The few economic historians who have written about the bicycle have focused on various aspects of its industrial development. For instance, Bruce Epperson (Peddling Bicycles to America: The Rise of an Industry. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2010) examined the growth and decline of the Pope Manufacturing Company. Roger Lloyd-Jones and M.J. Lewis (Raleigh and the British Bicycle Industry: An Economic and Business History, 1870–1960. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2000) detailed the evolution of Raleigh and the broader trends of the British bicycle industry. In Old Wheelways, Robert L. McCullough provides us with a different perspective focused on the experiences of the bicyclists themselves, the narratives some of them created on their journeys, and the ways that efforts to create usable bicycle paths have impacted the landscapes around us. McCullough is not an economic historian, and this is not a work of economic history, but aspects of it may well persuade us to pay more attention to the impact of the wheelways on the land around us and to the observations of some chroniclers of the period. While their experiences were obviously more circumscribed than those of passengers on the great steamships or railroads, their “perceptive descriptions of American places” can provide historians with considerably richer detail. As McCullough points out, “A tourist on foot moves too slowly to see the country on a grand scale; a tourist by train moves too swiftly to see the individual significance of any particular features of it; and a tourist on horseback or in a carriage would probably find more physical pain than intellectual pleasure” (p. 13).
Old Wheelways was 12 years in the making and covers the period from just before the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 to the beginning of WWII. While not its primary focus, the book opens with a number of ways in which the bicycle had economic consequences. Among them was the effort to improve the nation's roads—the sidepath campaigns are discussed in Chapter 7 and the New York campaign to build asphalt-paved paths in Manhattan is an important part of Chapter 10. Another is the contribution of the bicycle manufacturing industry to the modern machine and engineering technology that was central to both the automobile and aircraft industry in subsequent years. Those who are interested in the technology of the bicycle will find a nice overview of the design origins in France in the first chapter. The most interesting aspect of the book is McCullough's descriptions of the travel writings of those who explored the countryside on a bicycle. These self-described “slow-going and observant travelers” give us some unique glimpses into the changing landscapes of late nineteenth century America. As McCullough noted, “The routes they carefully documented can tell us much about the murky sequence of growth occurring at the edges of cities…” (pp. 6–7).
While some of the writers McCullough examines in the book were writing for their fellow cyclists, others had a broader audience and a different objective. For instance, McCullough describes the efforts of Timothy Dwight to “draw a picture of…[the] emerging [New England] society and its communities…The result is a comprehensive description of” a very large region in New England (p. 91). McCullough argues that Dwight's book “belongs to the extensive body of literature about travel and tourism in this country, which underscores the mobility that surely defines a key part of the American experience” (p. 93).
There are a number of other parts of the book that might be of some interest to economic historians. For example, McCullough explains that the organized annual tricycle tours organized by women was one vehicle for female independence; and we are introduced to a number of periodicals, including The Cycle, which included Helen Drew Bassett's column, “From a Feminine Point of View.” We also find a fascinating description of the Erie Canal in its twilight from Alfred Chandler's 1886 journey. By this time, the public imagination had shifted from the canals to the railroads, but Chandler provides some interesting descriptions of the canal as he rode along its perfectly level towpaths for 40 to 60 mile stretches (the canal towpaths seem to have been especially popular despite frequent edicts published by the canal companies declaring them off limits to the cyclists). The cyclists’ quests for adequate roads led some of them to rediscover the early nineteenth century turnpikes and they yield some unique perspectives on these early transportation systems. There were also efforts to combine the bicycle with the rapidly emerging transportation modes of the early twentieth century. For example, there was a creative proposal to build an elevated bicycle path over the Brooklyn Bridge that ultimately failed, but that influenced the successful effort to build bicycle paths on the Williamsburg Bridge. Those interested in some unique perspectives on early twentieth-century transportation systems may find value here. The book also has a potentially useful list of New York state sidepaths along with estimates of total mileage.
Finally, there are fascinating illustrations throughout the book that are worth examining in their own right. Most of these were engravings that originally appeared in publications like The Wheelman, and they add a rich visual dimension to the book. In the end, McCullough largely succeeds in what he set out to do by providing readers with some often ignored perspectives on how certain American landscapes were shaped during the golden age of the bicycle.
