Transportation
How the Bicycle Helped Invent Flight
And other insights from “The Mechanical Horse,” Margaret Guroff’s new cultural history of cycling.
All too often, drivers act like cyclists don’t belong on the road. And that’s not entirely their fault: By and large, city streets are designed to support cars, not bikes. This can have dangerous, road-ragey outcomes when the two modes mix.
But drivers actually have bicycles to thank for the fact that most roads are paved at all. Much more than that, bicycles influenced the design of cars and their mass-manufacturing. Bikes also were a vehicle of first-wave feminism, helped underpin the development of cities in the 20th century, and informed the invention of the airplane.