Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle

by Jody Rosen Narrated by Sean Patrick Hopkins, Amanda Carlin, Fred Sanders

Overview

A panoramic revisionist portrait of the nineteenth-century invention that is transforming the twenty-first-century world

“Excellent . . . calls to mind Bill Bryson, John McPhee, Rebecca Solnit.”-The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker

The bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly at odds with our age of smartphones and ride-sharing apps and driverless cars. Yet we live on a bicycle planet. Across the world, more people travel by bicycle than any other form of transportation. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bike-and nearly everyone does.

In Two Wheels Good, journalist and critic Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an ever-present force in humanity's life and dream life-and a flash point in culture wars-for more than two hundred years. Combining history, reportage, travelogue, and memoir, Rosen's book sweeps across centuries and around the globe, unfolding the bicycle's saga from its invention in 1817 to its present-day renaissance as a “green machine,” an emblem of sustainability in a world afflicted by pandemic and climate change. Readers meet unforgettable characters: feminist rebels who steered bikes to the barricades in the 1890s, a prospector who pedaled across the frozen Yukon to join the Klondike gold rush, a Bhutanese king who races mountain bikes in the Himalayas, a cycle-rickshaw driver who navigates the seething streets of the world's fastest-growing megacity, astronauts who ride a floating bicycle in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station.

Two Wheels Good examines the bicycle's past and peers into its future, challenging myths and clichés while uncovering cycling's connection to colonial conquest and the gentrification of cities. But the book is also a love letter: a reflection on the sensual and spiritual pleasures of bike riding and an ode to an engineering marvel-a wondrous vehicle whose passenger is also its engine.

Editorial Reviews

AUGUST 2022 - AudioFile

More people around the world travel by bicycle than any other form of transportation, says author Jody Rosen. This audiobook is filled with interesting anecdotes about bikes and the people who ride, build, repair, worship, and, sometimes, despise them. (One of Hitler’s first acts when he was in power was to smash Germany’s bicycle union.) Sean Patrick Hopkins narrates smoothly and enthusiastically as he takes listeners to the many places around the world that have interesting bicycle-related stories. Amanda Carlin and Fred Sanders share the story of two bikers who met on a cross-country ride while celebrating the nation’s bicentennial and ended up marrying. If you’ve ever ridden a bike, you are certain to find this a great listen. J.P.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 04/04/2022

This high-flying debut history by New York Times Magazine contributor Rosen captures the allure of riding a bike. Through vivid anecdotes, such as how the design of the bicycle led the Wright brothers to invent the airplane, Rosen makes clear how impactful the invention has been for humankind. Baron Karl von Drais, a minor German nobleman, produced the first bike in 1817, and the design was repeatedly improved upon in subsequent decades. For example, in 1888, Belfast-based veterinarian John Boyd Dunlop replaced the solid rubber tires on his son’s tricycle with “inflated rubber tubes, sheathed in canvas and an additional outer layer of sheet rubber,” leading to the widespread adoption of pneumatic tires. Rosen is equally fascinating in describing the bicycle’s changing status in countries like China, which produces more bikes per year than the world builds cars; the “Great Covid-19 Bicycle Boom” that saw people “converging on bike lanes and patronizing cycle-share systems in unprecedented numbers”; and the archetype of “bright-eyed children, bicycling through idyllic suburbs” seen in movies and TV shows like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Stranger Things. Witty prose, exhaustive research, and Rosen’s contagious enthusiasm ensure that this standout history will appeal to cyclists and non-cyclists alike. (May)

From the Publisher

Excellent. . . . Two Wheels Good takes the form of bricolage, blending meticulous historical research, local reporting from bicycle-dependent locales like Bhutan and Bangladesh and personal memories . . . . The book excels across all of them and, in its curious, mingled character, calls to mind Bill Bryson, John McPhee, Rebecca Solnit—obsessives, for whom the material world and their own infinitesimal presence within it constitute the most natural subject of artistic inquiry.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Comprehensive . . . [Two Wheels Good] often feels like a leisurely ride, full of spontaneous detours into unexpected delight. But what makes the book essential is its rigorous reporting.”—The Atlantic

“[A] complex cultural history. . . . The strength of Two Wheels Good is the journalist’s eye [Rosen] brings to a basic technology that has had radically disparate identities at different times and in different parts of the world.”—Curbed

“A lively biography of a tool central to the greening of urban spaces. It’s also a fascinating, sweeping everyday explainer, moving from the bike’s 19th-century origins to its importance globally.”—Chicago Tribune

“Encyclopedic. . . . A deeply researched and vastly entertaining history of the bicycle.”—Dallas Morning News

“The real feat of this book is that it takes us on a ride—across the centuries and around the globe, through startling history and vivid first-person reporting—offering not just a wry, rich, deeply researched meditation on the bicycle and our relationship to it, but also the headlong rush of cruising on two wheels into the unknown.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain

“When I fell in love with riding a bike in New York City, what I found myself craving was a history. But I’m greedy: I wished that whoever wrote this history would find a way to make it personal and ruminative, to bring cities and eras to life. Jody Rosen has written that very book. I got more than I knew I wanted.”—Wesley Morris, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, The New York Times

“The best thing I’ve ever read on a single subject. With curiosity, conscientiousness, and an exquisitely light touch, Rosen makes a convincing case that the story of the bike is the story of modern life.”—Lauren Collins, author of When in French

“This is social history as it ought to be written: funny, precise, surprising, anti-dogmatic, and unafraid of following a story, brakes off, to wherever the tale might want to glide.”—Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon

“Wide-ranging and inquisitive, Two Wheels Good is like an entire library of books on the bicycle.”—Lucy Sante, author of Low Life

“Eye-opening . . . a lively social history of the bicycle . . . Fans of bicycling and how-the-world-works reportage alike will find this a great pleasure.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Witty prose, exhaustive research, and Rosen’s contagious enthusiasm ensure that this standout history will appeal to cyclists and non-cyclists alike.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

AUGUST 2022 - AudioFile

More people around the world travel by bicycle than any other form of transportation, says author Jody Rosen. This audiobook is filled with interesting anecdotes about bikes and the people who ride, build, repair, worship, and, sometimes, despise them. (One of Hitler’s first acts when he was in power was to smash Germany’s bicycle union.) Sean Patrick Hopkins narrates smoothly and enthusiastically as he takes listeners to the many places around the world that have interesting bicycle-related stories. Amanda Carlin and Fred Sanders share the story of two bikers who met on a cross-country ride while celebrating the nation’s bicentennial and ended up marrying. If you’ve ever ridden a bike, you are certain to find this a great listen. J.P.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2022-04-09
A lively social history of the bicycle.

As New York Times Magazine feature writer Rosen observes in this good-natured narrative, the bicycle has always been viewed through a complex moral lens. In China, where “the number of bicycles manufactured this year…will exceed the total worldwide production of automobiles,” it was viewed as a great equalizer—but then, when car culture took hold, as something of an anachronism confined to the poor, and now, in a time of inequality, a status symbol for the wealthy and their expensive machines. Just so, as the author notes, there’s always been a tension between “bicycle love and bicycle loathing” in the Western world, where the bicycle and its forerunners were heralded as cleaner than animal-drawn vehicles and criticized for such things as showing off a little too much leg. Rosen chronicles his travels around the world to look at bicycle culture. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, which has some of the most tangled traffic jams anywhere, countless bicycle rickshaws underscore the fact that the machine is usually meant for labor and not recreation and that “the most widespread form of freight cycling is the one devoted to human cargo.” Back home in New York, Rosen risks life and limb to travel a city in which “bicycle infrastructure is inadequate, and cy­clists are forced into roaring traffic on streets where motorists oper­ate with something close to impunity.” At the same time, however, bicycling is “the best way to comprehend and imbibe New York.” The author delivers the goods lightly and always interestingly. His opening, for instance, concerns the origins of the rubber tire thanks to the tinkering of a Belfast veterinarian tired of bumpy cobblestones, and the discussion of the worldwide bicycle-theft epidemic is eye-opening: Most locks are easily thwarted and law enforcement indifferent, all good reason to follow Rosen’s lead and buy only inexpensive bikes.

Fans of bicycling and how-the-world-works reportage alike will find this a great pleasure.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176262353
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/24/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

The Bicycle Window

St. Giles’ is a small parish church that sits on a patch of pleasantly shaded land in the village of Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, twenty-five miles west of London. There has been a house of worship on this site since Saxon times. The oldest part of the church building, its rough-hewn stone tower, dates from the period of the Norman Conquest.

The place is also holy ground for literati of a certain age and inclination. It was at St. Giles’, in 1742, that Thomas Gray conceived “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” a meditation on death and bereavement that was once among the most celebrated poems in the English language, a fixture of syllabi until tastes swung to less orotund verse. Today, Gray himself is in the churchyard, in a grave marked by an altar-shaped tombstone that sits just outside a chapel window on the building’s east façade. St. Giles’ is a lovely place, tranquil and picturesque, an ideal spot for a rest—eternal or merely momentary. If you find yourself there on a mild evening, you will take in a setting little different from the one immortalized by Gray:

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.

My visit to St. Giles’ came in the spring, on a day of warm breezes and pouring sunshine. The panorama—church, churchyard greenery, surrounding countryside—was unreasonably pretty, and as I strolled the long path that snakes through St. Giles’ grounds, the birds were singing so wildly that I punched up the Voice Memos app on my iPhone and made a recording. Looming about one hundred yards to the south of the church was the Manor House, a sixteenth-century estate once owned by Queen Elizabeth I, and later by Sir Thomas Penn, the son of William Penn, Pennsylvania’s founder. For an American who had spent little time in the leafy home counties but many hours reading nineteenth-century novels and watching costume-drama adaptations of those novels, the scenery was exotic but familiar. I half-expected to see Dame Maggie Smith bustling out of the church in period dress.

The person who materialized instead was St. Giles’ minister, Reverend Harry Latham. With a couple of adjustments to his wardrobe, Latham himself might have stepped from the pages of Jane Austen. He was the picture of the handsome country vicar. He was perhaps forty-five years old, but he had the unlined face and full hairline of a younger man. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a pin-striped shirt with a clerical collar. There was a faint musical lilt when he spoke, and his manner was soothing. Latham has a second pulpit about a mile up the road at St. Giles’ sister church, St. Andrew’s, where the congregation is younger and the services more informal, with sermons augmented by guitars and drums and sing-alongs. It is easy to picture Latham in either role: intoning the Beatitudes beneath St. Giles’ medieval vaults or strumming an acoustic on the altar at St. Andrew’s, his feet tapping along in open-toed sandals.

I had phoned a few months earlier to arrange a meeting, and followed up with emails, including one on the evening before my arrival. But as I faced Latham that afternoon in the churchyard, it was apparent that he had no idea who I was or what I could be doing there. I watched him take me in, cap to sneakers, registering the facts of the case: I was a stranger, my accent was American, I was clearly seeking neither pastoral care nor communion with the ghost of Thomas Gray. He came to the obvious conclusion. “You’re looking for the bicycle window,” Latham said.

______

The bicycle is a definitively nineteenth-century thing. It was the product of hard science and machine age engineering, of mass production and global trade. It was a creation of Victorian commercial culture, blown up big and spread wide by billboards and newspaper advertisements and popular songs. The bicycle stood for modernity and for modernism. “Lady Progress” was the mascot of the first periodical devoted to cycling, Le vélocipède illustré, published in Paris beginning in 1869. Drawings that appeared above the magazine’s masthead depicted a female cyclist in a heroic pose, leaving dust in her wake as she streamed forward on two wheels, clutching a banner, with a headlamp lighting the way. The image winked at Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People while linking the bicycle to the hallmarks of changing times: women’s liberation, new technology, speed, freedom. Decades later, Picasso, Duchamp, and other artists and writers still enshrined the bicycle as an emblem of the avant-garde.

Yet a crucial truth about the bicycle, as a historical and technological phenomenon, is that it arrived illogically late. It was an anachronism at birth. The first bike came into the world a decade and a half after the invention of the steam locomotive. By the time the bicycle achieved its ideal form, the automotive revolution was stirring. The groundbreaking Rover bicycle hit the market in 1885; that same year, Gottlieb Daimler introduced his proto-motorcycle, the Einspur, and Karl Benz built his first Motorwagen. The knowledge and materials required to create a bike have been around since the Middle Ages, but it took centuries for the forces of fate and fancy to align and give the world the thing itself.

Perhaps this is why the bicycle library is cluttered with apocrypha: fantasies and hoaxes and bogus origin stories, projected centuries and even millennia back into history. Victorians dreamed of bicycles in antiquity, envisioning Roman velocipede cavalries and gilded bicycles waiting to be excavated from pharaohs’ tombs in the Valley of the Kings. The idea was echoed in the advertising art that pictured bicycles alongside figures from classical mythology. The surrealist jokester Alfred Jarry may have had such visions in mind when he wrote his satirical retelling of the crucifixion story, “The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race” (1903), in which Jesus punctures a tire with his crown of thorns and lugs his bicycle up the hill to Golgotha:

The bicycle frame in use today is of relatively recent invention. It appeared around 1890. Previous to that time the body of the machine was constructed of two tubes soldered together at right angles. It was generally called the right-angle or cross bicycle. Jesus, after his puncture, climbed the slope on foot, carrying on his shoulder the bike frame, or, if you will, the cross.

No one could mistake Jarry’s jape for fact. But myths have slipped into history books and popped up in respectable journalism. “Bicycles appear in the bas reliefs of ancient Babylon, Egypt, and Pompeii,” asserted The New York Times in 1974, breezily revising the birth date of the bicycle by thousands of years. Among scholars, the search for a lost ur-bicycle continues. It is as if the reality of the machine’s nineteenth-century origins remains at some basic level unbelievable, even to those most conversant with the history. Researchers grasp at scraps, identifying supposed bicycle progenitors: a fifteenth-century wood carving showing what may be a toy tricycle, a treadle-operated seventeenth-century “invalid carriage,” a variety of other human-powered machines propelled by the turning of cranks and the pumping of handles.

This antecedent spotting can be enjoyable, even when it is far-fetched. At least two works by Hieronymus Bosch have been noted for their depictions of putative proto-bikes, and it is fun to imagine that the bicycle began as a figment of that great freakish mind. One Bosch drawing, Witches (c. 1500), features a kind of primitive unicycle: a woman is pictured astride a large wooden wheel, to which her feet are attached by pedal-like straps. This device is shown rolling through a typically grotesque Boschian landscape; it appears to be headed for a crash with a nude figure whose rear end is being probed by a long-beaked bird.

Another Renaissance master was at the center of a notorious bicycle hoax. In September 1974, newspaper readers around the world were startled by the announcement that a sketch of a bicycle had been discovered in Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, a previously unpublished compendium of the artist’s drawings and writings. The drawing was said to be the work of Leonardo’s student and servant Salai, based on a design by Leonardo himself. Scholars greeted the claim with skepticism. The sketch was suspiciously detailed and modern-looking, showing a bike with a crank, pedals, a rear-driven chain wheel, and a mudguard. A raft of evidence has since confirmed that the image is counterfeit, likely scribbled into the Codex between 1966 and 1969 by a person whose intent may have been humorous rather than fraudulent. An art historian at UCLA found that the page of the Codex where the bicycle now appears previously featured abstract geometric jottings, two circles intersected by arcs. These may have suggested the shape of a bicycle to the prank’s perpetrator, who completed the job with a few quick pen strokes.

Videos