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Introduction The Bicycle Leads the Way

The conversion of energy into motion is at the heart of all transportation. Indeed, the history of transportation—from the horse-drawn wagon and wind-powered sailing ship to automobile and the jet-powered aircraft—can be thought of as the discovery through time of different sources of energy and the invention of the means to convert that energy into a mode of transport. In much the same way that the technology of coal-fired steamboats and locomotives transformed the nation in the nineteenth century, so would gasoline-powered automobiles and airplanes in the twentieth century. While the advent of steam power was contemporary with the idea of internal combustion, the evolution of the internal combustion gasoline engine followed a long and circuitous route through the workshops of numerous nineteenth-century inventors on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, Gottlieb Daimler developed the first horseless carriage using an internal combustion engine in 1883. In America, the Duryea Brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts, did not produce this country’s first viable horseless carriage until 1895. But from these modest beginnings the early auto age soon developed. Yet a generation before the accomplishments of Daimler and the Duryea Brothers, an interim mode of transport helped lead the way toward automobility: by developing technology integral to automotive design, by sparking a popular desire for independent travel, and by creating a public outcry for better roads. This frequently under-appreciated member of the transport revolution was none other than the man-powered, pedal-driven, mechanical horse called the bicycle.

A Celebration of Progress and Technology

With the Centennial Exposition of 1876, progress and technology came to be seen as inseparable aspects of American culture.

From May to November of 1876, the city of Philadelphia hosted a grand celebration of industry and science larger in size and broader in scope than previous industrial fairs held in London or Paris. The International

Exposition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of Soil and Mine—as the Centennial Exposition was officially known—was America’s first of such a caliber, held to commemorate the founding of the republic in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall a century before. Situated on several hundred acres of parkland along the banks of the Schuylkill River among “deep-wooded ravines, groves of century elms and oaks and immense meadows,” the fairgrounds contained more than one hundred buildings filled with exhibits of all kinds representing the arts, science, and technology produced in dozens of American states and territories, and fifty foreign nations. Before the fair ended, nearly ten million visitors from around the country and the world would tour the exhibits, brought to the fairgrounds on the final leg of their journey by the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the nation’s largest. To accommodate such a large number of visitors, the railroad constructed a new branch line to the fair, several storage sidings, and a large gothic-style station just outside the fair’s main entrance gates.¹

The workhorse of the industrial revolution being celebrated at the fair—the one piece of technology that made the growth and prosperity of the nineteenth century possible—was the steam engine. It was the coal-fired steam engine that powered the mills and factories that made the manufactures on which the nation’s economy depended; and it was steam power that propelled the riverboats, coastal steamers, and railroads that brought raw materials to the factories and distributed the finished products to wholesalers around the nation via a railroad network, which by 1876 extended into the heart of communities large and small from coast to coast.

It was appropriate, therefore, that the one exhibit that became symbolic of the fair as a whole was the Corliss Steam Engine, which stood like a giant at the very center of Machinery Hall, itself one of the largest buildings at the fair where the finest in machinery from around the world was on display. Built by the Corliss Company of Providence, Rhode Island, and used to provide power for hundreds of exhibits in Machinery Hall, the Corliss engine was the largest steam engine in the world. Standing thirty-five feet tall and weighing seven hundred tons, it required sixty-five railroad cars to transport its component parts to the fair for final assembly. One flywheel alone measured thirty feet in diameter and weighed more than fifty tons. The steam generated by the engine’s twenty boilers created a total of two thousand horsepower, which was distributed to individual exhibits in all four quadrants of the hall via a network of shafts and belts that totaled more than a mile in length.²

The Corliss Engine became the symbol of the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia. Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register, 1876

Clearly the size and power of the Corliss Steam Engine—like the size and scope of the fair of which it was the centerpiece—was meant to suggest the size and power of the new American republic. While still in the process of settling the western half of a nation that now extended from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean—and only recently rid of the curse of slavery that had plagued the country’s reputation since its founding—America was fast becoming one of the great nations of the world. As President Ulysses S. Grant commented on opening day, during the past one hundred years Americans had not only settled a new nation through “great primal works of necessity … felling forests, subdividing prairies and building dwellings factories, ships, docks, warehouses, roads, canals [and] machinery”; they had also come to rival “older, more advanced nations in law, medicine and theology; in science, literature, philosophy and the fine arts.”³ In truth, the Centennial Exposition of 1876 celebrated far more than the founding of a new nation. It marked the arrival of that nation on the world stage.

By relating the founding of the nation to the progress made through the application of American ingenuity and technology, the Centennial Exposition of 1876 also celebrated the idea of technological determinism in American culture. Promoted in the early days of the republic by Secretary of State Alexander Hamilton, technological determinism equated the nation’s growing economy—so essential to its very survival as a nation—to the machine-based system of manufactures and factory-based system of production developed by American businessmen. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the spread of technological inventions had sown deep into the subconscious minds of most Americans the idea that progress and technology were one and the same. A popular lithograph by Currier and Ives sold at the fair commemorated this belief in visual form. Titled “The Progress of the Century,” the lithograph depicted scenes of steam-powered technology—a large printing press, a steamboat, and a steam locomotive—while a man seated at an electric telegraph was busy sending a message that read, “Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable.”⁴

By 1876, the belief that economic prosperity and advances in technology went hand in hand had become an important part of the American psyche and was on display for the world to see (and imitate) at the Centennial Exposition. Indeed, technological determinism would remain a force in the American consciousness for nearly another century, through the advent of electricity, internal combustion, and nuclear power, before being challenged during the 1960s by an accumulation of evidence showing Americans that growth, technology—perhaps even the prosperity they made possible—all had their limits.

But in 1876, technological determinism, the age of steam, and the industrialization they made possible were far from over. The steam-powered railroad and the steamboat, for example, would remain commonplace means of transport for decades to come. However, despite these advances, there remained one aspect of transportation in which the power of steam was at a severe disadvantage: personal, independent transport of the kind provided by a horse and buggy. Because the steam engine was an external combustion engine—where fuel was burned in a chamber outside the engine to heat the water and create the steam that powered the machinery—the steam engine along with the boilers where the steam was created formed a large and heavy apparatus, whose power could only be increased by making the size and heft of the engine even larger, until one reached the immense size of the Corliss Steam Engine itself.

While some mechanics did pursue the application of steam power to personal transport, most inventors understood that the key to propelling a horseless carriage by mechanical means was to reduce the size and weight of the engine while at the same time increasing the amount of power it produced. The solution they devised was the internal combustion engine, where a small amount of vaporous fuel was ignited inside the engine cylinder in an explosion akin to gunpowder in a cannon or musket. But instead of the explosive energy being imparted to a cannon or musket ball that flew from the chamber, the force created by the internal combustion of fuel was held within the cylinder and transferred via the up-down motion of a piston to the axle of a wheeled vehicle.

In Europe, English inventor Robert Street devised the first internal combustion engine as early as 1794, while Swiss engineer Isaac de Rivaz built the first horseless carriage in 1813; however, his vehicle was a four-wheel cart with barely enough engine power to move at three miles per hour. From these modest beginnings experimentation continued on both sides of the Atlantic. But it took many more years, and the discovery of the four-stroke engine cycle (intake-compression-ignition-exhaust) by German mechanic Nikolaus Otto in 1876, to make the idea of internal combustion a practical reality. Still, many technological problems remained to be solved before the internal combustion engine could be successfully adapted to an automotive vehicle. The first horseless carriage in the world using an internal combustion engine of the Otto design was developed by Gottlieb Damiler and appeared in Germany in 1883. In America, the first horseless carriage, more primitive than its European counterpart but functional nonetheless, was introduced in 1895, manufactured by the Duryea Brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts. On August 5, 1895, Charles Duryea arrived in Hartford driving a horseless carriage that he and his brother Frank had designed and built in their shop in Springfield. Duryea had made the twenty-mile, one-way trip in about two hours, his open carriage automobile “taking the hills and grades with comfort.” The historic journey made Charles Duryea the first person to operate a gas-powered auto in Connecticut.⁵

However, there was already on exhibit in Philadelphia in 1876 a new mechanical vehicle that for the coming generation would ease the way to automobility while providing a means of personal transportation for millions of Americans. That vehicle, an import from England, was on display in the Centennial’s Wagon & Carriage Exhibition Building, right next to the latest in English horse-drawn carriages. It was called the “ordinary bicycle.” Despite its name, the rather odd-looking machine was far from ordinary. It had a large front wheel, fifty-six inches in diameter, to which the drive pedals were attached at the hub; while at the other end of its S-shaped iron frame was a much smaller rear wheel, twenty-four inches in diameter. Metal pegs protruding from the spine of the frame allowed the rider to climb up the back of the cycle onto a small leather saddle seat situated atop the front wheel, where the rider perched himself precariously above the driving pedals.

One of the millions of visitors to Philadelphia in 1876 was Albert A. Pope, a Civil War veteran who still carried the title of Colonel with pride. At thirty-five years of age, Pope was already a successful entrepreneur who had amassed a million dollars in personal wealth by manufacturing tools and nonleather supplies for the thriving shoe industry in Massachusetts, and was looking about for a new business opportunity. Seeing the small display of English ordinary bicycles at the Centennial Exposition, Pope became enamored with the product. As he recalled, “They attracted my attention to such an extent that I paid many visits to this exhibit, studying carefully both the general plan and the details of construction and wondering if any but trained gymnasts could master so strange and apparently unsteady mount.”⁶

On the train back to Massachusetts, Colonel Pope considered the possibility of importing such ordinary bicycles from England through his Boston-based company and selling the odd-looking machines in the States. Or perhaps he would manufacture his own version of the bicycle, thereby eliminating licensing and import fees and increasing his profit accordingly. A keen man of business, Pope considered as well the risks inherent in such an enterprise. Just how popular could such an unconventional vehicle become? Who, exactly, would buy one? Who could even ride one! Yet ordinary bicycling was already a popular pastime in England, and Pope’s instinct told him that the bicycle might also find an audience among athletic young men in America looking for a new sport to master.

Colonel Albert A. Pope’s success in Hartford earned him the title “Father of the American Bicycle Industry.” One Hundred Years of American Commerce 1795–1895, 1896

It is here, in the ruminating mind of Colonel Albert Pope, on the train ride home to Boston from the Centennial Exposition of 1876, that the story of Connecticut transportation in the twentieth century begins.

The Bicycle Comes to Connecticut

In the 1880s and 1890s, Boston entrepreneur Albert Pope made Hartford a national center of high-quality bicycle manufacturing.

Nearly two years after visiting the Centennial Exposition, in May 1878, Colonel Albert Augustus Pope arrived at Hartford’s Asylum Street station on a New Haven Railroad day coach from Boston. He brought with him not luggage, but a Duplex Excelsior ordinary bicycle that he had recently imported from England. When Pope retrieved the vehicle from the train’s baggage car, the 56" high-mount bicycle was the first of its kind to appear in Hartford. Drawing quizzical stares from station onlookers, Pope skillfully mounted the Duplex Excelsior and rode off in the direction of the Weed Sewing Machine Company on nearby Capitol Avenue, a cadre of curious children traipsing behind him.⁷

Since returning from the Centennial Exposition, Pope decided to pursue the business of manufacturing and selling ordinary bicycles—having first learned to ride and enjoy the vehicle himself at his home in Boston—and had purchased a batch of fifty ordinary bicycles from England, with which he intended to test the market. However, rather than retool his factory in Boston to manufacture bicycles, Pope thought it best to find a business partner to make the bicycles for him, while he focused his talents as a salesman on promoting the product. As he himself once said, “I could not make a bicycle if my life depended on it, but I know how to sell them.”⁸

The Weed Sewing Machine Company, headed by George A. Fairfield, a fellow Civil War colonel, was a logical choice. The firm was well respected in the shoe manufacturing industry with which Pope was familiar, and had in place a skilled workforce that was experienced in making interchangeable parts. As it happened, the sewing machine business was then in a slump, and whether Pope was aware of it or not, the Weed Company was looking for a new source of revenue. So when Pope approached Fairfield with an offer to make a batch of fifty ordinary bicycles for him based on the Duplex Excelsior—to be sold under the American trade name Columbia—Fairfield accepted.

Even with a prototype at hand, however, manufacturing the bicycles proved a daunting task. To replicate the English model, Weed Company engineers had to design and forge seventy-seven unique parts, some of which required large and expensive dies costing hundreds of dollars. Each part also had to have a production tolerance small enough to be interchangeable from one bicycle to another. Only the solid rubber tires were to be purchased from an outside supplier.

The bicycles were completed by fall, and to Pope’s delight the first batch of fifty ordinary bicycles made in America sold out quickly, along with the fifty Duplex Excelsior cycles that Pope imported from England. With one hundred units sold and a rash of unfilled orders still in hand, Pope increased production and during the following year sold an additional one thousand ordinary bicycles through Columbia agents that he established in cities such as Hartford, Boston, New York, and Chicago. By the end of 1879, both Pope and Fairfield were convinced that a new American industry had been born in Hartford, Connecticut.⁹

The Columbia ordinary was not the first “bicycle” to be ridden in Connecticut. Its earliest ancestor, a European invention called the “dandy horse” velocipede, appeared in American cities as early as 1819, including New Haven, where it excited the interest of Yale students. Unlike the ordinary bicycle, this earlier model looked more like the bicycle we know today. It had reasonable thirty-inch wheels front and back “and a saddle between them on which the rider sits.” There were, however, no pedals to propel the dandy horse, which moved only when the rider, “touching his feet to the ground, sets the wheels in motion, and keeps them rolling by now and then lightly touching the ground.”¹⁰ Seeing an opportunity to make some quick money, local carriage makers produced cheap copies of the dandy horse and rented them out to interested riders by the day or month, until dandy-horse bicycles were seen around New Haven “in great numbers.”¹¹ But as its name implied, the dandy horse was viewed more as an amusement than a mode of transportation, and so the fad soon faded.

A half century later, a second bicycle craze took place in Connecticut, after a French mechanic named Pierre Lallement had modified the velocipede’s design by adding foot pedals to the hub of the machine’s front wheel and a steerable front column that allowed the rider to power and direct the bicycle by pedaling. Unable to arouse interest in his invention in Paris, Lallement came to Connecticut in 1865 where he took a job at a machine shop in Ansonia. Once established, he assembled the bicycle he had brought with him to America, and pedaled his way into New Haven, where a newsman saw him and recorded the event for posterity. “An enterprising individual propelled himself about the Green last evening on a curious frame sustained by two wheels, one before the other, and driven by foot cranks.”¹²

Though Lallement’s velocipede was a smart improvement on what had come before, its iron-rimmed, wooden wheels made for an uncomfortable ride, and the machine was soon dubbed the “boneshaker.” Despite this limitation, Lallement’s bone-shaking velocipede sparked a second bicycle fad throughout the Northeast. This time, riding academies and cycling rinks appeared in cities around the state, including New Haven. At Yale, a student noted in the college’s Literary Magazine that business at several indoor rinks was brisk and that he had to wait in line for two hours to take a fifteen-minute ride on a boneshaker, which cost him one cent per minute. Some riders went so far as to pay a premium to usurp the time slot of a person who had lined up ahead of them.

Despite the boneshaker craze, Lallement was unable to find an American investor or manufacturer willing to turn his prototype invention into a commercial product, in part because he was “a pleasant young man … incapable in every way of promoting his invention.” So Lallement returned to Paris “no closer to fortune than when he had left,” and America’s second velocipede craze came to a close.

In the 1870s, the bicycle manufacturers of England developed the high-mount ordinary design, mainly out of engineering necessity. Since the technology of chain drive and gearing had yet to be perfected, the only way to increase the power and speed of a bicycle like Lallement’s boneshaker—with pedals attached to the hub of its front wheel—was to increase the diameter of the front, or power, wheel. This led to the odd-looking design of the ordinary bicycle, with a front wheel fifty inches or more in diameter, which was kept from twisting out of roundness by a mesh of metal spokes. It was just such a top-of-the-line, English-made ordinary bicycle, on display at the Centennial Exposition of 1876, that had captured Colonel Pope’s imagination.

With production well underway and his first thousand ordinary bicycles sold, Pope instructed Fairfield to design an improved model that utilized lighter tubing and smoother bearings for an improved ride. As a result of ubiquitous advertising and a team of salesmen who traveled the country demonstrating and promoting the improved Columbia ordinary bicycle, sales continued to rise, and within a few years the Weed Sewing Machine Company in Hartford became the largest bicycle factory in the world, having increased production to one thousand ordinary bicycles each month, and selling them at an affordable retail price of one hundred dollars apiece. By now, of course, other manufacturers entered the lucrative cycling market. But such was the high quality and popularity of Pope’s product that the improved Columbia accounted for two-thirds of all ordinary bicycles sold in America.¹³

Perhaps the most notorious owner of a Columbia ordinary was Hartford’s own Mark Twain, who purchased his bicycle directly from the Weed factory, along with lessons from an instructor who taught him to ride in the privacy of his own backyard. Twain described the experience with usual humor, equating the high-mount bicycle to the familiar horse it was intended to replace:

Mine was not a full-grown bicycle, but only a colt—a fifty-inch, with the pedals shortened up to forty-eight—and skittish, like any other colt. The Expert explained the things points briefly, then he got on its back and rode around a little, to show me how easy it was to do. He said that the dismounting was perhaps the hardest thing to learn, and so we would leave that to the last. But he was in error there. He found, to his surprise and joy, that all he needed to do was to get me on to the machine and stand out of the way … Although I was wholly inexperienced, I dismounted in the best time on record.¹⁴

In the 1880s, English bicycle manufacturers developed an effective chain drive and gearing system, which allowed them to detach the drive pedals from the hub of the front wheel, equalize the diameter of the bicycle’s two wheels at a reasonable size, and let the rider utilize both wheels in propelling the vehicle. The new design was called the “safety bicycle”—the ride, and the dismount in particular, being much safer than that of an ordinary bicycle—and subsequent improvements, including pneumatic tires, lightweight tubular frames, and coaster brakes, now made bicycling accessible to the masses and for the first time opened the market to women and children.

Keeping up with technological advances, in 1888 Pope introduced his own Columbia safety bicycle complete with a low-mount frame, chain drive and gearing, and adjustable handlebars and seat. The first Columbia safety weighted fifty pounds and cost one hundred fifty dollars, and as a result of Pope’s penchant for high-quality production, it soon became the industry standard. The success of the mass-produced Columbia safety bicycle in the 1890s allowed Pope to purchase the Weed Sewing Machine Company outright, making it a fully owned subsidiary of the Pope Manufacturing Company. By the turn of the century, the Pope factory complex in Hartford was producing six hundred safety bicycles each day for sale by more than three thousand Columbia agents worldwide. By then, mass production had reduced the price of the Columbia safety to one hundred dollars, and improvements in metallurgy—the Pope complex had its own metal-working laboratory, the only one of its kind in New England—had reduced its weight to a more manageable twenty-two pounds.¹⁵

An advertisement for the Pope Ordinary bicycle of the 1880s.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

The Columbia Safety Bicycle, a typical low-mount safety bicycle of the 1890s.

Courtesy of the Connecticut State Library

In the course of two decades, Colonel Pope had earned himself a new moniker—Father of the American Bicycle Industry—and the bicycle itself, incorporating in its design the latest in gearing systems, metal-working technology, and pneumatic tires, had become a mode of transportation for millions of Americans. As one visitor to sleepy Old Saybrook at the turn of the century attested, “An odd thing about the town, and one that rather offsets its sentiment of antiquity, was the omnipresence of bicycles. Everybody—young and old, male and female—rode this thoroughly modern contrivance. Pedestrianism has apparently gone out of fashion, and I got the idea that children learned to ride a wheel before they began to walk.”¹⁶

The Bicycle and the Good Roads Movement

Albert Pope, together with the League of American Wheelmen, led a populist movement to establish federal and state agencies dedicated to improving public highways for bicycle use.

No sooner had Pope begun to sell his first ordinary bicycles than the young men who bought them began to organize themselves into wheel clubs so as to socialize with fellow cycling enthusiasts. In Connecticut, clubs of ordinary-bicycle owners were established early on in Hartford (1879), New Haven (1880), Bridgeport (1880), and Waterbury (1881). By the mid-1880s, ten additional ordinary-bicycle clubs had been formed in towns large and small around the state, including Stamford, Cheshire, and New London.¹⁷

In May 1880, realizing that promoting the culture of cycling was a surefire way to increase sales, Albert Pope helped to organize the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), comprised of thirty-one cycling clubs from around Southern New England. The LAW was established as a national organization of cycling enthusiasts with chapters in each state; its aim was to promote the general interests of cycling, to protect the rights of wheelmen, and to facilitate touring. Membership in the LAW increased steadily over the decades, especially after the introduction of the safety bicycle in 1888, and peaked at more than 100,000 in 1898.¹⁸

An important recruitment event for the LAW was the annual state gathering at which races, tours, and other events were organized and where proposed cycling legislation was debated. One such gathering—the Third Annual Cycling Tournament sponsored by the Hartford Wheel Club—was held in that city’s Charter Oak Park on September 2–3, 1889. The weekend program included a four-mile bicycle race to the state prison in Wethersfield, a tour of the prison facilities, and in the evening, an open-air concert with music by the Weed Company Military Band.¹⁹

As stated in its charter, one of the group’s main activities during the 1880s was the promotion of long-distance touring, which had captured the imagination of many adventurous cyclists. One of the most noteworthy touring cyclists of the time was former Yale student Karl Kron, who undertook numerous forays throughout New England riding his Columbia no. 273, one of the early ordinary bicycles manufactured by the Weed Company. Kron wrote of his cycling adventures in detail in a book titled Ten Thousand Miles on a Bicycle, which included several jaunts around and through Connecticut at speeds averaging five or six miles per hour. The following quote describes a portion of one such trip that originated in Boston in the summer of 1883 and during which Kron traveled the shoreline Post Road through Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut to New Haven—the same route traveled on horseback by Madam Sarah Kemble Knight in 1704. The quote is memorable, to be sure, for the effort that it documents but also for its snapshot of existing transportation modes in Connecticut—from turnpike and steamboat to railroad, electric street railway, and roads paved with oyster shells—that Kron’s description inadvertently captures. The distances mentioned were measured using a Pope-made odometer that Kron had attached to his Columbia ordinary bicycle (m. = miles, h. = hours):

I had an extremely pleasant ride to New Haven, the following forenoon (27 m. in 5 h.), through the clear, bracing air and bright sunshine, on roads quite free from dust and mud. From the corner in Clinton to the flagpole in Madison (4m.), I kept mostly on the sidewalks, and I was 1 h. in wheeling thence to the green in Guilford (5 m.), where I decided to leave the turnpike in favor of the shore road, and so followed the telegraph line out from the s. w. corner of the green and turned l. with the poles at the first fork. The road across the marshes supplied goodish riding, though it is overflowed when the tides are very high. On a hill on Leete’s Island (3 m.), I stopped before a little gravestone at the left of the road to copy the inscription: “Simeon Leete, shot here by the Enemy, 18 June 1781, age. 29,” and then I hastened on to the station at Stony Creek (2 m.), whence to the green in Branford (4 m.) I found the riding almost continuously good, in spite of the hills. From there I went without stop to the summit of the big hill (2 m.), and again without stop to the watering trough near Tomlinson’s bridge (3.5 m.), by which I entered New Haven. The dock of the New York steamboats is just beside this bridge; and I rode from it without dismount to the city hall on Church St., facing the green,—my route being alongside the car tracks to Wooster St., through that, l., and its prolongation, over the railway bridge, then a few rods l., to the head of Crown St., which soon crosses Church St. at right angles. All three of these streets, and many others in the city are macadamized; and, as a very large number of the New Haven sidewalks are without abrupt curbs at the crossings, long rides may be taken continuously on their bricks or flagstones. Oyster-shells [from the thriving oyster fishery in nearby Fairhaven] supply a smooth surface for several of the suburban roads.²⁰

As an extension of the touring activities of its members, the LAW published a cyclist’s travel guide to Connecticut, a pocketsize, leather-bound volume titled The Cyclist’s Road-Book of Connecticut. The guidebook included seventeen long-distance road trips—including one from New York to Boston via the upper Post Road through New Haven, Hartford, and Springfield—mapped out on eight county road maps of Connecticut. The routing for each tour was highlighted in red, and each section of the route was rated (from one to five) by its gradient (from level to mountainous) and by the quality of its surface (from first class to very poor). The road book also included a list of hotels along each route where cyclists could spend the night, some of which advertised reduced rates for LAW members.²¹ With books such as these, the LAW provided useful touring information for its members and also helped to publicize the surface condition of many Connecticut roadways. Indeed, in 1891, the Connecticut division of the LAW offered prizes for “the best collection of photographs showing the need for improved roads.”²²

As a logical extension of his work with the LAW, in 1889 Pope began an unrelenting advocacy on behalf of good roads with a speech before the Carriage Builders’ National Convention in Syracuse, New York, where Pope, ever the businessman, equated good roads with good business, in particular the sale of carriages, wagons, and bicycles. Pope continued to preach the gospel of good roads in subsequent speeches and in print, calling for a national commission to deal with the matter. The “good roads” movement, as it came to be called, peaked in 1893 as Pope delivered to Washington, D.C., a massive petition that listed the support of 150,000 individuals and organizations, including seventeen governors, for an ongoing nationwide program of road improvements. In response to the activism of Pope and other good-road advocates, Congress that year established an Office of Road Inquiry (ORI) within the federal Department of Agriculture.²³

Pope’s Good Roads petition of 1893 to Congress is stored in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Courtesy of the National Archives

As the name implied, the main role of the ORI was educational, and it fulfilled its mission in two ways: by collecting and disseminating information on how to build good roads to towns and cities across the nation, and by building short segments of “object lesson” roads in select cities, including Pope’s hometown of Boston, to demonstrate what a good road could be like and thereby whet local appetites for the construction of additional good-road mileage. While the ORI had no funds to build a continuous network of good roads (that degree of federal support would have to wait two more decades), the ORI did become a permanent institutional presence within the federal government and as such soon replaced the LAW as the nation’s most vocal advocate for road improvement.

As might be expected, the good roads movement led by Pope, the LAW, and other advocates had its impact on state governments, first in New Jersey and Massachusetts, where the nation’s first two state highway commissions were established in 1891 and 1893, respectively, to address the ongoing issue of improved roadbuilding. In Connecticut, the momentum for good roads legislation peaked in the winter of 1894–95, as farmers from the state’s 122 Grange chapters at their annual meeting passed a resolution supporting legislation to provide for good roads throughout the state, and vowed their “continued agitation” until such action was taken.²⁴ Meanwhile, the Hartford Courant published articles on good-road activities in other states, thereby keeping the issue alive in the consciousness of the state’s citizens and their elected representatives. In June 1895, the Connecticut Legislature created the state’s first Highway Commission (and the nation’s third). At the beginning, the Connecticut Highway Commission was comprised of a three-man board of commissioners, with James H. MacDonald its first chairman. Two years later, in an effort to centralize responsibility for roadbuilding even further, the legislature revised the structure of the commission, reducing it to a single commissioner, James H. MacDonald, who alone was now responsible for implementing a highway improvement program for Connecticut. As we shall see, it was through MacDonald’s efforts as highway commissioner over nearly two decades that the Connecticut Highway Department was eventually organized in 1913, along with a statewide network of paved trunk line highways for which the department was responsible.²⁵

The bicycle craze of the 1880s and 1890s left two important legacies, one technological, the other social. The technology of the bicycle included much that would prove useful to makers of the automobile (and later the airplane), including advanced metallurgy, improved ball and roller bearings, variable speed transmissions, shaft drive, pneumatic tires, and certain techniques for the mass production of precision parts. Whereas their French and British counterparts were responsible for inventing the boneshaker velocipede, ordinary, and safety bicycles, American inventors made significant contributions to “the development of tools for affordable mass production,” such as improved lathes for wheel and frame manufacturing. And, of course, it was American industrialist Albert Pope who showed the world how to sell bicycles—and the related culture of bicycle touring.

The social legacy of bicycle touring introduced the public to the reading of road maps, the need for route signing, and the possibility of long-distance touring, complete with tour books and discounted lodging, all of which would later become essential elements of auto travel. In addition, the bicycle promoted the need for good roads between towns and in the process turned the idea of roads improved for all-weather, long-distance travel from a low-priority government activity, historically carried out in haphazard fashion by individual towns, into a public right whose time had finally come. As a result of the efforts of Albert Pope, the LAW, and other cycling advocates, the struggle for good roads became a national political issue, and for the first time in American history agencies were created in our national and state governments to promote and provide for adequate roads.

Most importantly, bicycle touring encouraged the desire for independent travel long before the advent of the horseless carriage. So powerful was this contribution to the public consciousness that one Pope engineer believed it was the bicycle that “directed men’s minds to the possibilities of independent, long-distance travel over the ordinary highway. We thought the railroad was good enough.”²⁶ But though people had lived for half a century with the omnipresence of mass transportation via the railroad, “the bicycle created a new demand which it was beyond the ability of the railroad to supply. Then it came about that the bicycle could not satisfy the demand, which it had created. A mechanically propelled vehicle was wanted instead of a foot-propelled one.”²⁷ The unprecedented craze of bicycle riding and touring in the 1880s and 1890s had created the desire for the automobile years before the horseless carriage itself appeared.

Ultimately, it was automobility—the interconnected system of automotive technology (vehicle, engine, and fuel) together with the smooth running surface of paved highways—that made high-speed, door-to-door travel possible year round. And it was automobility (the vehicle plus the infrastructure over which it would operate, not one or the other alone) that would radically alter the course of Connecticut history, have a significant impact on the landscape through the redistribution of the state’s population, and have an adverse effect on the state’s established system of railroad and steamboat transportation—as we shall see in the first chapter. It was also automobility that by the climax of this story in the 1960s would make visible to the general populace the dangers to the natural environment—from air, noise, and water pollution, traffic congestion, and suburban sprawl—inherent in automobility itself. This conundrum of technology (if some is good, why isn’t more even better) would make visible the limitations of all technology and strike at the heart of America’s long-held belief in growth through technological progress, so proudly exhibited for all the world to see at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia.