they're very expensive, even that early velocipede. So we're looking at, and really the narrative of the book kind of follows these white, middle to upper class, young bored men who are the sons of paper barons, for instance, in Wisconsin looking for something to do, and this challenge, the excitement of bicycles, they're immediately drawn to it. >> And what were these velocipedes, these are the first bicycles? We're talking about the late 1860s by this time? >> Yeah, mid-1860s for Paris, France, carriage makers take carriage wheels, attach pedals to the front wheels, and it's actually a much more sort of interesting movement in France initially because it's much more gender integrated. A lot more women were involved. >> Leave it to the French. >> Yeah. >> But when you say carriage wheel, that means a hard wheel. A wooden wheel. >> Wooden with an iron rim on the outside. >> Very unforgiving if you hit a pothole. >> Yeah, they're called bone shakers. Called sort of colloquially early on. >> And the velocipede, what was the relationship between the two wheels in terms of size? Same size? >> They are two same sized wheels. They don't start to really shrink down until sort of the late 1860s into the early 1870s when that transition happens from the velocipede to the high wheel. >> So, does a velocipede, it has a pedal and it has some kind of a chain that will drive the wheels when you pedal? >> No chain. The wheels were attached right to the front hub of the front wheel. >> If you've seen a child's tricycle, it's sort of the same technology. >> Oh, sure. >> With one wheel in the back. And the front wheel is a little bit bigger than the back wheel, but they're basically the same size early on. >> And so the back wheel just gets dragged along with the front wheel. >> Pretty much. >> And how did this become popular in Wisconsin? Why Wisconsin? >> One of these French produced models was shipped here, and somehow it got into the hands of Joshua Towne, who's one of these working class, middle class American Express clerks working in Milwaukee, who decides to take it out in the middle of January. >> Of course. >> Yeah. I imagine it arrived in the mail or somehow was shipped to him, and then he was anxious to use it. So first chance he had, took it out into a frozen street in Milwaukee, and it was such a scene that actually Milwaukee newspaper editors showed up and reported on it. So that's going back and looking at the newspaper coverage we were able to locate the first ride in Wisconsin history in January 1869. >> It was such a bid deal because all the state newspapers were covering the velocipede as it slowly made its way to Wisconsin. And once it finally arrives in Milwaukee that January, it's just greeted as this incredible technological marvel. It was a real sign of progress for Milwaukee. I believe the newspaper headline

that day was

"All Hail the Velocipede." >> Yeah. >> Cheaper than a horse? >> Long-term for sure, yeah, with the care. >> That's the idea. Long-term but initially these are very expensive machines. It's 1869, so just four years after the Civil War when Union soldier were making $13 a month. Velocipedes would be a several month salary. >> Several month proposition. >> Yeah. >> We're going to shoot ahead just for a second to look at the actual cover of your book, and give me some idea of what's going on here. >> This is a lithograph from the Library of Congress showing a bicycle race in Detroit, Michigan, actually. So, sorry, Wisconsin. >> We'll forgive just one. >> But it really captures the energy and color and spirit, we thought, of the sort of pivotal year for our book. 1895 is the year that Wisconsin is named the leading division of the west by the League of American Wheelmen, meaning it has the most riders of any western state in the country. And that's a moment the Wisconsin cycle community really celebrating. >> Is this is a realistic image? Everybody's looking down at the road there. >> I think it's embellished. >> A little bit idealized somehow. >> Yeah. But you have the packed grandstand behind the riders filled with spectators really giving you a sense of just how popular this sport was by the late 1890s. And that's a story we'll get into later on as well. >> I gather this is one of those designs that didn't exactly work out. >> The velocipede? >> That we're looking at here, yes. >> Yeah. This is a, well, one of the questions we've had throughout writing the book is why Wisconsin? Why tell this story from the perspective of Wisconsin? And you find examples like this throughout our story of sort of hybrid designs that Wisconsinites grew organically and made their own. And this is such a wonderful, this is anticipating the arrival of the machines that they're reading about in newspapers in France and thinking about how can we make this useful for Wisconsin landscape. So you can see that there's actually skis attached to the wheels. >> Of course. You don't have to wait for summer. >> Yeah. And with the two back wheels, it's a little more stable. >> For sure. >> Yeah. >> Why didn't three wheelers catch on more? >> They do into the early high wheel period. It was a stable machine, a little bit safer to ride than those challenging high wheels. So we see them quite a bit in Wisconsin in the 1880s. Also for women, because there's a story that we follow throughout the book who can and cannot ride a bicycle and the politics behind that, and women were required by society to wear, particularly the men who were involved in cycling, to wear long skirts while they rode. So the tricycle becomes popular because your skirt won't get caught in it as easily while you're pedaling. >> What's the issue here? If we're talking about long skirts, is this a violation here? >> It's sort of a later moment. In this early moment, this image shows Edith Shuler in Milwaukee. She's a Chicago woman who came up to Milwaukee in the spring of 1869 and became the first real ambassador, real champion of the sport, by riding trick performances inside velocipede rinks in the city of Milwaukee where folks could pay 25 cents and come and see Shuler ride this new machine. And I think the spectacle of having a woman rider really played into the interest of... >> I have no doubt, but I have to wonder a little bit if there wasn't a slight bit of angle of the novelty of the dance hall too. >> Yeah. >> Seeing a well turned ankle displayed. >> And that probably is the first image of what we would call a bicyclist in Wisconsin. Although at that time they were still called velocipedestrians. But Edith Shuler probably is the earliest. >> So the velocipedes, these would have been ridden indoors? Is that what you're implying? >> There were certainly people riding outdoors, enough that a lot of cities in Wisconsin passed ordinances so people cannot ride on wooden plank sidewalks because the streets were often muddy and rut-filled making it really challenging, especially in the winter when these machines arrived. So there was a lot of riding indoors. And this is a great example of one of those facilities. This is Metropolitan Hall in Appleton, Wisconsin. And every mid-sized city in Wisconsin, from Beaver Dam, Appleton, larger cities like Milwaukee, had these indoor rinks where velocipede manufacturers would rent them to, as Jesse had mentioned, have exhibitions to show how great a velocipede was to ride. What was that? >> I was going to ask how many velocipedes at a time do we have in one of these rinks? >> Quite a few. Sometimes there's descriptions of people doing special tricks, five people riding at the same time, doing kind of like the Shriners in circus parades, big circles around the rink. But people would come to watch sort of the hysteria of people trying to ride a bicycle for the first time. Something they had never seen, learning from people who had only been riding for a month or two. So the newspaper accounts are just full of accidents and playing on that hysteria. >> And images like this from Harper's Weekly in 1869 showing the chaos inside. We don't have any good documentation of an interior shot of a Wisconsin rink, but we have New York City here in 1869, and this is a great representation of the chaos that sort of reigned inside these. There's a story in the book of Jacksonville, Illinois, riders setting up a ramp and actually launching themselves from one building to another. >> Oh. >> Yeah. With some marginal success.

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>> But I think today it'd be hard enough for someone who's a very skilled rider to try and pedal around in a circle in one of these small second story buildings in Wisconsin. So it had to be a challenge either way. >> And so at this point it sounds if it's really catching on pretty quickly. >> It was, but oddly enough by midsummer of 1869, the velocipede disappears. We find very few descriptions in Wisconsin. It just wasn't very practical. Certainly was a challenge to bring out this new technology in the middle of winter, and they were expensive. In Appleton, the Appleton Crescent estimated there were four consistent velocipede riders in Appleton, but enough to cause a nuisance for people that they put an ordinance in place banning them. >> Oh, banning them. >> Banning them on city streets, yeah. >> Well, when you think about the sort of traffic you would have, if we're talking about 1869, on a city street. Of course you'd have pedestrians, you'd have lots of horses, you'd have horse drawn conveyances and no particular traffic laws anyway. >> Sure. First time local cities begin legislating traffic rules. >> But at the same time, you also needed, I suppose, the flatness, the relative reliability of a city street. I can't imagine that bicycling, velocipeding would have been that good in the country at this point. >> Not at all. It's really a rink technology, but it does create a small and dedicated band who believed that the bicycle is the future. And technology begins to expand and adapt. They develop rubber wheels, more intricate spokes, better saddles, and they improve, they greatly expand the size of that front wheel leading to this high wheel technology in the late 1870s and 1880s. >> Which to us today looks just crazy. >> Yeah. >> I mean, this high wheel technology, the probability to be able to stay balanced on something like that, and one false move and you fall a long way. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's called taking a header. One of the most dreaded episodes of the early bicyclists was falling off one of these things. And we even hear accounts of people being knocked over by huge tailwinds coming off of Lake Michigan on occasion. >> I wouldn't be surprised. But why the great discrepancy between the size of the wheels? >> That big wheel is really fast and surprisingly stable, actually. It doesn't look like it'd be a stable ride. I've never ridden one of these. We occasionally get asked to ride these in our events, but we've never jumped on.

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But a surprisingly stable machine and very quick. So the high wheel kind of generates a new boom and leads to a new cycle of racing and outdoor competition and long distance touring. >> Are these rubber tires? >> Rubber tires. >> But not inflatable? >> No pneumatic tube. So this is another solid, bumpy... >> It's still a hard ride. >> Yeah. But you can cover a long distance on those. >> And are these starting to be mass produced in Wisconsin by the time the high wheels come along? >> A little bit. There's a company actually owned by a young man who is standing with a high wheel. That's Terry Andrae. And his family early on become interested in cycling. They create, in the late 1880s, Julius Andrae and Sons for bicycling manufacturing. They're also, before that, making electrical components. But they're two young sons, Terry and Henry Andrae, become enamored with the bicycle. And their father who has a lot of income and knows that his sons have an interest builds a big plant in the third ward of Milwaukee. This starts to manufacture a few, or at least assemble high wheels. But they really take off during the safety, which is a little far ahead of what we're talking about. >> One way to mediate the high wheel difficulties and dangers is the tricycle technology, which you see there as well. >> Yeah. >> And so, again, this is a pedal connected directly the wheel. No chain. >> Yep. >> But surprisingly fast. >> Yeah. They would race high wheel bicycles against later models, and high wheels would actually outperform the safety diamond frame that we have nowadays on occasion. >> Terry Andrae first became famous as an amateur high wheel racer. He competed in Illinois and Wisconsin mostly. Occasionally you see his name in some national newspapers, but pretty rarely. He as the best nickname in the book. He was known as the flying badger which is an iconically Wisconsin name. >> He should have copyrighted that.

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I'm guessing that these high wheels would be more popular in rather flat places. How were they on hills? >> They were certainly a challenge on hills, but we see them throughout Wisconsin pretty equally distributed. But it's still a very expensive machine, so it's limited still to those young men who could afford these machines. We don't see a lot of people riding high wheels. A good size cycling club in, say, Oshkosh or Appleton might be 30 riders during that time period. So it's not as widespread as we like to think the high wheel was. >> So do we have clubs by this time? >> We start to see them forming, yeah. >> This is Milwaukee in 1887, showing the expansion of the clubs by the last end of that decade. The League of American Wheelmen is formed in Rhode Island in 1880 and becomes the leading national cycling organization, and it becomes the duty of states across the Union to create local chapters that then attach themselves to the League of American Wheelmen national organization which is today the League of American Bicyclists based in Washington, DC. But forming these local chapters becomes another way to sort of tap into the growing boom nationally. >> What are they doing for surfaces now? Are we pretty much outdoors? >> We're pretty much outdoors. There are some riding rinks still in cities like Milwaukee where you could go and test different models, watch exhibitions happen. Wisconsin really becomes involved in bicycle advocacy in 1885. We create the Wisconsin division of the League of American Wheelmen. >> And what are they doing for, when you talk about advocacy, are they advocating better biking surfaces? >> They're starting to talk about that. >> How much power do they have in that, though? The priority is going to be for, it's too early for the automobile, so who's going to care other than bicyclists? >> I think, primarily, the League of American Wheelmen at first is purely about just generating excitement for the sport, and that means hosting parades, getting out into the streets, demonstrating this sort of manly respectability of men riding in unison and military uniforms and singing songs. But eventually it becomes more powerful. They do turn to a more formal kind of politics that is much more about improving infrastructure and the quality of life for cyclists, which gets wrapped up into the sort of road discussions about improving infrastructure networks nationally. >> We're started getting used to the early years of the kind of gymnasium movement in this country and this whole sense of health and fitness. Is the bicycle then keyed into that? >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. Your gym clubs would all have bicycle clubs attached to them as well. Another important part of these early bicycle clubs and the League of American Wheelmen was to sell Colonel Pope's bicycles, Columbia bicycles. We followed the story in Appleton, Wisconsin, as a salesman from Columbia came to Appleton, and he had two goals. One was to open up a small shop to start selling Columbia bicycles, which the leader of the League of American Wheelmen owned, but then his other goal was to start a club while he was there, to start to make that demand for the bicycles in the community. So he lives in Appleton for about two months or so, sets up his shop, sells models, creates a club, and just moves on. So he creates that demand as he goes from city to city. >> Here's an image that kind of summarizes the thinking at this time as we get into the, what, 1870s, 1880s, I suppose. Are these people related? >> They are, yes. This is Augusta on the bicycle and her sister Elizabeth Wilhelmy from Manitowoc, and they're right in that early stage of the next transition for bicycle technology. We're now in a period where the bicycle is kind of what we ride still today. The technology has changed a little bit. >> It looks very similar, doesn't it? >> Yeah. >> It's the same basic premise. Pneumatic tires, rubber wheels, there is now a train drive added to this machine. She's even using a net on the back of the bike to make sure that her skirt doesn't get caught in the spokes. >> A very good idea. >> And I believe that's a drop frame as well. So you start to see that as well. >> Room for the skirt, which we still see, I think, less than we used to on bicycles, that drop frame for women's bicycles, but still out there. >> It's a nice technology for step through so it's easier to get on bike for sure. But yeah, few people realize that it's origins are to accommodate skirts. >> This, I think, illustrates well too that the daredevil sort of manly culture that surrounded the high wheel is consistently being challenged and questioned. And people want access beyond the high wheel technology, so they want a safer machine that's more equitable. And safety sort of answers that demand by lowering people down to the ground, making a much more stable bike. >> So, what was the thinking about women on bicycles at this point? >> They're certainly challenged in many aspects. The League of American Wheelmen, even though women could join the organization, a lot of local chapters formally excluded women from becoming members, and if they were, they're usually kind of relegated to what they call the club auxiliary. So they were there for minutes and that kind of stuff. >> Run the bake sale. >> Yeah. So women start creating their own clubs, and one that we follow a little bit in the book was from Lawrence University. It was young women who were in Ormsby Hall at Lawrence who created their own bicycle club for the city of Appleton, and they're also the early bloomer club for the city. Bloomers and bicycling actually occur pretty quickly during our story. From about 1894 to 1896 bloomers are at their peak in the state. But as they ride in their bloomers throughout Appleton and surrounding cities, the local newspapers are constantly commenting on that and really questioning their respectability for wearing them. >> Bloomers you think were actually developed for more athletic women? >> For sure, yeah. >> They have deep roots in the 19th century. They're developed initially, I believe, by Amelia Jenks Bloomer. I know from my own research she lived for a while in Ohio. And this form of clothing catches on in reform circles, antislavery circles initially, and then later on with suffrage movement. And so this image from -- magazine shows one of these new age women getting ready to head out on a bike ride with her husband at home and the kids crying and really sort of upends the gender system that animated much of the 19th century. >> It's sort of implying that she's... >> Independent, mobile. >> You can kind of interpret it either way, can't you. With the crying children it's like mother, dear mother, why aren't you staying home? >> Right. And there's certainly a level of shaming going on here as well. >> Her bike's propped up in the corner just peeking out. >> So how did this development, it's called the safety bicycle, come about? Was there a particular demand for it, or was it just another design that was tried because it really seemed to revolutionize biking. >> Yeah, we see the first safety bicycle appear in Wisconsin in 1887, and it's questioned immediately. Like all the bicycle inventions that we cover in the book, we invest in the first half of the chapter kind of the story as it arrives from Europe to Wisconsin. They're usually always European inventions that we're talking about. But in 1887, the first safety bicycle arrives in the state, and it's owned by Henry Andrae. And he has his brother, Terry Andrae, on his high wheel race against a man named Parker Sercombe, who was going to ride a safety. So they're going to challenge to see finally once and for all is it the high wheel that's the bike to ride or the safety. And it's a really, really well covered event throughout the state. People were really interested in this. And Terry Andrae does end up winning on the safety because he is such a great athlete, but Parker Sercombe, who really had no reason even being close to him in a bike race, was really close on the safety. So even though Terry won, people really focused their attention on Parker Sercombe and used his near victory as sort of reasoning that the safety bicycle really had merits. But the men who are really interested in the high wheel really still saw it as the more manly choice, and so occasionally you see in local newspapers, they would sort of lessen the impact of the bicycle by feminizing it, calling it the bicyclette compared to the manly high wheel. >> And there's a rift in the cycling community that goes in one direction towards the sort of Victorian, refined, gentlemanly high wheel culture and the more modern racing and safety sort of oriented culture. And one sort of venue that the older crew the League of American Wheelmen sort of begins to adapt is the minstrel shows that they host in clubhouses throughout the state of Wisconsin. >> To do what, fundraisers? >> They're fundraisers. They're using these shows to sort of raise money for their clubhouses and for their infrastructure projects throughout the city and state. And you get a sense of the sort of reactionary politics here as well. >> And this is in 1893 at the height of one of America's worst recessions. And one of their main targets is sort of the working poor and mocking them during their minstrel show fundraiser. >> It's a rather questionable strategy. >> It gives you a good sense, though, of the demographics of the early cycling clubs. >> Of the clubs, but now at what point, we're talking 1887, 1893, at what point does the bicycle become a workhorse? >> Right, so the bicycle boom really begins to take off in the mid-1890s, and this sort of hold that these old clubs have on cycling culture is just exploded by the continued efforts by women to gain access, by people of color to gain access, and by working class people to use the bicycle as a utilitarian measure not as a competitive or leisurely machine. >> Yeah, and you can look at a lot of exterior images of factories during that time period, and there'll be stacks of bikes right outside. >> So the price is coming down then? >> Yeah. >> There's a much greater demand, and factories are starting to catch up with that demand and they're flooding the marketplace with new technology that's much cheaper than it used to be. >> And so at this point with these safety bicycles we have inflatable tires. >> Yeah. >> Yep. >> We have chain driven wheels. >> Yep. >> And we have fenders to keep your clothes out of the wheel. >> There's even simple braking systems that are starting to be developed. >> Would these be like what we expect with, again, before we get into geared bicycles, you used to just push back on the pedal and that would brake, is that how those work? >> There's little spoon brakes that kind of apply pressure down on the front wheel that slows you down. It's a very crude braking system, but I guess it worked. >> But not this component work leads to an explosion of industry across the state, and so you have manufacturers and component makers located in all sections of the state. It becomes very quickly a multi-million dollar industry in the 1890s. >> Yeah there's a very large manufacturing base in southeast Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, at the large plants. But even Oregon, Wisconsin, had a factory that was making Badger Bicycles. Appleton had a small company that was making more kind of craft produced bikes. But the manufacturing side really reaches all corners of the state. >> Are we getting into long distance races, then, once we get these bikes outside? >> Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Century rides are very popular. People trying to bike around the world.

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>> Okay, now how did that work? >> Well, there's a lot of instances of individuals coming into Wisconsin on really long bike rides. In fact, when the high wheel is first introduced to the state in about 1879, it's two men from Boston who are biking all the way across the United States already at that point who came into Wisconsin, were spotted circling Monument Square in Racine. So the whole time Wisconsin's been a destination for that long distance riding. >> I think the best example in the book is Frank Lenz, who's pictured here, in 1892 stopping in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on his worldwide tour. He's from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and one of these young mavericks who takes out on a worldwide trek alone in the 1890s and ends up rather tragically killed in the opening days of the Armenia genocide. And the bicycling community in the United States is very concerned about his fate and sends riders out to find him. They never do but it's a major scandal in the bicycling press of the 1890s, and we were really fortunate and really surprised one day to find this image in the Milwaukee County Historical Society archives because there was no knowledge at all that Lenz had been photographed while in the state. >> And this is him in Waukesha. He went up to Madison. And at that time still, rural roads were very bumpy, sometimes impossible to pass by bike. And so he actually rode on the railroad track from Elroy to Sparta, which of course is the trail today. >> You just have to know your schedule, your train schedule. >> He made a mistake that may or may not be true. He at least claimed it was. He was crossing a bridge a little bit west of Baraboo and a train was coming. So supposedly he hung off the bridge with his bike in one hand and just grasping the bridge with his other.

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>> One way he would fund his journeys was to submit articles to Outing magazine, which would then fund the rest of his journey, and it became a way to sort of, he was an entrepreneur. >> These bikes were made out of what, iron at this point? >> These are steel. Steel and iron. Yeah. >> But just like today where you have your carbon frames and people want to go lighter and lighter, they were concerned that there was Huseby Manufacturing in Milwaukee that made bamboo frame bicycles. >> That's an interesting idea. >> There's an image of that one in the book. >> Beebe Manufacturing was a wooden frame bicycle. >> This whole idea of inflatable tires, we're still before the automobile, were inflatable tires designed originally for bicycles? >> Yeah. Oh, yeah. The pneumatic and for horse racing too. Their carriages had pneumatic tires. >> Oh, did they? >> In fact, Milwaukee had a magazine that really provided a lot of our research called the Pneumatic, and it was really popular in the 1890s in Wisconsin, but it's naming itself after those tires. But it covers all the details of cycling in Wisconsin during that period. >> So we have bicycle clubs sprouting up all over Wisconsin. >> Yep. This is the Apple Cycling Club in 1896 near High Castle. >> High Cliff. >> High Cliff. >> It's kind of fun with this image because it's one of the most popular rides in the state to go around Lake Winnebago. And this image is just great because it documents these guys doing that already in the 1890s running from Appleton to High Cliff. >> And I gather then that there was this increasing pressure for roads, and for maps for that matter. Road maps in fact. >> Yeah, Nick mentioned the Pneumatic. The publisher of the Pneumatic was a guy named MC Rotier based in Milwaukee and also became one of the leading map makers in the state. And actually during the height of the boom in Wisconsin, Wisconsin riders were given these maps which indicated on a scale of one to three, one being hilly, two being sort of hilly, three being very hilly, the landscape of the state. And it's really interesting to see a map like this because it really shows you there were road maps before cars in Wisconsin, and these were available to wheelmen who are heading out into the countryside out of the cities seeking league affiliated hotels and restaurants they could visit, and these maps would give them clues as to where to go. >> Yeah, it was coupled with a small pocket-sized booklet that was published by Sam Ryan of Appleton, Wisconsin. And these two documents were there because there were so many bicycle tourists coming into the state. Wisconsin already then was known as just a great place to ride. And so our current bicycle industry is so much about tourism, and even then that was the case. We were already really developing that over a hundred years ago. >> Yes, the whole notion of developing yourself as a tourist state does seem to really have a burgeoning in this part of the 19th century, doesn't it? >> Yeah. >> There's something with the leisure and the mobility that enables... >> Rusticator. >> Rusticators, that's true, yes. And Wisconsin also had this reputation as being a place of health resorts, and that whole kind of health movement would tie in with this, wouldn't it? >> Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. >> And what about the whole class thing? We've talked about gender of course and we've talked about how bicycling developed as a young man, a wealthy young man's leisure activity, but as we get into the 1870s, 1880s, into the '90s, does it also become kind of a racially charged phenomenon? >> Yeah. In 1894, the League of American Wheelmen formally forbid African American participation at its national convention in Louisville, Kentucky. >> And why would that be? Other than just pure racism, what was their rationale? >> The rationale is to cordon off the sport and protect its benefits for like people. And it's an effort to sort of secure the commercial benefits, economic benefits of maintaining the grip over the industry and the sort of benefits that come with the exclusivity of the sport in those early days. >> And much like women, there's ample evidence throughout the United States of African Americans creating their own clubs within the bicycle movement, creating their own space. So it's a very similar story. >> Here's another image of a club. The Tree Toad... >> The Tree Toad Bicycling Club. Yeah. >> What do we know about the Tree Toad? >> This is a great image. It helps underscore that rural people were also very interested in cycling. This is a tour. They're from Richland Center, and this is a picture of them on Fourth of July, probably on a Decoration Day ride going out in support of the Grand Army of the Republic veterans. They were riding through Hub City where they must have had some sort of a malfunction and had to pull over and get some help from a local farmer to get back to their hometown. >> The aura that these pictures generate is of this wonderful, even in the urban pictures there's this kind of rural quality, this kind of sense of space and easygoing aspect to it and just kind of the amount of outdoors that you had to work with and kind of a casual breeziness to the whole thing. >> Yeah. >> It's easy to get nostalgic, isn't it? >> Absolutely. Yeah. And that's something we don't want to do with this history because this photo, I think, really makes this clear. What's driving this industry in a lot of cases is exploitation and child labor, like the Meiselbach factory here. Is this Milwaukee? >> North Milwaukee. >> North Milwaukee. Young folks would be much more adept in certain ways with handling small parts and small machining so they were brought in to do a lot of the work with producing the bicycles in this period. >> It's all part of just an explosion. A lot of your bicycle club leaders also owned these factories. So the things were tied together very nicely. And in Wisconsin itself, in 1890, we barely have a bicycle industry. There's really just Julius Andrae and sons who are just starting to get into it. But it really underscores the vastness of the boom. By the mid-1890s, Wisconsin's bicycle industry was a top 10 industry in Wisconsin. >> Really? >> It happens in less than five years. And if you take it another five years to 1900, it's not even on the map. There's still some companies that are producing bicycles lingering into the early 1900s, but even they are doing automobile components as well. >> So you're talking about a boom here. So it's a boom between, well, let's say in particular the development of the safety bicycle and the advent of the automobile. >> Yeah. It kind of hovers right between that in Wisconsin. >> Who's selling the bikes exactly? You mention the factories of course. >> Everybody. >> Everybody. >> Everybody was. If we look at a city like Appleton, there's at times at least eight, sometimes 12 different businesses that are selling bicycles in a city of that size. And it's everything from hardware stores, this is Groth's Hardware in Appleton. They dealt in both bicycles and shotguns and pistols. They had an interesting crossover. >> Of course. Cutlery I think also in some cases. >> Yeah. And pharmacies too are even selling bikes. Department stores. Everyone wanted to be part of the boom. There was a lot of money to be made. >> What kind of safety standards were there? >> For bicycles? >> Yes. >> There weren't necessarily very, well they were concerned about in the aspect that the safety bike is about new safety for riders and their brakes. But they're not wearing helmets or anything like that during this time period. >> No. They didn't wear them really until when? >> Firearm manufacturers are producing small packable pistols that bike riders can wear so that if they're out in the boondocks somewhere and they're approached, they can handle that, I guess. >> Yeah, the conflict between farmers and these young city dudes going out into the countryside occasionally brought violence. >> A lot of antagonism. >> Really? >> Yeah. >> Why would that be? With an automobile I can kind of see it because it's noisy and tends to get bogged down and you need to hire the farmer to pull your car out of the mud with his team. >> The accounts we see, the bicycling technology is so new and so alien that a lot of times it scared farm animals. So when they would head out into these rural areas, animals would rear up and run through the fence and the farmer obviously did not like that situation very much. And, culturally, bicyclists are known as sort of urbanites. They're a lot of times referred to as city dudes, as Nick mentioned, and wear weird clothes. >> Actually, they still kind of do, don't they? The serious ones? >> And farmland was disappearing in Wisconsin, and so the farmers are also worried about their young children who are now moving into the cities and becoming part of this culture. So there are some challenges with that too. But ultimately, it's kind of an interesting compromise that occurs. There was a man named Otto Dorner in Milwaukee who was the national leaders of the good roads movement in Wisconsin, and he teams up with William Dempster Hoard. Together they sort of try to mend this division between farmers and cyclists and successfully do that. William Dempster Hoard saw that paved roads, improved infrastructure would certainly help the dairy industry as well. So there's a nice teaming together to overcome some of this antagonism. >> So this good roads movement, is this still pretty much pre-automobile? >> All pre-automobile, yeah. It occasionally makes its way into national conversations. Is it cars who created the roads? It's really bikes. It's really bikes. >> That's fascinating, yes, because the bike had really a very narrow opportunity to do that. >> Yeah. But that first highway map, that's for bikes. That's not for, or road map, it's not quite highways yet, but that's for bicycles not automobiles. >> I think this is another look at, this is an interior shot, isn't it, of a place that just sell them. I don't think they're making them there. >> It's a fun look behind the scenes at Groth's Hardware, the same hardware store we just looked at, but some things haven't changed on the bike. I think this looks like most bike shops today. >> And so by 1900, still pre-automobile, if we look at this image here, for example, biking is still quite the craze because the automobile hasn't come on the scene quite yet. >> This is a great example of fractures of the bicycle boom in Wisconsin. In 1900, Milwaukee actually held the national meet for the League of American Wheelmen. So it was supposed to be a big convention, a big celebration of bicycle racing. The track that they had set up for this race was completely dangerous, and the professional racers refused to ride on it. So already the meat was starting to fall apart at that point. >> It was dangerous intentionally to make it challenging? >> No it was just an old track that they were trying to ride on. It was just bad construction. It was this wooden plank thing, and it was designed for people 10 years earlier who were going at a much slower speed. So the racers refused to participate in Milwaukee. Not many people came to the meet, so it's really representative of this bicycle boom falling apart. But this image is really wonderful. It shows some of the costumes that people are riding. A very popular thing today. >> Mixed genders of course. >> Mixed genders. People go on tweed rides today in Milwaukee and Madison, and this is kind of part of that. >> You mean retro things. >> Yeah. They're kind of replicating this picture in some ways. They all have these chains on too. They are actually to signify how many miles you've ridden in one year. Those are century pins, little pins that would link together. So the women and men in that picture must have several thousand miles that they're showing off on their belts that they're wearing over their shoulders. >> Pretty impressive by late 19th century technology to be able to do that. And this is one of the clubs, another club I gather. >> This is one of my favorite pictures that we found for the book. This is the Milwaukee Push which was the official team of the Milwaukee Wheelmen chapter. And this was taken somewhere around 1892, and it shows a man named Walter Sanger, Terry Andrae, Parker Sercombe, kind of the main individuals who were the leading, at this time, amateur racers in Milwaukee. And this was the elite racing squad in the state during that time period. >> And so they're doing national meets too? >> A little bit. This team early on wasn't really leaving Wisconsin or Illinois often. There was already a great sports rival between Chicago and Milwaukee, between the Chicago Cycling Club and the Milwaukee Push, sometimes breaking out in fist fights on the track. >> Oh, on the track. >> Yeah. >> Well, that raises an interesting question, doesn't it, because today we think of a bicycle race, even like Tour de France, although there obviously must be some interesting interplay involved among the cyclists, we think of it as being not a contact sport. >> Yeah. >> But I gather these earlier bicycle races were a little bit more like Roman chariot races. >> A little more crude. Yeah, I think that's right. This is the champion racer from Milwaukee, Walter Sanger, pictured at one of his famous races in Massachusetts in 1895 where he set a world record actually. Sanger is the subject of our last chapter when spotting the sort of commercial benefits of racing in the interest of professionalizing the sport, you see the rise of sponsored professional riders, and Walter Sanger is one of the great national and even international champions at the time that arises from Wisconsin. >> And what makes a great bike champion at this time? >> Speed. >> Well, sure. >> Speed. He was kind of an interesting character because most bicyclists during this period are kind of tall, lanky guys, and when Sanger appears on the race scene, he's discovered actually by the Andrae family, and when he's first described in the newspapers, he's described as having a Herculean build. And he's kind of, where all the other cyclists are kind of built like wide receivers in football, Sanger is built like a fullback. So he just had this raw speed. He would hold back in all of his races until the very last stretch. >> Common technique, I think, even in the Kentucky Derby. >> Yeah. >> And oddly enough, he has so much great folklore, and some of it's reality, that surrounds him. He became such a great cyclist because, supposedly, on his dad's farm where they raised professional racing horses, Sanger would break in the horses by biking alongside them. >> No kidding? >> And in his waning days of his career, he kind of became this sideshow at the Wisconsin State Fair where he would actually race horses. >> For a certain distance, a fairly short distance. >> That's a tradition that goes all the way back to the velocipede mania of the 1860s, horses versus bicyclists. >> It's natural, isn't it? >> Yeah. It's such a natural fit. >> It seems inevitable. So what kind of career trajectory did Walter Sanger have? >> He was absolutely spectacular. He would compete occasionally overseas in Europe. He won at London's legendary Herne Hill. He set many world records. He really was an international superstar during that period. We can find his name mentioned in newspapers in Kingston, Jamaica, Australia, really throughout the world. He was a known commodity in cycling. He's usually in the top four to five racers during that time period. But completely unknown. He's been lost. >> His career really nicely maps the trajectory of the book because he's born in March 1873, his career is basically, as a professional racer, is basically over by 1900, and 1870 to 1900, in his early part of the career, he's riding recreational, training animals, doing the thing in Waukesha. By the 1890s, he's a champion racer. So he really nicely embeds this sort of arc for our book as well. >> And how does he fall by the wayside? With the sport itself at this point? >> He races, so yeah, he goes into motorcycle racing, which is actually... >> That's so different though. >> Well, not really. It's a bicycle with an engine basically attached to it. >> Well, yeah, correct me if I'm wrong, a motorcycle's stamina isn't nearly so important as racing on a bike. >> That's true. So Harley Davidson, actually, is initially a bicycling company that has roots in the boom just like the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, and so many others. As soon as the automobile becomes ascendant in the early 20th century, the bike boom kind of falls apart in the United States. >> Sanger also plays kind of a role with African Americans really challenging access to the sport. In 1896, after a really important meet in Appleton, Walter Sanger went down to Indianapolis, and he was very open in the newspapers that he was going to set a track record in Indianapolis. And there was a young teenage boy named Marshall Walter "Major" Taylor. Major was his nickname. A young African American cyclist. And, at that time, white racers would compete in the main meet, and then maybe a day or two days later, black racers could compete against the best time from that race. So Major Taylor was well known in Indianapolis already as being a very fast cyclist, and so he decided to challenge Walter Sanger and actually destroyed his course record that he had set. And from there Major Taylor really launches himself and challenges that idea that African Americans should not be competing directly against whites. It's kind of Jackie Robinson but many decades earlier. >> Sure, sure. Yeah. I gather, then, that there was standardization of the bicycles in these races so that you can compare apples and apples? >> A little bit. They're always trying to outdo each other, switch to wood or bamboo bikes. There's always actually a lot of controversy. We think of Ryan Braun or Lance Armstrong as sort of challenging their sports and cheating, but in chapter eight of our book, every few pages there's a controversy. >> Over cheating of some kind? Well, it wasn't drugs at that point, I assume. >> There's some of that going on. >> Is there really? >> We don't really cover that too much in the book, but there's quite a few histories of racings that talk about that. But Walter Sanger especially because he is supposed to be an amateur cyclist early on, and that transition happens in the early 1890s where he's starting to get paid even though he's an amateur. So he gets banned from professional racing for a while. >> From amateur or professional? >> From amateur racing, yeah. As he's making that transition, he's not allowed to compete for a while. >> So they're making that distinction even that early? Between amateur and professional? >> There's a tremendous economic benefit to professionalizing the sport for bicycle producers and for the racers themselves. So there's a lot of pressure to do that. >> So is he doing endorsements where I ride this kind of bicycle. >> He's riding a Sanger Telegram bicycle that, yeah, he's synonymous with that brand. Just like a NASCAR racer, he's got that long list of sponsors after the race. Bicycle racers are doing the same thing. >> Sanger's got his main model of bicycle that he's racing, tires, probably even his jersey even. Yeah he's just like NASCAR. >> You mentioned that he went into becoming a motorcycle racer. What is the next thing then? Between bicycle and motorcycle? Did motorcycles really catch on that much in those early years? >> Yeah. We start to see the transition to motorized transportation in Wisconsin already around 1898. This is a picture of a man riding a steam-powered locomobile in Milwaukee. And as the boom starts to kind of fall apart, there's this new desire to make money on the next transportation. And so a lot of those bicycle manufacturers are really easily equipped to just do a couple tweaks to their factories, and they can produce these early automobiles because this locomobile, it has pneumatic tires that look very much like bicycle tires. It's got a central chain that's driving the machine forward. In many ways it's kind of a blend of that early velocipede where it's part carriage makers and their technology, part later models of bicycles. There's a nice blend there. >> How did bicycling ever come back then? >> It's a complicated story. And we don't talk too much about the 20th century, but I think with the post-World War II boom in population and sort of economic recovery with the war and the prosperity of the 1950s, urbanization, you see a huge expansion of bicycling demographics among the white middle class once again. Alongside the social justice movements of the '60s and '70s, especially environmentalism and the oil crisis, particularly the 1970s, along with new technologies, derailleurs, and 10-speed bikes, we're in the midst of something comparable to what was experienced in the 1890s now. >> Way back in the day in the '60s they used to call them English bikes, those bikes with the narrow tires and maybe, what, three speeds. And do you think that really contributed a lot to the runaway success of biking in the '60s and '70s? >> Yeah. I think young people remember fondly their days on the bicycle back in the good ol' days, and it's combined now with, I think, a resurgent interest in health and in environment. There's a confluence of things that are coming together just like it did in the 1890s to create another sort of rise in bicycling popularity. The popularity of the sport is exploding in parallel numbers, since 2000 especially. >> Good infrastructure is also playing a really big role. You see that in Madison. We're starting to see it in Appleton where we're getting bike lanes and bike corrals, and that's really giving people a lot more confidence to ride on the streets. They have their place, cars have their place, and it's really contributing, we see it in Appleton just a tremendous boom in the number of people who are riding every day to work, to the grocery store, and people who are doing leisure and sport riding too. >> There's a little bit of irony in it too, isn't there, in that just as the automobile replaced the bicycle to a great extent, the bicycle is now going into all this territory that used to be the province of trains. >> Yeah. >> As these railroad tracks are being pulled up, they make these fantastic biking corridors. They go on for hundreds of miles. >> Yeah. Yeah. And we have not exactly that, but some things kind of similar even in the 1890s. There's a lot of great parallels that people are noticing as they're reading through the book. But even in the 1890s we had a bicycle side path movement, which there were dedicated bike trails that would, or essentially bike trails, that will link up different cities. There was one that was really well developed between Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls that had castle keep huge towers that you could ride through as you're going on the trail. >> Oh, really? So kind of novelized. >> Yeah. Yeah. Great Northwoods novelty, yeah. So there's a lot of great parallels like that that we see sort of replicated from that first boom and our current boom. >> When you were researching your book, how big a part did luck play in finding some of these images? >> A lot of it. A lot of it was, it was a good argument to be made for getting out to your local library and to your local historical society because just asking the friendly folks at the front desk for whatever you're working on was one of the most fortuitous things we ever did for this book because really getting out and talking to people about what was in their collections was a real turning point for us because they would bring out things that they haven't migrated online, they haven't migrated into searchable databases, they haven't migrated in, and physically handling the photographs with the captions written on the back to give you an idea of who's actually in the picture and when the date was for the image wouldn't have happened if we weren't able to do that. And it's a testament to Wisconsin's strong library and historical society infrastructure as well. >> We were very systematic too. We contacted so small historical societies just to see what they had, like the Richland County history room, and they had the great picture of the Tree Toad Cycling Club. So we made sure to cover as many libraries in large cities or small towns as we could. >> Anything that you were looking for that you just couldn't find? >> That's a good question. >> Yeah. Well, I think there's one story in particular. We have two pictures in the book of young Ho-Chunk men posing with bicycles in Black River Falls, and I think if we were to, and we probably should have in our book, really kind of followed that story a little bit more because the Ho-Chunk at that time are going through relocation and moving kind of back and forth between Wisconsin and the reservations farther west. And here there's great portraits of men with their bicycles, and I think that there's... >> That's a really rich story that we could have covered more of. >> Yeah. There's something there waiting for someone to dig into. >> What are the questions that people ask you most when you take this book on the road? >> How do you get on a high wheel?

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>> That's routine. >> How do you ride a high wheel, is the number one question we've encountered. Do you want me to answer it?

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>> Yeah. >> You kind of run alongside it. There's a step at the base of that back wheel. You put your left foot on, and then you kind of leap onto the top and, yeah, that's how you do it. >> How did you write the book in your spare time? >> Right, that's another one. We never lived in the same city during the entire production of this book. >> Rarely the state. >> Or even the same state. So we learned how to digitize a lot of our research and share things online. >> And are you both avid bicyclists? >> Yeah. I ride every day. Every day. Try to all the way through the year. >> Yeah, I started commuting when we were in grad school back in Milwaukee in 2006 or so, and I've been commuting every day since. Currently based in DC, and that's also been a really great place to ride a bike. >> Is it? >> Yeah. I live on Capitol Hill, which I understand is probably the best place in the city down to the mall. But I've lived in New York, Milwaukee, Madison of course. I think Madison is one of the greatest cities I've encountered for bicycling. >> Well, again, a lot of that has to do with rail corridors, doesn't it? Opening those up for biking. >> Yeah. >> There's just a guaranteed maximum, what, 7% grade on those. >> Right, right. >> How can you go wrong? >> My own roots are on the Sugar River trail in southern Wisconsin, Brodhead and then up to New Glarus. Elroy-Sparta was another big childhood hit for me. >> The Elroy-Sparta trail was phenomenal because of those huge tunnels. >> Yeah, they're spectacular. >> Absolutely. If you have time, head out and see the tunnels. They're one of the great treasures of the state cycling infrastructure for sure. >> Yeah. >> Well, thanks for sharing your research, your insights, and your stories about Wisconsin bicycling. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Pleasure to have you with me. My guests have been Nick Hoffman and Jesse Gant. They're the co-authors of Wheel

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How Wisconsin Became a Great Bicycling State. I'm Norman Gilliland. I hope you'll join me next time around for University Place Presents.