Featured on PDR in the collection Cycling Art, Energy, and Locomotion (1889)

Innovations in transportation are “the most powerful factor in the evolution of man”, wrote the inventor and industrialist Robert Pittis Scott in the introduction to his treatise on bicycles, tricycles, and man-motor carriages. He proceeds to quote a “great”, though unnamed, “genius”, who suspects that a day will come when human limbs will “shrivel and drop off”, “being entirely dispensed with in the art of moving and manipulating matter”. And yet, in 1889, cycling heavily taxed the limbs rather than relaxing them to the point of atrophy. This was about to change for the better thanks to the recent development of the first practical inflatable tire by John Boyd Dunlop. While Scott thought the technology “one of the grandest ideas in the way of anti-vibration”,…