bicycle Archives -

17 Jun

The Riotte Kerosene Bicycle Motor

While I’m working out the plot for my new book, I’m also trying to figure out what exactly the machine my heroine’s father has invented looks like. I have in mind for it to be an early motorcycle, but my knowledge of motorcycles and motors past and present is minimal. Fortunately my reliable friends at Google have scanned in volume 1 of The Horseless Age, a publication for the nascent automotive industry in 1895. There are a great many bicycle, tricycle and carriage motors described, from steam-powered to gasoline, and spring-motors, which were coiled by a hand-crank and then powered a bicycle for 15 miles. I was briefly excited by the description of an ether-motor–more efficient and powerful than using water for steam–until I looked a little further and learned that ether is extremely explosive, which is why we don’t see it used as a propellant in many engines these days. There will be some mishaps in the novel, but not the explosion and full-body burns sort of disaster.

Right now the leading contender for me to base my fictional motorcycle off of is a kerosene motor, a lightweight option which could be attached to a regular bicycle frame. It doesn’t seem to have caught on, as the only mention I can find is this description on page 19 of Vol. 1, No. 1 of The Horseless Age, printed in November 1895.

The Riotte Kerosene Bicycle

C.C. Riotte, of the Riotte & Hadden Mfg. Co., 462 East 136th St., New York, has invented a kerosene motor for bicycles which is extremely simple, light and inexpensive. It can be attached to any ordinary bicycle, detached at a moment’s notice, and is started and stopped by a small handle at the oil tank. It consists of two small valves, a cylinder, piston and igniter.

The operation of the motor it [sic] as follows: When the piston descends, a cylinder full of air mixed with a small quantity of kerosene oil is compressed into the explosive chamber and there ignited by an electric spark which is generated from a small battery weighing one half pound. This battery never polarizes or requires recharging.

The air in the cylinder being highly heated from the combustion of oil drives forward the piston which is connected through a crank with the rear wheel as seen in the illustration. The operation continues on, almost noiseless and without smell, with every turn of the rear wheel. A speed of twenty five miles per hour has been attained with it on level ground and a pretty good speed maintained on grades of about four or five per cent.

The weight of the motor including tank full of oil is nine and one half pounds. The tank holds enough oil to carry a person 75 miles and when the oil gives out a quart of kerosene or any kind of petroleum lamp oil can be bought at any country store or of any farmer.

Mr. Riotte has been experimenting in gas and oil engines all his life, and has had a good deal to do with stationary and marine engines of all descriptions.

The principle of this bicycle motor is the same as that of his new improved stationary oil engines except that heavy weights and the fly wheel are dispensed with.

The firm is also constructing a carriage, which is propelled by a kerosene motor the same in principle as their stationary motors. The operating gear will have but one lever to start, stop, reverse, or go at any speed from 2 to 25 miles per hour. They expect to form a company to manufacture bicycle and carriage motors on a large scale.

As far as I can tell, it seems like a pretty plausible option, especially with the option to buy fuel on the road. One of the things I’ve realized about the development of motor vehicles is that they were initially hampered by the lack of infrastructure. To be successfully used for long distance travel, they needed to have good roads for all the wheeled vehicles, and for the fueled vehicles, they needed places to buy fuel. I’ve pretty much taken the existence of gas stations for granted, but now I assume that part of what made or broke the different motor options described in The Horseless Age was the availability of their required fuel, whether it was kerosene, ether, or gasoline. It may also explain the interest in the spring motors!

06 Jun

Victorian women learning to ride a bike

More on women’s cycling from old books and journals. There are two popular topics regarding women and bikes: method of riding and choice of dress. Throughout the 1890s the debate rages on skirts vs bloomers/knickerbockers, what sort of cut to the skirts, bifurcated or not, how to keep your skirt out of the wheels, best bikes with skirtguards… There’s a lot of concern about looking unladylike while riding a bicycle. For the lady who did want to ride, how would she get through the awkward phase of learning to ride gracefully without embarrassing herself publicly? By attending a cycling school or academy, where a (presumably male) teacher would assist her with balance behind sheltering walls. As you might expect, there were still writers ready to make fun of the female student of the bike, as in the poem below, which I found in a magazine for Locomotive Engineers. I’m considering making my heroine a female bicycle instructor, as she could surely provide a more friendly experience than that described in this poem!

At the Bicycle Academy

‘Twas at the female cycling school,
Where bloomer costumes arc the rule;
And fairy forms in trousers hid,
Essay the bike as she is rid.

A rare and radiant vision she!
A dream! a song! a rhapsody!
To whom none other there was like,
Came forth to tame the festive bike!

She cast about a bashful glance,
Gazed at her wiry steed askance;
Then eyed her bifurcated skirt,
And wondered if a tumble hurt.

Then at the master’s stern command,
She grasped her steed with trembling hand;
A gasp, a sigh with anguish pent,
A bounce, a boost, and up she went.

Prate not to me of dire alarm,
Of fire and floods and martial arms;
For depth of woe there’s nothing like
A frightened female on a bike!

She stuck, she strained, she vainly strove
To make that pesky pedal move;
She pumped, she pushed, turned ghastly white;
And worked both feet with all her might!

And now she starts, she seems to feel
A thrill of life along her wheel!
But, oh! a bump! a zigzag slump!
Girl, bike, spokes, legs, all in a lump!

Reprinted from the New York Evening Sun in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers’ Monthly Journal, Vol XXIX No 3, March, 1895.

22 May

Psycho Ladies Safety Bicycle

I’m finishing up my first historical romance and starting to draft the second in the series, which means I am back into research mode. Book two’s heroine is a cyclist, so I’ve been trying to figure out what she might be wearing — the 1890s is still a period of upheaval in ladies’ fashion, as corsets disappear and “rational dress” appears, and the advent of women’s bicycles leads to debate on where and when it is appropriate for women to wear knickerbockers or should they be riding bikes with drop frames, with nothing for their skirts to get involved in…

Anyway, I was reading an opinion letter in an 1890s magazine and the lady writing mentioned that she and her sisters have all ended up riding the Psycho Ladies’ Safety.

“Safety” is the “safety bicycle” but Psycho Ladies? Really?

Yes, really! Imported from England in 1888 and after, the ladies’ safety bicycle from the Psycho line, manufactured by the Storley Bros. was one of the first ladies’ bikes available in the United States. A search in Google Books brings up two pages of mentions in the late 1880s and 1890s of the Psycho ladies’ safety. For instance, at the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association’s seventeenth triennial exhibition in 1890, W.W. Stall of Boston won a silver medal in the category of “Agricultural Implements and products, carriages, wagons, bicycles, and other vehicles and appliances” with “Bicycles and appurtenances, including New Star Combination Drop-Frame Psycho, Ladies’ Light Roadster Psycho, Ladies’ Extra Light Roadster, Double-Frame Psycho, Coventry Rival Safety, Tremont Safety, Elliott Safety, and others.”

Psycho Ladies’ Safety Bicycle

Sorry, I have to repeat it because I’m so excited that it existed with that name.

Obviously, “psycho” had different connotations at the time. Etymonline tells me that it wasn’t used as a shortening for “psychopathic” until Raymond Chandler used it that way in 1936. If we look at the roots f the word, it’s the Greek term psykhe, meaning “mind, mental; spirit, unconscious.” There’s also the Greek myth of Psyche and Cupid/Eros, a variation on the Beauty and the Beast storyline, in which Psyche is married to a terrible serpent who visits her at night as a handsome man and, after she breaks some rules, she has to complete a number of quests in order to win him back and live happily ever after. I think it’s safe to say that the makers of Psycho bikes had this image in mind,

And not this.

Anyway, the Psycho ladies’ bikes – and there were soon several different options – and ladies’ bikes in general were a big step forward from tricycles, which had earlier been the most accepted form of bicycle for ladies. As one article from 1891 points out, “it was surely not in reason that a presumably robust, lightly-clad man should ride the light-moving fifty-pound bicycle, while the weaker, long-skirted girl was condemned to trundle the hundred-pound tricycle.”

By 1893, manufacturing and technology had improved even on the fifty-pound bicycle option, and Iron Age‘s 1897 history of the women’s bicycle tells us that,

The combination of light steel frame perfectly elastic air tires held on a tough and springy wooden rim makes a bicycle of 25 pounds weight or less to ride which is as near like flying as woman is likely to get in our generation.

Compared to a modern bike, that sounds like, well, a modern bike. I ride a 2013 Trek 520, a steel-framed touring bike, which weighs 27 pounds. Perhaps it would be a little lighter with wooden rims on the wheels!

I still have to decide if my heroine will be riding a Psycho ladies’ safety, which had a drop frame, i.e. no top bar.

This allows it to be ridden more easily while still wearing skirts, but my heroine will be following rational dress and wearing knickerbockers. From this illustration in the novel A Study in Bloomers: Or, The Model New Woman, however, wearing bloomers, or knickerbockers, doesn’t automatically mean a female cyclist would be riding a wheel with a diamond frame.

She’s wearing a velvet suit, which sounds incredibly stylish but hot for actual riding… Obviously I still have more research to do!