4 - Moving Forward: Space, Time and the Bicycle

Summary

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

Albert Einstein

At a time when scientific discoveries such as Einstein's theory of relativity (1905) were transforming contemporary understandings of time and space, mass and energy, the new mobility of the bicycle offered a compelling vantage point on our surroundings. Einstein recognised the importance of technology in shaping our understanding of the world around us; in his short version of the special and general theory of relativity (published in 1920), he makes extensive use of the image of a moving train to illustrate his findings to a nonspecialised readership. Moreover, it has been argued that his work on electrical machines at the Swiss Patent Office as a young man may have led him to his game-changing insight into the fundamental nature of and relationship between space and time. His theory rejected the traditional conception of time as absolute and universal, showing that it was dependent on frame of reference, speed and spatial position. Time and space cannot be considered separately, but are intertwined in the continuum of spacetime; moreover, many different spacetimes may coexist and overlap. Einstein is widely cited as having said of his famous theory, ‘I thought of that while riding my bicycle.’ While there appears to be no firm evidence for this claim, the legend holds that the physicist was inspired when contemplating the beam of light from his moving bicycle. Whether or not the claim is apocryphal, Einstein was part of the generation who first discovered this transformative individual form of mobility along with the unique interaction with time and space it offered. Bicycles played a key role in the spatial transformations occuring at the turn of the century; as Glen Norcliffe observes, ‘Personal geographies are transformed by cycling […] It follows that bicycles have reconfigured space, and continually do so.’ The ways in which they do this, and how writers conveyed this experience in text, will be the focus of this final chapter.

I first engage with the role of cycling in the formation of an accelerated, subjective, commodified modernity.