Read Online It's All About the Bike by Robert Penn - Free Book Online

head down, on the instructor’s back, and saw the machine fluttering in the air between me and the sun. It was well it came down on us, for that broke the fall, and it was not injured. Five days later I got out and was carried down to the hospital, and found the Expert doing pretty fairly. In a few more days I was quite sound. I attribute this to my prudence in always dismounting on something soft. Some recommend a feather bed, but I think an Expert is better.
    The Expert returned to the fray with four assistants and Twain eventually learnt to balance and steer:
    The bicycle had what is called the ‘wabbles,’ and had them very badly. In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was against nature. That is to say, that whatever the needed thing might be, my nature, habit, and breeding moved me to attempt it in one way, while some immutable and unsuspected law of physics required that it be done in just the other way . . . For instance, if I found myself falling to the right, I put the tiller hard down the other way, by a quite natural impulse, and so violated a law, and kept on going down. The law required the opposite thing — the big wheel must be turned in the direction in which you are falling. It is hard to believe this, when you are told it . . . The intellecthas to come to the front, now. It has to teach the limbs to discard their old education and adopt the new.
    Twain memorably concludes: ‘Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.’
    Many who rode high-wheelers didn’t. With the arrival of the safety bicycle in 1885, the world finally had a machine that was both safe (at least compared to the high-wheeler) and easy to steer. Since the pedals were attached via a chain to the rear wheel, the front wheel was free again to undertake its principal responsibility — steering. Only the aged and the overly prudent required ‘experts’ now. Leo Tolstoy, aged 67, took instruction in 1895 and Jerome K. Jerome reported how, around the same time in London’s parks, ‘elderly countesses [and] perspiring peers, still at the wobbly stage, battled bravely with the laws of equilibrium; occasionally defeated, they would fling their arms round the necks of hefty young hooligans who were reaping a rich harvest as cycling instructors: “Proficiency guaranteed in twelve lessons.”’
    For the greater part of humanity, balancing on a safety bicycle was straightforward. In
The Complete Cyclist,
published in 1897, A. C. Pemberton wrote: ‘What each learner must remember is simply to turn the handles in the direction in which he is falling . . . the rest is easy’ — a fact that lies at the heart of the universal appeal of the bicycle to this day.
    Bicycling Science,
an academic tome on the physics behind the machine, explains balancing a bike as: ‘making the small support motions necessary to counter each fall as soon as it starts, by accelerating the base horizontally in the direction in which it is leaning, enough so that the acceleration reaction (the tendency of the centre of mass to get left behind) overcomes the tipping effect of unbalance’.
    Perhaps Twain put it better but the point is that balance is at the heart of the story of the bicycle. Drais understood this, even if he did discover it by accident. And the key to balancing a bicycle is learning to steer the handlebars the way the bicycle is leaning, putting the centre of mass back over its support, and regaining equilibrium. Only temporarily, of course, for a bicycle follows more or less a curving trajectory, continually deviating a little to one side or the other. I’ve often wondered if it is this — the eternal serpentine course of the bicycle, the ‘dignified curvature of path’ as H. G. Wells called it — that lies at the root of my love for the machine.
    Initially a child learning to ride a bike will