The bicycle is a technology that extends and transforms the range of human experience. Voted the greatest invention since 1800 by BBC listeners in 2005, over the past two centuries cycling has played a key role in human mobility and society at large. The empowering experience of people-powered locomotion points an alternative route to progress, one that remains rooted in an awareness of the past, the environment, the body and humanity while moving steadily into the future. This study aims to reinstate the turn-of-the-century bicycle as a crucial element in the wide-ranging project of modernity, to which it contributed by helping to introduce such concepts as rapid individual mobility, an intimate connection to both the body and the machine, and a subjective, embodied relationship to space and time. By interrogating the very definition of modernity – often automatically associated with fossil-fuelled technologies, commodification and acceleration – early twentieth-century cyclists formulated an alternative, human-centred vision of progress. At the same time, this research seeks to (re)define the bicycle itself, by uncovering the utopian meanings attributed to it at the point of its introduction. The alternative paradigm of human-propelled mobility that the bicycle established at its inception continues to offer a road map for more environmentally and socially responsible societies in the present day. Far from pointing to a regression to a previous state, it offers a responsible, convivial and just means of moving forward, one that moves counter to the individualistic, profit-driven thrust of many contemporary societies.

Given the fact that the basic technology of the wheel had been understood for millennia, it might come as a surprise to learn that it took until the nineteenth century for humans to design an object that allowed them to balance and move on two aligned wheels. Indeed, the object seemed such an obvious companion to human locomotion once invented that some nineteenth-century writers imagined a more ancient history for the technology. Cycling historians over the past thirty years have helped to correct many inaccuracies concerning the origin of the bicycle, disproving as fraudulent a Leonardo da Vinci sketch that was claimed to have featured in his Codex Atlanticus in 1493, and the claim that Comte de Sivrac developed a bicycle prototype (the célérifère) in 1791.