 Okay, so I wanted to say before I introduce Luis that he was the first lecture, unfortunately, right after we shut down in March 2020 for the pandemic. We shut down, officially made that decision on Wednesday and he was going to be speaking to us Friday. So, yeah. It took me three years to get back. Yes. So we're really, really excited to have him back. This is wonderful. Okay. Luis Favonco is Professor and Chair of the Anthropology Department at UVM. He holds an A.B. from Dartmouth and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Cultural Anthropology from Princeton University. In its broadest sense, his scholarship focuses on the culture and politics of environmentalists, social movements, and activism, drawing primarily on ethnographic research conducted in Costa Rica, Mexico, Columbia, and the United States. His writings include numerous books, articles, and chapters on community-level biodiversity conservation and ecotourism, the history of nature, cinema, and wildlife film, and the socio-cultural dimensions of urban bicycle mobility and political activism. He has also co-written several widely used anthropology textbooks and is primary author of the recently published Oxford Dictionary of Cultural Anthropology. He's currently working on his 10th book, which is a comprehensive overview of the field of environmental anthropology, and he spends more time than he probably should making and sharing research-based comics on the social history of bicycles. So this should be a real joy. Please welcome Luis. Thank you, Carol. And thank you all very much for having me. I'm really excited after all this time to get a chance to talk to you because I think we're going to really enjoy this topic. And I want to start us off with an imaginative exercise. And so you can close your eyes or not. It's up to you. But I want you to imagine the following picture of Burlington. And it includes this. The city is widely known as a great bicycling destination, a reputation that extends throughout Vermont and the Northeast, especially in its urban centers, and it attracts tourists who want to ride on its distinctive pathways and streets. The city itself experiences an explosion of consumer enthusiasm for bicycles. And they are seen as a way to promote a healthy lifestyle and to create strong social ties with neighbors. And especially, although many people riding bikes or men, it turns out that women are also turning to the bicycle and celebrating it as an activity that gives them health and emancipation. Sales in bicycles or brisk and retailers are using advertising and financial sponsorship of public activities to celebrate bicycle use. And they rent bicycles to short-term visitors. Cultural institutions respond by offering special bike parking, ballet bike parking to those who arrive by bicycle. And the YMCA has stationary bicycles so that you can ride in the winter. Bicycle advocates with very strong ties to national and regional organizations celebrate the bicycle and push public officials to improve conditions for bike riding. They organize bicycle training classes, bike parades, and convivial rides to increase skills, generate enjoyment and fun, and to raise awareness about their concerns about bicycling conditions in the city. And city leaders, by the way, are very well aware of this. And they are concerning themselves with questions about the adequacy of the infrastructure for all these new bicycle riders, and they start using their regulatory power to control bicycle use. Because public concern is rising as UVM students race down Pearl Street. Bicycles travel on sidewalks downtown harassing pedestrians. And at night, bicycles without lights threaten public safety. A bicycle ordinance requires bicycles to display lights at night and prohibits them from the sidewalks in the Inner Fire District. And some bicycle-related conflicts are rooted in class differences, producing tensions between city elites and working-class individuals over what's the most appropriate way to move around the city. I ask you, does that sound familiar? It very closely resembles conditions today. But everything I just told you happened in the 1890s. So how do I know that? So about 10 years ago, I wrote a book called Reconsidering the Bicycle. And as an anthropologist, I caught wind of the greening of the bicycle. As an everyday bicycle rider myself for decades, suddenly my activity was designated as a green activity. And I thought I'm a scholar of green movements. What does this mean? And so I got to work asking questions about, well, what are these urban bicycle movements pushing for? What are the conditions for urban sustainability? What role does transportation changes play in that? And so I started doing ethnographic research here in Burlington and in Bogota, Colombia, and wrote about that in this book. And when I wrote the chapter on Burlington, I knew that in the background, historically speaking, there was a thing called the Bicycle Crades in the 1880s to 1890s. And that Burlington was close to the epicenters of all this, which were just south of here and just north of here. And so I went to our Special Collections Library at UVM, and I asked very naively, could you please give me an article on that so that I could just include that brief history into my book? And they said, Luis, there is no article on that. There are a bunch of books in this library that you're going to need to go through if you want to know that. And so I decided that I would try that. And I dug through the archives. I looked at city directories. I looked at reports put out by the Department of Public Works over the decades. I looked at photos. I read a lot of letters and began to picture this kind of story I just told you. And I just kept going. A few paragraphs literally end up in the book. But I kept going. And I realized there's this really fascinating mountain of material. And so now it's Vermont-wide. And I've been doing this now for about eight years or so and spun off into making research-based comics. You have a guide to this talk in your hands that has some of that. I've just really enjoyed telling this story in all different kinds of ways. I will say at the outset that you don't need to be a bicycle nut like me to enjoy this talk. It's, there's, my interest, I guess I would say as an anthropologist is that the bicycle is a lens into some bigger social changes happening that are happening along with the bicycle that I think you'll find rather interesting and surprising about Vermont in particular. So let's get started. Oh, first of all, I do need to just alert you to that. I'll talk about a few different kinds of bicycles and this picture is in your guide. And so if you find yourself needing to consult it, but quickly this field guide to 19th century bicycles, the very first is not really known as a bicycle is in 1817. It's called a dandy charger and it was very popular among dandies and it was a running machine. But it was a fad and then sometime in the 1860s a broken down running machine ends up in a Paris wagon wheel shop. When a mechanic there, it's debated who, we think it was a guy named Pierre Laliment decides to put a set of cranks and a pedal on the front wheel of that running machine. And that's where we get the second bicycle known as a velocity. They were also called bone shakers because they weighed about 150 pounds and you would ride on cobblestones and it would shake you to the bones. People wanted to go very, very fast on these things and there were limits on a bone shaker given their weight and given that they're direct drive vehicles. So the way to get a direct drive vehicle faster is make that front wheel bigger. So that's why in 1871 we have the high wheeler or the ordinary, the penny farthing. That is developed and it's a massive technological change. They're using lightweight steel. They developed spoke wheels for this purpose and the very first bicycle ride around the world occurred on one of these, which is an astonishing story of endurance and grit because there weren't really roads. And then you can imagine that that high wheeler is a dangerous bicycle. The term header comes about because people would fly over onto their heads and die. And so the safety bicycle is developed in the mid 1880s as a safer alternative. And this is a bicycle that obviously is very familiar to us and the most basic form has not changed since then, at least for this kind of bicycle, right? It doesn't mean that there aren't other three wheeled bicycles and so on. And then they add pneumatic tires beginning in 1888 to make this a softer ride. That was Dr. John Dunlop, whose sickly son wanted to ride bicycles and didn't like to get shaken around. So he invented the pneumatic tire for bicycles. So we'll start with the bone shakers because there was a Velocipede craze in Vermont in the late 1860s. So they literally are developed in around 1868 and by 1869 here in Vermont, they're showing up. And we know that because in the newspapers in the St. Albans messenger in 1869, there's a Velocipede school that opens up in St. Albans at the Daryl concert hall. And here's an image of a woman on a tricycle, a three wheeled Velocipede. It could have been made here in Vermont because there was a manufacturer in Montpelier of children's Velocipedes that played a bit role in a huge patent war at a time when patents were being put, slapped onto all of these new technologies emerging around the bicycle. So Vermont plays a kind of a famous role in that big fight. But Velocipedes were a flash in the pan. They were hard to ride and it was mainly circus performers that went around on Velocipedes. We jumped through the 1870s so that that high wheel bicycle really doesn't come to the United States until the late part of the 1870s. And but by the 1890s, we do have the high wheel bicycles racing around Vermont. This is the captain of the Rutland Wheel Club, Nelly Ross. He came from a prominent family. His father was the manager of the Lincoln Ironworks down there. And these were very expensive bicycles. They probably cost about six months of a typical worker's wages. So you would have these individuals, they started calling themselves wheelmen, dressed up in uniforms, riding around the state with buglers in cavalry formation and making quite a spectacle. And this is around the time that towns are starting, some towns, including Burlington, are starting to pave their streets with McAdam. And so they have nice places to ride. And so the high wheelers start spreading around. And then by the 1890s, you have a full blown craze. And it's a craze that happens all over the U.S. northeast into the upper Midwest, into parts of the West, and all over Europe. And now you have men and women riding together. It was the case that women tended not to ride the high wheelers. It was a very difficult experience and you needed a lot of time and you needed a lot of social leisure to be able to learn how to master one of those. But with the safety bicycle coming, prices begin to drop. The bicycle industry is in full blown scale and bicycles really begin to proliferate. And everybody is going on bicycle parties and it's to the point that in Burlington, we have 10 retailers of bicycles in the decade of the 1890s. So if you take a snapshot of the 2010s, we have four bicycle dealers, maybe five with double the population. So if you can imagine, a city of 1920,000 people has 10 retailers selling bicycles and everybody was getting in on the bicycle sales game. You had George Hager, who sold hardware in harnesses trimmings and he was a dealer for Victor and New Mail Bicycles. We did have a bicycle shop, a full time, fully dedicated shop. It was on Loomis Street. It's now a student house. I've taken people there and everyone's ogling and the students are like, what are you looking at? And it was called Lane's Bicycle Livery. They rented bicycles to short term visitors. You'll see a picture later of their lot, but very prominent dealer in bicycles. The jeweler started getting in on the bicycle game. So LM March on Church Street, Diamonds Watches, Clocks Jewelry, Optical Goods and Bicycles. And then the electrician supply shop had a bicycle department on Church Street. So there was a system of agencies. So they would be agents of bicycle companies, basically sort of a franchise model. And so this craze was hitting all levels of retail. Sewing machine companies were selling bicycles, right? It was to the extent that people started really talking about it as a mania, a bicycle mania. And this is an especially wonderful cartoon from 1897. This happens to be the British version of the cartoon, but there's an American version of it. But everybody was reimagining the world through the bicycle. It was so central to people's ideas about progress and excitement and new ideas about how to spend your leisure time that everyone wanted in on it. And so this sort of satirizes that bicycle cigars, bicycle books, bicycle national bank, eat bicycle food, sprocket haul, drink bicycle soda, bicycle face cured, bicycle face. So there was a whole new category of diseases that were associated with bicycles and bicycle face was the condition your face got contorted in when you were having so much fun that you would be going too fast and your face would get stuck in that. And I'll talk more about some of these maladies in a bit. But there was a real sense that bicycles were at the heart of the most exciting things happening in the 1890s. And by 1905, certainly by 1910, a lot of that enthusiasm really begins to diminish. And some of it is that the locus of excitement shifts to the automobile, which is the first automobiles of merch in Vermont in the early 1900s. And that scene is the innovative side of everyday transportation. But the bicycle wasn't just a fad. This is one of my main points here today that I want you to come away with. It was very closely tied to, and it was even precipitating some important very consequential changes that we take for granted today. So one of those is it brought with it new ideas about the pleasures of effortless speed and the idea of automobility, right? So people had, they could go fast effortlessly, but it was on a train. And trains were on not your schedule. They were on a track. You couldn't just go anywhere on a train. And so people felt like they were being swallowed up by the train system. It was convenient to be sure. But when you get the bicycle show showing up, suddenly people are like, oh, I can take this anywhere. I can go all over the place. And I can experience that joy that we all have had of going fast without really putting much effort into it, right? It was also a cutting edge industry. And so the bicycle, it's often said, laid the technological and industrial groundwork for the rise of the automobile. And I can think of no better illustration of this than Henry Ford. Henry Ford started his career as a bicycle mechanic. And bicycle mechanics were tinkers. They were adding motors, electric motors, internal combustion motors as early as the 1880s to these things. But Henry Ford went on a junket to the Columbia Bicycle Factory in Hartford, Connecticut. Now, Columbia Bicycles, you probably know Columbia Bicycles. They've been around since the beginning. They're still kind of around. They're owned by someone completely different. But they were the most prestigious bicycle company in the United States during this whole time. And they had a factory that was electrified by Thomas Edison. And it was operating 24-7 in basically a style of manufacturing that Henry Ford would ultimately refine to be that sort of conveyor belt, multiple workers on all sides, each person specialized so that you could move very quickly. And he witnessed this as a young man. And clearly that made an impression on him. And then 20 years later, he creates the Ford Motor Company. It's more like 10 years later. And everyone, including the Columbia Bicycle Company, imagined their future building cars, not bicycles. But in so many ways, that business of the bicycle influenced our lives. And another really interesting one is advertising. So newspapers up to the 1890s were largely driven by subscription dollars. But the bicycle industry was so innovative in how it approached marketing, because it was a very expensive object. And you had to convince people that they needed it. So they hired the best artists of their time. Maxfield Parish was one of them to create these great images of bicycles. And what this led to was a whole advertising frenzy so that in the 1890s, the typical newspaper, 10% of its ads, were bicycle-related. That allowed newspapers to shift to an ad-based revenue model and move away from the subscription model. And then, of course, others followed the bicycle industry with that marketing. There was a reordering of gender relations as women took to the bicycle, demanding greater rights and freedom and less restrictive clothing. It created new ideas about recreation and athleticism and leisure, and wheel men and wheel women were pushing new geographic limits. And so in 1884 to 1885, a guy named Thomas Stevens, who actually came to Vermont to give a lecture on this after he succeeded in doing it, rode a highwheeler around the globe. Right? And it was just an astonishing adventure story for people that you could actually do something like that. But bicycles caused a lot of commotion and social conflict as well. Cyclists were using their bicycles in ways that were challenging, taking for granted, ideas about urban propriety. They're riding on sidewalks. They're scaring horses. They're splashing people with mud. They're going too fast. And in fact, traffic laws had to be invented to control bicyclists. That was fairly seamlessly transposed to the automobile. The bicycle was drawn into debates over the effects of urbanization on people's morality and on their bodies. Religious leaders were decrying leisurely Sunday rides as promoting moral decay. And Charlotte Smith of the Women's Rescue League, and now I'm quoting her, says the bicycle run for Christ by so-called Christians should be properly termed the bicycle run for Satan. For the bicycle is the devil's advanced agent, morally and physically, in thousands of instances. And as I said earlier, health authorities were weighing in with all kinds of new maladies that were being caused by the bicycle. Bicycle face was just the tip of the iceberg. There was a thing called Kyphosis Bicyclistarum, which was your back hunched over. And it was almost like you were a hunchback because you were constantly like this, right? There was Bicycle Foot, which would happen to fashionable ladies who were riding around with their French boots on bicycles and their foot would, their arch would collapse, right? Bicycle Hands. Your hands get frozen and stuck. And now we've experienced a version of that. Probably some of you have had numb hands. So some of this was around just figuring out how people are using their bodies in new ways and trying to process the, the experience, right? But the medical establishment was really professionalizing at the time and it claimed a lot of these things and said, these are diseases and we can treat them. So what I want to do for the remainder of this talk is sort of locate this history in three different sites. And one is the wheel men. The wheel men were these elite networks of men who first brought the bicycle to Vermont and created wheel men's clubs. Then I want to talk about the new woman, the way that women here in Vermont engage with the bicycle as a tool of social change and personal liberation in some cases. And then I want to talk about the roads because the roads were terrible. And it was the wheel men that transformed not just how Vermont, but broader United States approaches roads and who's responsible for roads. So let's get started with the wheel men. This is the Bicycle Club of Swanton in 1893. And the proper way to ride a bicycle until really the late 1890s was with your companions in leisurely and recreational fashion. And so this was a time of joining internal organizations. And so wheel men's clubs were established. And the initial wheel men's clubs were really elite. So in Brattleboro, the Vermont Wheel Club was established in 1885. And it was a social organization that you didn't necessarily have to have a bicycle to join. But every prominent citizen anywhere from within or near Brattleboro wanted to be part of it. They had elegant quarters where they would host visiting wheel men from Boston and other places. They had this winged wheel symbol was a very prominent image that you saw splashed on their China and their silverware on their caps. And they organized races that brought people from all over the Northeast and they were quite well known and renowned for their racing. But again, you didn't have to have a bicycle to join. They had a baseball team, as a matter of fact. And they lasted until 1924. They're one of the oldest, most long running wheel men's organizations in the United States. In Burlington, we had a wheel club early on. We had throughout the 1890s there were about four or five wheel men's clubs. But the first one was the Burlington Wheel Club. There they are in front of the Fletcher Free Library which is where City Hall is. So this is looking from City Hall Park. They would be standing on the steps of City Hall if this were the new building. But you can see they're all high wheels. And what is so interesting about this juxtaposition is that the Vermont Wheel Club, whenever they had their winter ball every aspiring politician made it down to Brattleboro to be at the wheel club's winter ball. It was such an influential organization. In Burlington, these were all these people pictured here were very influential leaders of Burlington and wealthy. But in 1887, they got rid of their bicycles. And they got yachts. Because that's when the Lake Champlain Yacht Club was founded. So many of these individuals that we see pictured here ended up bailing on the bicycle. This was an object of distinction. It was expensive. It was hard to master. And so they found yachts to be more distinctive. Helped their social capital. But here's one of the guys who ended up buying a yacht. But he was a prominent wheel man. He was the president of the Burlington Wheel Club. His name was Joseph Ald. And he was one of the publishers of the Burlington Free Press for a time. And he was kind of a typical wheel man of that early period. He was very well educated. He was a prominent citizen. He wrote or he created a book called picturesque Burlington, which was really one of the first tour guides to Burlington. You can still see it. It's still around there are copies and it's very much. If you look at it, it's very much the sensibilities of a wheel man who was out for landscape appreciation. He's trying to get people to get out of Burlington and explore the lakeside to go see the mountains. And this is what wheel men wanted to do. It barely mentions bicycles once in the whole book. He was also an inventor and he got a couple of patents. One was for some window shades. But this one's really interesting. He got a patent on a tricycle in 1883, which was basically a gearing system that he invented. And the tinkering that was happening around these objects was really a key part of how they developed. It was people trying new things. There were other wheel clubs all around the state. I'm going to give you an abbreviated version. But the Rutland's Bicycle Club was after the Vermont Wheel Club. It was one of the earlier ones. And they went so far as to organize and build a skating rink. And so wheel men and skating rinks were associated with each other in the 1880s and 1890s because the winters are long and you want weren't somewhere to ride. And so you can do it inside. You could learn to do tricks. And so wheel men love to practice tricks and skating rinks. And then they could rent it out for skating parties or town celebrations. So the Rutland Wheel Club builds a skating rink. It opens July 4, 1884. It cost them $15,000 to make. That's about $430,000 in today's money. So not in substantial. It had 1,200 seats. It had 30 gas chandeliers. So they opened it in July 4, 1884. The next year, 1885, they sold it at auction for $2,325. It was a disaster. It was a total disaster. But it wasn't that this rink couldn't have worked out. What happened was they took out a mortgage. And the town clerk in Rutland mis-wrote the information on the collateral for the mortgage. And at some point, one of the contractors called a lien on this property and said, you know, this is all messed up. You need to work this out with the city. And the wheel men were too busy riding their bicycles. And next thing you know, the bank says, we're taking this all back. You're going to have to put this up for auction. So this magnificent building disappeared pretty quickly. And this was one of their last hurrahs by 1886. These guys all went their own way. They're like, we're done. We don't want any more of this. In the upper valley, that was another prominent center of Wheeling. There was a famous parade on Elm Street and Woodstock in 1895. I took a picture of a lot of men and women. And this was an event that was a bicycle parade. And I'm going to read this for you in full, because I want you to know how exciting this was to people to have a bicycle parade. Cycle clubs were all in the area. And Woodstock, Hartford, White River Junction, a parade in any of these towns could draw as many as 500 wheelmen. Right? So here's an article from 1895. It's about this particular event, bicycle parade in Woodstock. A bicycle meet and parade under the auspices of the Wabino Cycle Club was held at Woodstock last Friday afternoon and evening and was a brilliant and successful affair. Stores and residences were elaborately decorated. And in the evening, the entire village was beautifully illuminated by over 3,000 Japanese lanterns. You can actually see the lanterns in the background. The Hartford and Lebanon cycle clubs and cyclists from adjoining towns were present. The Woodstock Railway Company running a special tram. About 200 wheels were in line. And the parade was witnessed by several thousand people. There was a fine display of fireworks in the evening, Woodstock Cornet Band, Discourse Music, and refreshments were served to all the cyclists and visiting friends in the town hall. So thousands of people come out to see this bicycle parade. Right? Interesting side story here, this Woodstock Railway, one of the things that Wheelman did very early on is they wanted to go visit each other so they could do these parades. And so they put a lot of pressure on the railway companies to give them free passage for their bicycles. And so, you know, so those of you who are cyclists know that we worked long and hard to get Amtrak to get our bicycles on their trains. And that took, I don't know how many years. They did the exact same thing, right? They were putting a lot of pressure and they eventually succeeded. The thing that Wheelman did was they promoted orderly riding. Like, they believed that riding was an important thing to do, as I said, with others, and there were rules. There were norms around it. So the newspapers were full of stories and advice about this during that time. This is from 1895 from the Free Press. Always keep to the right. Always keep your wheel clean. In passing another rider or vehicle, keep to the right. Keep off crowded streets unless you have urgent business there. Don't forget that pedestrians have rights. It often saves bitter thoughts. And there were a lot of discussions about etiquette because, again, these were very disruptive technologies. And so here's a little tidbit from the United Opinion from Bradford in 1895. It's called Cycling Etiquette. I'll read it for you. Every sport has its rules of etiquette and a system of exchanges of courtesies must be adapted to cycling conditions. A question that is causing a great deal of agitation relates to the mode of greeting among wheelmen and wheelwomen. Shall a man take his hand from the handlebar at the risk of taking a header in order to tip his cap? Or shall he merely nod his head and say, howdy? Shall a lady make a sweeping courtesy or merely nod? Instances are cited wherein men have tried to do that which they have been taught from childhood and the result has been a hectic flush all over one side of their faces where the skin was caressed by the loving but somewhat calloused hand of Mother Earth. Ladies who have bowed too profoundly have been picked up tenderly by helping hands after it was all over. It is with reason, therefore, that cyclists are giving this matter serious consideration. So they were trying to figure out how do you interact with each other with these new fangled devices in the middle of everything? The wheelmen were also really fascinated and obsessed with speed and racing. And by the way, speed was a big cultural theme in the 1890s. People really were obsessed with speed and bicycle races were the sort of NASCAR of the era and the utmost in entertainment where bicycle racing was the sixth day race which was literally a sixth day bicycle race. Most people would avoid it until day five because that's when the excitement happens because you have these riders who are completely exhausted. They would have short breaks but that's when people start crashing and that's when crazy things happen. As far as I can tell, we never had six-day races here in Vermont but racing happened quite a bit and this is a really interesting article from 1899 of a bicycle race that started at the top of Church Street. It was sponsored by the bicycle dealers so all the bike dealers got together, pitched in to buy the prizes for these racers and there were about a thousand plus spectators and the race went from the top of Church Street along Elmwood Avenue basically out to Riverside Avenue down to the Winooski Bridge and back. The winner, it was a little over four miles, the winner's time was 12 minutes. So we all know Riverside Drive, right? It's down a hill, so you can go on pretty fast but then you got to get back up. So this was on a single speed bike that probably didn't have brakes. So think about how powerful that winner was, right? And how athletic this was to be able to do something like this. We kind of pat ourselves on the back for our really lightweight bicycles and how fast we can go on them. They had heavy bicycles with no brakes and single speed and they could go in many cases just as fast. They were also obsessed with feats of endurance. They're testing their bodies in new ways. So here's a great little tidbit from the Herald and News in West Randolph from 1894 about two crack Woodstock wheelmen who Sunday morning at 2.30 a.m. they depart on a long ride. Their goal is to reach Littleton, New Hampshire. They get to Littleton around 10.30 a.m. and then they're like, let's keep going. And so they end up riding up to Lancaster and Haverhill and then St. Johnsbury and then Woodsville, New Hampshire and then basically they stop, they spend the night and then they head back home the next day. And in 23 hours they rode 158 miles and then a short rest and then another 52 miles home. On terrible roads, on single speed bicycles probably with no brakes, right? So this was newsworthy, right? These feats, these athletic feats. But here's what's lurking in the darkness here and it's scorchers. Now scorching was a real moral crisis in this time. We still have scorchers by the way. We call them college students racing down Pearl Street. Scorching was typically lower class men who didn't have the social distinction to be able to adjoin one of these wheelmen's clubs but who were equally into bicycles and they would ride by themselves most of the time. They would be going fast. And so some of the moral crisis was class tension. It was like, we don't like how these guys are riding their bicycles. But people riding bicycles fast was thought to be a great moral ill of the time. And this is an article from 1899 that I just love how it starts. Another accident occurred Tuesday evening as a direct result of the ever present bicycle scorcher, right? So this is that bike shop, Lane's cycle livery on Loomis Street. Students living there now. But the guy who was involved in this incident was a mechanic here. His name was Abner Lozo. And he goes out and he goes for a ride. He's scorching down Loomis Street. And he runs over Barney Buxton, a boy of eight or nine years old. Barney's unconscious. He's got cuts on his head. His right arm is bruised. They call Dr. Lyman. Dr. Lyman revives the boy. He regains consciousness and he can't remember a thing about the accident. So one day I got a random inquiry from a person whose last name was Lozo. They said, hey, I hear you do research on bicycles. I have an ancestor who was a bike mechanic in Burlington. Are you talking about Abner? Abner who ran over Barney Buxton? So what happens is that wheelmen propose regulations and they want to get out ahead of this before it gets out ahead of them. And so the Mount Kilburn Wheel Club down in Bellows Falls writes, there's been considerable complaint of fast and reckless riding. It is better that the wheelmen take the matter and hand themselves. And they say, we suggest all wheelmen carry lanterns and bells and keep to the right side of the street or on such bicycle paths as may hereafter be provided. So this is 1897. And in 1897, Burlington and virtually every town in Vermont passes a bicycle ordinance. And it's the same ordinance that we have today, basically. Speed limits, lights on your bike, bells, all of that stuff is being put into place. A nice tidbit to think about. It's an imaginary alternative future is at the time there was so much enthusiasm about bikes that they had started building bicycle paths between towns and cities. And that was going to be the super highways of the era. Because cars are not yet on the horizon. And so people are like, well, how are we going to get from town to town? Let's build bicycle paths. So a number of bicycle toll paths get built. Vermont didn't go deep into that. Our state Senate rejected a bill for the state to fund it. But a lot of this happened in the Upper Midwest and New York. Now let's shift gears and talk about women. This is a great little cartoon from the London Dairy Sifter in 1897. He, don't you think it rather risky to come so far alone on your wheel? She hadn't thought of it. But if you feel timid, I will see you home. So women really took to the wheel with a lot of enthusiasm once the safety bicycle comes around. And it was actually the suffragist leaders looked at the bicycle and saw a great opportunity to promote women's emancipation politically by encouraging this social activity of the bicycle. Because here you have women, first of all, who are making serious legitimate complaints about restrictive clothing that prevents them from athletic activities and prevents them from riding their bicycles. And so the bloomer is invented. This is these sort of pants that are very look a lot like a dress. So it's modest. But it was there was a what was called the rational clothing movement at the time. And it was closely allied with the suffragist. And the bicycle was thought to be this tool of emancipation. And so I need to find the right page here. So Elizabeth Katie Stanton writes, the bicycle will inspire women with more courage, self-respect and self-reliance. And it will make the next generation more vigorous of mind and body for feeble mothers do not produce great statesmen, scientists and scholars. And so there was a lot of interest in the woman in the wheel in the 1890s in particular. And the newspapers are full here in Vermont of stories about women taking to the wheel and offering advice as well, right? And so here's one that says, the coming woman will be the woman whose mother rode a bicycle and thereby made herself fit to be the mother of the coming woman, says Ida Trafford Bell. There are eight million bachelors in the United States. Watch the reduction in number as soon as the bicycle girl in bloomers is scattered over the land. So another one was the etiquette, right? So men and women interacting with each other in new ways around bicycles create certain kinds of dilemmas. So this is a little tidbit that was also in the free press that same year, 1895, called selecting a cycle teacher. Most cycle depots will send up a man to teach any of their own customers. And many ladies have learned in this fashion. Many, however, it seems to me that if one must clutch any male thing wildly by the neck and fall into his arms 10 or 20 times in the course of an afternoon, a relative or intimate friend is better than an unknown oily mechanic. And I should therefore counsel any girl who contemplates learning the safety to select her teacher with these unavoidable contingencies in full view. So in the very first conference of the rights of suffrage in 1892 here in Vermont, there was one of the addresses was about physical training for women. There were three major addresses made, and one of them really focused on women's right to their bodies, women's right to athletic activities, women's right to be outside enjoying the outdoors. And in Vermont, political suffrage was granted in a limited way in 1872 for women who could vote or stand in certain local elections. But it, of course, was not extended at statewide level and certainly not at the national level until 1920. But in Vermont, the suffrage movement didn't really engage with bicycles, which is really interesting. It's a puzzle for me why the suffrage movement here was avoiding the bicycle. Because in other states, they were hand in hand. Suffragists rode bicycles, right? And if you rode a bicycle, you were very much projecting a certain kind of politics. In Vermont, you could sort of see the complex enthusiasm around bicycles. So this is from the Orleans County monitor. Ms. Majun, do you believe in women's suffrage? Ms. Janfeb, well, I haven't quite come to that yet, but I ride a bicycle, right? So they were separating it here. And it could have something to do with the real difficulties of achieving suffrage here in this state. But it was also having to do with women's power. Women, especially in rural areas, this is the beginnings of tourism and women are controlling the income from tourists while the man is out farming, right? And so women are the face of engaging with tourism and beginning to get some economic power. They are also, there are very high rates of literacy, pretty low rates of divorce. There was the right of divorce. And so, you know, my sense is that they didn't necessarily need the bicycle, but their allies, the temperance movement, so the suffragists and the temperance movement were tied. The temperance movement loved bicycles here in Vermont because as one temperance leader said, a drunk man cannot ride home on a bicycle. But a lot of the consternation around bicycles and women was focused on the health-ish consequences of bicycles. So one side of this debate said that the best Rx is a ride, take it instead of going to the druggist. There was a whole thing called bicycling hygiene. It was thought, you know, writing a bicycle opens the pores. You should treat them with ablutions of water. You need to know how to breathe, of course, because breathing through the mouth can cause heart troubles. And be sure your mouth doesn't get parched. It can affect digestion. So drink milk with a few drops of rum in it before you go on a ride. And this is a really remarkable screed against bicycles by a guy named Heine Marx from St. Louis. This was published in the Free Press in 1895, where he's just going off on the health disaster of bicycles. First, you have a kind of paralysis of the hands and contraction of the chest. This causes congestion of the lungs and leads to consumption. That's tuberculosis, by the way. Furthermore, with men, rupture, varicoseal, hydrosilfollow, and worst of all, it destroys virility. With women, riding promotes amorous desires. Married women are especially liable to very serious mishaps. If the world is not depopulated by the rapidly increasing membership of this suicide club, the human race will die out by reason of lack of manhood and inability to propagate. So this controversy really flared. And we had a professor at UVM, a professor of nervous disorders named Graham Hammond, who studied bicycles and studied the relationship between bicycles and women. And his argument was bicycles are great for our health when ridden in moderation. Now, what about the roads? This is the last section. So the roads were pretty terrible. You can see this is a typical road undrained in 1894. The Vermont Highway Commission did a study of Vermont roads. Green Mountain Road here, obviously dirt roads. And the way we managed roads at the time in our history was that there was no central authority that was in charge of roads. Each town here in Vermont was in charge of its roads, but they typically left it to the neighbors to manage the roads in front of their properties or between their properties. And so people would throw rocks out there. They'd eventually get packed down. But if it was really muddy, you know, they might help someone get unstuck. But for the most part, they were too busy making a living to manage the roads. And so the roads were terrible. And people, by the 1840s, when the train system started developing, people were like, let's take the train, right? It's just better that way. So the road system, we had 13,000 miles of road in the 1890s. And most of them were really dreadful. And so wheelmen were especially concerned with the quality of the roads. How are you going to ride your bike if you have these terrible roads? Early on, the way they adapted to this was they would write guides. And so this is a really great guide from the 1880s called 10,000 Miles on a Bicycle. And it's this very thick book. And with this guy, Carl Krohn, that's his gnome de plume. His real name was Lyman Bag. I love both names. I don't know, it would be hard to figure out which one to choose. But he writes this book where basically he goes 10,000 miles on a bicycle. He comes to Vermont. And what he does is he goes to all the wheelmen and he says, give me $5 to fund my trip. And I'm taking notes on all the good rides and the condition of roads. And then when I'm done, I will send you a copy of the book. And then you know where you can go for rides. And so these are really interesting historical documents, partly because they list all the subscribers. So you know who all the wheelmen were from all over the United States at the time. In any case, he's describing his experience in Vermont. He has a few different sections. But this one answers one of those trivial pursuit questions that you might get someday. He wrote the first century ride in Vermont. And it was, so this is in 1887. The longest days ride previously taken in Vermont was on July 9th, 83, by two Rutland Boards, 100 and a half miles. So 1883 was the first century ride in Vermont. On terrible roads on high-wheel bicycles. So anyway, he describes, you know, stretches of roads, some are unrideable, some are kind of sandy. So this was what wheelmen did, they had to tell from each other about what roads were like. And then the bicycle industry realized very early on that it needed to get serious about road issues, because how are you going to sell bicycles if the roads are terrible? And in some cases cities and towns are banning bicycles because they're disruptive. So one of the things they do is they create what's called the League of American Wheelmen. This is in 1880. Today that is called the League of American Bicyclists or it's still around, but under a different name. But the League of American Wheelmen funded by the bicycle industry took on the road issue. And they said, we need to lobby to get better roads for this country. And so Columbia Bicycles, that was the Pope Manufacturing Company, they had these competitions where you would write an essay. You would get high school students to write essays, like why we need good roads. So there was this thing that emerges called the Good Roads Movement. It's all funded by the bicycle industry and it's drumming up citizen support for changes in how we manage roads. And Albert Pope, the President of Columbia Bicycles travels the country and gives lectures and he says in one famous lecture, an eminent writer says, the road is that physical sign or symbol by which you will best understand any age or people. If they have no roads, they are savages for the road is the creation of man of civilized society. They were astonished that the Inca road still existed and they thought they were more civilized and progressive than the Incas, of course. So this was sort of a a cultural crisis on some level for Americans once they started getting interested in this issue. And Wheelman were at the heart of it and Wheelman went on protest rides to raise awareness about the bad roads. And this is the good roads frog appeared up in this area. This is the only picture we have about him but I've seen references to it. Some guy would dress up as a frog and ride around and raise awareness. This was a trip to Osable Chasm to raise awareness about bad roads. So what happens? Vermont is one of the first states in the country to pass what is known as good roads legislation. And this is one of those transformations we take for granted today, right? What happens is that the state says we're going to take over centralized control over the quality of roads. We're not going to leave it to the towns. We're not going to leave it to the landowners. And what they do is they put on everybody new property taxes that then they distribute as aid back to towns and then the towns spend the money on road projects. The towns are authorized to issue bonds to raise money to build better roads. We get the creation of a state highway commission and there's a few other states that did this New Jersey, Massachusetts, but we were one of the first and the guy who signed it was known as the road governor Levi Fuller. Now Levi Fuller became very famous nationally for signing this legislation and he went on road shows to give lectures about this. But here's the interesting thing about Levi Fuller. He was from Brattleboro. He was not a wheelman himself but his brother-in-law was the president of the Vermont wheel club. So you can imagine that when Levi went home to Brattleboro he was getting harangued by his brother-in-law and all of his prominent friends to sign the dang law, right? Do this thing. We need the good roads. So Levi Fuller was a big fan and champion of good roads and it really transforms how we think of and deal with roads in this country. By 1900 we see a new vehicle making its appearance. The first car climbs Mount Washington in 1899. The Vermont Motor Company is established in 1902. Horatio Nelson Jackson makes a famous bet to drive across the country from San Francisco to New York in 1903. He's a Burlington physician, son of William Wells, the famous general of Gettysburg. Burlington Automobile Club established in 1905. So just like in the 1880s the elites sold their bikes to go get yachts. By the 1910s the elites sell their bikes to go get automobiles, right? Those who were remaining with bikes. And then the 1902 the Burlington's very famous Fourth of July Parade has its usual assortment of military automobile sorry, military bicycle horribles and trade parades but it's the first parade where we have automobiles. So suddenly you see this real shift beginning to occur at the turn of the century. And then if you follow the newspapers over the course of the next 20 years we get established the narrative that we have today and it sticks with us it's bikes versus cars but it's an old conflict and one of these articles says something like, you know, the typical Saturday night crash on Williston Road between a cyclist and a car occurred, right? And so it was thought to be this is just the norm, right? Bikes versus cars. And so that gets established very early on. And increasingly the bicycle is this sort of figure for children, toy for children it's no longer seen as a leisure, important leisure activity for adults. It doesn't really ever take root as a transportation thing except in our postal service here in Vermont. So we then by the 1920s are in a pattern that we've been just beginning to see challenged in recent decade or two. So if you have old photos in your attic I'm always interested in seeing old photos of bicycles. And I'm sorry I went a little bit over but I think we do have some time for questions some questions at least. Thank you. Do you do you need a mic or anything? Oh, okay. Okay, Carol's got it. Question. Where you left off there invites my curiosity about whether looking forward given the climate crisis and all kinds of imperatives to cut back on greenhouse gases, etc. If you do a prediction about, I don't know, fast forward 20 years 40 years, would you see a renaissance for bikes on roads and that succeeding or is the culture just too wedded to cars and a step of electric cars. Thank you very much. Yeah, this is a great question. This is what I've been studying as an ethnographer as an anthropologist for the past 10-12 years. So what I see it's uneven obviously. Working in a city like Bogota, Colombia where the majority do not own cars and the city makes a very strategic decision to invest in bicycle infrastructure, safe bicycle infrastructure, you can see how people respond and they will do it. So in a city like Bogota, they've seen a big transformation in the role of bicycles in their transportation mix. I think in this country, there are pockets where you see bicycles like Davis, California was designed as a bicycle city but it's an exception, right? But you see a lot of cities including Burlington trying to retrofit a bit to accommodate bicycles in the mix and of course we have a law here in Vermont called Complete Streets which means that when they rehab or they build a new street they have to take into consideration all users. It's rooted in a philosophy which I think a lot of you would appreciate which is called the 880 city. So if a city has infrastructure that can accommodate an 8-year-old and an 80-year-old, it's an inclusive city for all, right? So we have that idea percolating in our laws, it doesn't mean it always is put into practice here in Vermont, but you do see attempts to begin to retrofit. I think this is me commenting as a cultural anthropologist. I think one of the things that we have to we're struggling with today that they created for us that we inherited back in the 1890s is that in this part of the world they thought of bicycles as leisure and recreational objects. They did not think of them as transportation objects. Now different countries took a different route. The Dutch very early on thought these are transportation objects. But we always thought of them as recreation and all the wheelman political push was around their recreational desires. It wasn't around how do we build a transportation system that includes bicycles. So I feel like we're living in a shadow that we're still trying to shake ourselves out of in this country. Bicycles can be a legitimate form of transportation and once you do that shift then you can start seeing some changes in the policy and the investment and so on. Which is partly why I rode my bike here. I want to I want to do it but I also want to show that it can be done. It's just not on that road. You have to try other ways around. Yeah, hi. In the 1890s or 80s you started talking about the history in the 1880s and I was wondering if there was not a conflict between bicycles and horses. There definitely was. I mean, there's a lot of stuff in the road that would be difficult. Bicycles and it would be interesting to just hear a little bit about that. Yeah, so it's really interesting. So the bicycle, so remember I showed you that image of that running machine from 1817? So that was invented by a guy named Karl von Dres. He was a German nobleman who said, who for years wanted to create a horse-less carriage. Because he said, you know, horses create a lot of muck. And so he wanted to create a horse-less carriage. And so he tried and he failed. This is just such an interesting, crazy story. So there was a volcano eruption in Indonesia in 1816. And the next year, Vermont suffers that year without summer. And so what Karl von Dres saw in northern Germany was all of his horses died. And he's like, ah, here's my chance. And so he takes this wagon, these wagon wheels, he puts them together and he says this is a horse replacement. Right, so bicycles were often portrayed throughout the 1800s as a horse replacement. They called them iron horses. And there was this sense that horses get tired, bicycles don't. Horses have to be fed, bicycles don't. Right, so there was this idea that bicycles were going to displace horses anyway. And there were some cities, there was this really interesting moment in American urban history. It didn't last long and it got redirected very quickly. But in the late 1800s, American cities were beginning to plan for a future of more bicycles and fewer horses. And so they started telling their planning departments, you need to make better accommodations for bike riding and let's figure out a way to marginalize the horses. Right, and then, of course, when the automobile comes around, the bicycle was easily displaced by that, but so was the horse. And people loved the automobile because it got rid of all the horse doodoo. Right, you know, because it would become dust and people breathing it in. So, yeah, it was the bike for a time really was thought to be a relevant replacement. But at the same time, there was a huge amount of tension. You know, horse riders and carriage folks were always feeling like they were being harassed by that silent bike coming up from behind. I worked in the planning department in Burlington in the early 70s and you may have seen a bicycle study. Yes, I have seen it by them. So I was the author of that. Wow. My name is Ben Boscher and we did a demonstration project of a five foot wide asphalt bike path from Letty Park. And I can't remember if it went to Shore Road or Star Farm. I think it went to Star Farm. Yeah, and that got used so much that that convinced the city council to put more money into bike lanes and bike paths. And the study included bike lanes as well as paths. Yeah, I write about this in my book. I think that was another really interesting moment. And some of that was related to the oil crisis, right? OPEC crisis of the early 70s, right? When suddenly people are reimagining, well, they're dealing with high oil costs, right? And they're reimagining a different kind of system of transportation. And you have the new technology of the 10 speed bicycle is showing up at that time, right? So you do see in Burlington was at the cutting edge of some of this stuff way back then. Yeah. Yeah. I think that study says that there were 13,000 bicycles in Burlington at that time. You counted them. Thank you so much, Luis. You're very welcome. This was very enjoyable. I appreciate it.