ABSTRACT
In 1983, Harry Clarke, an engineer and former professional cyclist, attended an antiques auction in Melbourne, Australia. There, he purchased a bicycle that would shape the rest of his life, an 1884 English-made “Cogent” high-wheeler, also known as a penny-farthing. He named it “Black Bess.” Once Clarke had learned to ride his new bike – a process that involved numerous spills – he competed in the National Penny-Farthing Championships in Evandale, Tasmania, winning the relay event in his first race. For the next two decades, Clarke attended the annual Evandale vintage bicycle festival, winning the veterans’ category over several years. Not content to master the high-wheeler over a short distance, Clarke set out to reenact
one the great overland journeys undertaken by penny-farthing. In 1988, as President of the Vintage Cycle Club of Victoria, he joined with 23 other cycling enthusiasts to mark the centenary of the round the world journey made by Melbourne penny-farthing riders George Burston and Harry Stokes. Celebrations included a partial re-enactment of their adventures, with the group spending two weeks riding from Melbourne to Sydney on their penny-farthings (a distance of some 1,000 kilometers/621 miles), following the original route where it still existed. Invented in England, high-wheelers spread across the world in the 1870s. They
represented a significant technological advance in bicycle design, with rubber tires and a large front wheel making them more comfortable and faster than the primitive, if popular, iron and wooden wheeled “boneshaker” velocipedes. High-wheelers, however, like the velocipede, lacked the chain and cogs now widely used in bicycles to amplify the rider’s effort. A single turn of the pedals produced only one revolution of the front driving wheel, so the only way to go faster was to make the driving wheel larger. However, this also made the bicycle heavier, and as bicycle makers responded to a demand for speed by increasing the size of the front wheel, they also decreased the size of the rear wheel to save weight. The resulting stark difference in wheel size reminded people of the British penny and the much smaller farthing (quarter-penny), giving rise to the name “penny-farthing.” Penny-farthings were difficult and dangerous to ride, but they grew quickly in popular-
ity, especially among athletic young men, introducing people to the speed, excitement and potential of the bicycle. For the first time in history, a person moving under their own power could sustain speeds of between 15 and 25 kilometers an hour, about the same speed as a trotting horse. And while travelling while seated at nearly 2 meters off the ground is astonishing to the modern perspective, it would have been less confronting to a generation accustomed to riding horses. Movement is an essential component of being human, but how we move and the objects
we use to achieve locomotion are not somehow “natural.” Rather, the ways in which humans, in concert with their objects, interact with and move in their surrounds emerge through a complex interplay of cultural, historical, technological and environmental factors. Each relationship between human and machine is distinctive, enabling and requiring certain things of people’s bodies and opening them up to particular kinds of interactions with their environment. As Luis Vivanco has argued, riding a bike is a “relationship, even a temporal fusion or assemblage, between human and machine that is distinctive from other vehicles.”1
