Flash From the Past: Bikes of all types, even in late 1800s

There is no one type of bicycle! Today on roads and trails you see a hodgepodge of bike styles: fat tires or skinny tires; wheels the size of a dinner plate or a hula hoop; riders sitting straight, bending over or lying down; even bikes with no seats. This week and next, Flash From the Past looks at bicycling over a century ago, and the operative phrase might be: plus ça change. As far back as Confederation, velocipede bicycles (pedals attached to the wheel) were gaining popularity in Canada.

Then came the fad for penny-farthings (with huge front wheels). In the 1870s, many handymen built homemade bikes in a variety of styles at their homes and in small machine shops. But it took the so-called safety bicycle, manufactured in Ontario over the next two decades, to capture the imagination of adult men and women.

As popularity surged in the 1890s, more and more bikes appeared in rural Waterloo County as well as in towns and villages. An early local manufacturer of bicycles was the Pequegnat family’s famous Berlin & Racycle Manufacturing Company, about which more next week. Of course, the bicycle’s rapid rise in popularity ticked off some older folks, and not much has changed: people complained about cyclists riding too fast, hogging the sidewalks, riding across flower beds, zooming from behind with no warning or simply showing off.

In this first episode let’s enjoy some turn-of-the-century bikes ridden by people in Berlin and Waterloo. Meet Ernest John Stewart, born in England in 1864. By the 1890s he was in Berlin working for Merchants’ Bank and courting Martha Fennell, daughter of a prominent hardware merchant.

They married in 1894, around the time Ernest found a new hobby: he bought one of the early safety bicycles in Berlin. Posing in a local photographer’s studio, Ernest seems unlikely to have been one the press would have labelled a “scorcher”, sending pedestrians scrambling for safety. Turn-of-the-century Berlin bylaws mandated a maximum bicycle speed of eight miles an hour (13 km/h); at least one hand on the handlebar and both feet on the pedals; a bell rung when approaching intersections; no child carried on a bicycle; and a lamp visible at 200 feet (61 metres) turned on at night.

Two speedy gents in a photo studio run by Waterloo’s Addison C. Moyer defy gravity on their tandem racing bike. On the original cabinet photo, a slim wire can be seen running from bottom right across the rear rider’s left ankle and around the other side of the bicycle.

That was how Moyer kept the riders and bike steady for the exposure. Waterloo hosted numerous bicycle races in the early 20th century — speed, distance or duration. Some of the participants, perhaps these two riders, became sports idols of the time.

The Canadian Wheelmen’s Association, a national organization of bicyclists, organized major meets every Dominion Day, July 1. In 1895, the meet was held in Berlin-Waterloo. The camera captured a number of riders (either ending or about to begin) in front of the Walper Hotel’s two-storey balcony in Berlin.

It’s high noon on a hot and sunny holiday, with many onlookers sporting parasols. The cyclists must have worked up extreme sweat as they pedalled along the towns’ macadamized or dirt streets. Lap races were held on Waterloo Park’s track oval.

This 1925 photograph shows off tandem and single bicycles, but of equal interest, in the background, is advertising for a pair of later-famous local bicycle retailers. General Repair (the rear of the shop is seen behind the branches) was operated by Gordon Braun and brother-in-law Cecil Wagner. From that business at 210 King St.

E. sprang Braun’s, Kitchener’s best-known bike shop of the 20th century. The tall sign at left is barely legible but advertises Shippling’s, operated by William Shippling a mile away on Duke Street East near Wellington.

It became another long-lasting Kitchener bicycle shop. Next week, we learn more about the Berlin & Racycle Manufacturing Company. rychmills@golden.

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