Flying

The bicycle was born of the urge to fly. Sure. Sure. Working folk couldn’t afford a horse. A bicycle was cheaper, took up less room and didn’t require a supply of oats, but don’t mistake the inspiration. We have always wanted to fly.

The Wright Brothers started in bicycles, opening their Wright Cycle Company in 1892 and operating it with great success for a decade or so. Their bicycle business, thriving as it was, gave way, famously, to aeronautic work.

In the ’40s, an English auto engineer named Benjamin Bowden turned his eye to bicycles, designing a futuristic bicycle with a driveshaft, a dynamo hub and a built-in radio. It featured a monocoque steel frame, the sort of thing common in airplane design, where the external “skin” of the mechanism provides its structure. After failing to gain traction in the UK, Bowden came to the States and the bike made it into production under the name Spacelander, an attempt to leverage people’s excitement in the early days of space exploration. The steel exoskeleton became fiberglass, but the finished product was expensive, fragile, and in many ways, too far ahead of its time.

We are always getting ahead of ourselves, like Icarus in his first gleeful moments aloft.

As children, when we really thought we were going fast, we said, “I was flying!” But of course we weren’t, Not really. And neither did the Spacelander, which you knew already because you’ve actually never heard of the Spacelander before. It sold some few hundreds, all collector’s items now. You laugh when you come across a story like this, but time does that to a lot of ideas. The Spacelander inspired but never took off.

We dreamt of jetpacks. Instead, we get 31″ of legroom on United, in standard economy, and a come on for an airline credit card. Or we get another road bike, more aero than the last one, with deeper section rims, with a one-piece bar stem nightmare and a five-year warranty. Which one is more laughable?