A bicicleta. Na infância permite-nos experimentar o primeiro sentimento de independência ou a primeira corrida de velocidade. Temo-nos impulsionado sobre duas rodas há cerca de 200 anos. Inicialmente, a bicicleta foi inventada como uma máquina de correr de madeira por Karl von Drais, mais tarde ganhou pedais e, graças à Dunlop, ficou muito mais confortável com a adição de pneus. Mas a bicicleta é mais do que um meio de transporte, está também associada à emancipação, à conscientização ambiental e ao estilo de vida.
O desenho mais antigo que se conhece de um aparelho semelhante à bicicleta é de 1534. Atribuído a Gian Giacomo Caprotti, um discípulo de Leonardo da Vinci.
Lembrei-me deste podcast que dá uma volta pelo que se dizia da bicicleta quando se tornou popular.
When the bicycle debuted in the 1800s, it was blamed for all sorts of problems–from turning people insane to devastating local economies to destroying women’s morals. We explore why the bicycle scared so many people, and what happens when the opposite of our fears turn out to be true.
”The bicycle is a devilish paraphernalia that destroys the youth - and lures them into rolling around on the roads every single night and on Sundays.
Parents and husbands no longer know where their children and servants are. They roam for miles to parties and dance, get drunk and uppity because of this gad about machinery. They fight and sin and impregnate girls from foreign parishes whom they don’t even know.”
However, with time I have realised that researching this topic can go further than exploring how bicycles improved day-to-day lives. Running alongside this story is a much larger tale of how the activities of those men and women who first took to cycling culminated in bigger changes to society as a whole.
One unexpected way it did this was in the field of genetics. For the majority of those living in rural areas, owning a bicycle dramatically increased the number of potential marriage partners, as for the first time they possessed their own means of travelling beyond their local communities. The widening of gene pools which resulted from this process means that the biologist Steve Jones ranks the invention of the bicycle as the most important event in recent human evolution.
However, the most noticeable social change brought about by the bicycle was in the lives of women. At first, most female cyclists were from middle-class backgrounds, but as the price of bicycles decreased as the 1890s progressed, it became increasingly possible for working-class women to purchase machines.
As the ranks of female cyclists grew, conservative opinion which stated the ‘unbecomingness’ of a woman being sat astride a machine which she propelled with her legs began to be overridden. Self-powering a bicycle and travelling where you wished was both a symbol of, and means of achieving, freedom and emancipation. As one female cyclist stated in 1899:
The bicycle is in truth the women’s emancipator. It imparts an open-air freedom and freshness to a life hithertofore cribbed, cabined and confined by convention. The cyclists have collided with the unamiable Mrs Grundy (a voice for conservative opinion in the period) and ridden triumphantly over her prostrate body.
