Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Cycling in automotive history

The Detroit News has a great article about how the bicycle was instrumental in the creation of the automobile industry in Detroit. Many of us know that "historians attribute the automobile's explosion of growth in Detroit to the network of superior roads built for bicyclists." Robert Hurst's Art of Urban Cycling touches on some of this, mentioning that bicycle racers flocked wholesale to the much faster race cars and helped promote cars to the public. Detroit was home to a myriad of small shops making carriages and bicycles. These shops were filled with tinkerers for whom the simple idea of adding a motor to a wheeled contraption seemed obvious. Some car manufacturers started out as bike builders.

From fixedgear.

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