Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
U.S. witnessed the birth of numerous bicycle clubs and races, and the device
became integral to courtship as couples sought to out-pedal chaperones.
Women could venture farther from home, and, shockingly, unchaperoned,
and children were freed from their spatial constraints close to home. Urban-
ites began to infest rural areas on weekend outings. Equally novel was the way
in which the cycling craze brought people from di
erent social classes into
contact with one another. For many who could not a
ff
ord a horse carriage,
the bicycle was the “great leveler,” diminishing the value of physical distance
as a means of preserving social hierarchies. Like so many innovations of the
period, the new machine brought forth new perceptions of time and space.
Many early riders on railroads likened the experience to the ultimate in speed,
the
ff
“flying by.” Kern (1983:111)
evokes this notion with a description of a group of Parisian friends: “On the
road the couples feel a new rhythm of movement, a unique sense of penetrat-
ing the surrounding world as their senses open to new parts of the terrain.
They experience a new sense of time, as if they were moving through a dream
rather than the French countryside.”
The bicycle soon became much more than a toy, however, and gave birth to
numerous impacts on the urban fabric and the world economy. Legions of
riders in the working class used it as a cheap transportation to work; four times
faster than walking, it widened commuting
fl
flight of birds, and spoke of landscapes “
fl
fields by substantial margins and
gave large numbers of people an unprecedented degree of mobility. Indeed, the
bicycle is still widely used throughout much of the developing world. Bicycle-
mounted police o
fi
cers became widespread in large cities. The late nineteenth-
century bicycle craze also ushered in, among other things, a surge in the world
demand for rubber, which Brazil rode to become the world's leading producer,
for a while. Growing legions of bicycle users in Europe and North America led
to demands that roads and signs be improved (Vance 1990). In many respects,
the bicycle paved the way, socially and psychologically, for the automobile.
The telephone defeats distance
Alexander Bell's discovery in 1876 that sound vibrations striking a diaphragm
generated a variable resistance that could be transmitted electrically led to
another of history's most transformative technologies, greatly expanding the
possibilities of contact but enabling people to live at ever-wider distances
from one another. In e
ect, the telephone made all places equidistant from
one another, or at least almost so.
Like the telegraph, the early historical geography of the telephone was
almost exclusively American (Brooks 1975; de Sola Pool 1977; Fischer 1992).
The bandwidth of telegraph lines was too low to allow voice tra
ff
c, necessi-
tating the construction of a new infrastructure. Western Union relinquished
its telephone interests in 1879 under the threat of a patent-infringement law-
suit by Bell, who then bought Western Union's equipment manufacturer,
Western Electric, and pioneered the way for a vertically integrated giant.
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