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The world's greatest invention


The Guardian's cycling guru Matt Seaton captures the enduring allure of pedal power

Saturday March 3, 2007
The Guardian


Photograph: Vicki Couchman



When asked what their favourite invention of all time is, what do you suppose people say? Mobile phones get some votes; computers, too; iPods, inevitably. And there are always some people who love their car and couldn't imagine life without it. If it's a poll conducted by a radio programme, some will generously nominate the transistor for making their listening possible. But what comes out top? The bicycle, every time.
It seems a paradox in the age of consumer electronics and ever more gorgeously refined designer "black goods", but it's this sturdy piece of Victorian technology - the good old bike - that we love most. But why does the bicycle occupy this special place in our affections?


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The heart has its reasons. A shrink might say it's to do with attachment. The great majority of us first learn to ride a bike as a child. For us, you might say, the bicycle is a type of "transitional object", carrying us for the first time, experimentally, away from our parents. A mechanically assisted reprise, perhaps, of our unremembered first steps.
When we learn to cycle, aged five, six or seven, the scary thrill of discovering that we can balance to ride - wobbling and hesitant at first, but soon faster and faster - gives us our first real taste of freedom and independence. It's a primary pleasure of cycling that you move under your own steam, and you control where you want to go. For a child, always exploring boundaries, that's an ecstatic moment. How could you not feel, ever afterwards, that your bicycle is in some way your friend for giving you that experience?

And it's not only you. In a volume of memoirs, The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills, the writer Henry Miller wrote how, as a boy, he would infuriate his mother by cleaning his bike in the house and leaving smudges of oil on the hall floor. "You'd sleep with that damn bike, if you could," she cursed (I quote from memory) - and he silently agreed. Another volume, comprising portraits of friends and lovers (both plentiful and fluid categories in Miller's life), he entitled My Bicycle and Other Friends. Another Californian writer, poet William Saroyan, described the bicycle as "the noblest invention of mankind" - a sentiment echoed by our own Iris Murdoch who, in the early 60s, composed a line that has only gathered resonance since: "The bicycle is the most civilised conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart."

It is not that writers necessarily have a particular affinity for the bicycle, but simply that they voice for us all the pleasure, and meaning, of cycling. For me, just the short, 15-minute ride to work is a twice-daily spirit-lifting treat that helps me stay fit and healthy and, more importantly, keeps me sane. And that despite having to negotiate my way through other people's "more nightmarish" forms of transport: the buses, cars, cabs and motorbikes that clog the sclerotic streets of our cities like chunks of cholesterol plaque.

And that is the extraordinary thing about the bicycle. There may be little mystery as to why we feel so warmly about our bikes, but what is remarkable is the way cycling has spanned the industrial revolution and survived where so many technologies have been overtaken and fallen by the wayside. The bike just rolls on.

Onwards and upwards, in fact. The object that first inspired the early Modernists as a symbol of a new harmony between mankind and machine, that seemed to bring into being a new social mobility and equality of the sexes when it first arrived in the 1890s, has found fresh purpose and new relevance in the 21st-century as people begin to look towards a post-carbon economy. The wheel has turned. The bicycle, you might say, has come full circle, re-synchronised with the spirit of the age.

If you are of an optimistic frame of mind - and cyclists tend to be (it's all the endorphins running around their system) - you might feel that the best is yet to come. Increasingly, people directing public policy have seen the light, that cycling solves so many problems at once: it gives you your daily dose of exercise without even having to shell out for that gym membership; it's cheap, accessible and democratic - almost everyone can cycle and own a bike. The bike is also superbly practical and convenient: cyclists know their journey times around cities to the nearest minute, more or less. And it civilises, as Iris says, in a multitude of ways. It gets us out of our polluting, potentially lethal vehicles, hermetically sealed from social interaction. And it helps turn blighted inner-city streets from sinister rat-runs for cars back into pleasant boulevards with pavement cafes, safely traffic-free for pedestrians.

Utopian? It would be, if it didn't already exist in many cities of northern Europe - in the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, where in many places more journeys are made by bike than by car. But, in the weird dialectic of progress, what was once the greatest cycling nation on earth, China, is busy stripping out bike lanes to make way for more cars, now seen, in every sense, as the vehicle of prosperity. That familiar cycle - of growing congestion and a public health crisis caused by vehicle emissions - seems destined to repeat itself on an epic scale. And the greatest irony of all: that the vast productive capacity of China's bike manufacturing industry is virtually all for export. They make, we ride.

But we can hope that what goes around will come around, as it has for us. You only have to swing your leg over your bike and get rolling, in that gorgeously rhythmic cadence of pedalling, to feel better. About the world, about yourself, even about the person on the bike in front. The hum of tyre on tarmac, the gentle whirr of the chain running over ring and sprocket, the roar of the wind in your ears. As the road unfurls in front of you, you start to unwind. And then you might feel that, after all, we might get there in the end.


Two-wheel stats

If you cycle regularly, you can expect to be as fit as an average person 10 years younger.

Almost half the population lives within one mile of a National Cycle Network route, which is longer than the UK's motorway system.

On a bicycle, you can travel up to 1,037km on the energy equivalent of a litre of petrol.

Cyclists absorb lower levels of pollutants from traffic fumes than car drivers.

On average, cyclists live two years longer than non-cyclists.

"When I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the human race." (HG Wells)