Late modern time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 131

constant pace of innovation under capitalism—its most distinctive feature—
which led to a continual process of creative destruction in the late nineteenth
century with momentous repercussions for the structures of space and time.
Numerous intellectual trends, technologies, and political processes combined
to usher in an exceptionally fecund and fertile era. Hence, Kern (1983)
opens his celebrated account of late modern time-space compression with the
following passage:

From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping
changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of
thinking about and experiencing time and space. Technological innov-
ations including the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle,
automobile, and airplane established the material foundation for this
reorientation; independent cultural developments such as the stream-of-
consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity
shaped consciousness directly.

Bicycling through late nineteenth-century time-space
Any account of the cultural experience of space and time in the late nineteenth
century must necessarily include the bicycle, a device generally underappreci-
ated by observers of historical and spatial change. The bicycle was the rst

form of private transportation available to urban dwellers of modest means.
In Hugill's (1993:189) words, “Bicycle technology introduced humanity to
the advantages of individual mobility at a speed level much higher than the
unaided organism could achieve.”
The origins of the bicycle extend to 1784, when Edmund Cartwright, who
invented the

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first power loom, devised a pedal-operated quadricycle (Vance
1990). The draisine or velocipede was introduced in Germany by Karl von
Drais in 1817, and di

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used thereafter to France and Britain. Subsequent
changes in the 1860s by French engineers reduced the wheels of the veloci-
pede to two, initiating a rage for mobility that swept through Paris (Calif
1983). In England in the 1870s, a new style of bicycle, with very high front
wheels (up to

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five feet) and very low back ones made the machine the
exclusive preserve of athletic young men. Gradually, however, new develop-
ments such as ball bearings, lighter frames, and pneumatic tires made the
machine easier and more e

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cient. The present form, the “safety bicycle” with
equal sized wheels, generated improvements in stability and speed of move-
ment, became standard in the 1880s, and allowed bicycling to be extended to
women and children and greatly enhanced the device's popularity. It could
reach a speed up to 12 miles per hour, and became a primary form of amuse-
ment for the youth of Europe. The New York Times noted it could achieve
“great economy of time as well as money” and foster “immense development
of muscle and lung” as well as “independence of character” (quoted in Herlihy
2005). The bicycling craze of the late nineteenth century in Europe and the