Bicycle - 25 Interesting facts

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1. Social reformer and feminist Susan B. Anthony once said that the invention of the modern bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world” and called it the “freedom machine.”



2. In the early 1900s, 6-day long bicycle races were quite popular. The winner would be whoever rode the greatest distance in the 6days. They would get extremely little sleep and hallucinate on the track.



3. Paved roads became mainstream not because of automobiles, but because of bicycles. While cars could go across cobblestones fairly well, bicycles could not.



4. Hans and Margret Rey, two jews, fled Paris in 1940 on bicycles Hans had built. They escaped just hours before Nazis seized Paris. Among the few possessions they carried was the illustrated manuscript of the first Curious George book, which they would later get published in New York.



5. The 1913 Tour de France rules forbade outside assistance when riders’ bicycles broke. At one point, the race leader’s front fork broke and he trekked 10km to a forge where he repaired it himself, as he happened to also be a skilled mechanic. He was penalized 10 min because a child worked the bellows.



6. M-185 on Mackinac Island, Michigan is the only state highway in US where no motorized vehicles are allowed. Travel is only by bicycles, horses or on foot.



7. Walter Arnold of East Peckham, Kent had the dubious honour of being the first person in Great Britain to be successfully charged with speeding on 28 January 1896. Travelling at approximately 8mph/12.87kph, he had exceeded the 2mph/3.22kph speed limit for towns. Fined one shilling and costs, Arnold had been caught by a policeman who had given chase on a bicycle.



8. Despite the fact that speed limits do not apply to bicycles in UK, you can be prosecuted simply for cycling too fast, under the charge of ‘cycling furiously.’



9. The Japanese invaded most of Malaysia while riding their bicycles during WW2.



10. UPS was founded by two teenagers with one bicycle and $100 Borrowed from a friend.



11. In 1981 India launched a satellite that was transported on an ox-cart, with the rocket parts carried on the back of bicycles.



12. In the 1890s, there was real concern that straddling a bicycle saddle combined with the motion required to propel a bicycle would lead to arousal in women. So women’s bicycles had saddles with little or no padding, and high handle bars to reduce the risk of arousal.



13. The bicycle is one of the most efficient inventions in the history of mankind. A gallon of gasoline (about 4 liters) contains about 31,000 calories. If a person could drink gasoline, then a person could ride about 912 miles on a gallon of gas (about 360 km per liter).



14. Korean man Okhwan Yoon left a profitable business to bicycle the world to support world peace. Over 9 years he has biked across 192 countries on six continents and has survived 6 car accidents, malaria, extreme temperatures, robbery, and kidnapping.



15. When you are in Sweden you have the year-round right to walk, cycle, ride, ski and camp on any land, with few exceptions, due to The Right of Public Access, or ‘Allemansrätt’.



16. Bike Helmet Law was defeated in Denmark partly because “the overwhelming evidence is that enforced helmet laws lead to very much less cycling, particularly for utility journeys and amongst young people.”



17. As an experiment, Massachusetts transit police placed cardboard-cutout cops near two bike racks in Cambridge. Bike theft dropped 67% in a month.



18. In 1954, a fifteen year old told his parents he was going to school, but then rode his bike 700 miles in a week from D.C. to Atlanta because he was “homesick for Dixie and his grandmother’s fried chicken.”



19. There are more bikes than people in the Netherlands, and the cities are planned to accommodate bikes rather than cars.



20. Cyclists in bike sprint races try to ride as slowly as possible.



21. Every year between 12,000 and 15,000 bikes are pulled out from the canals of Amsterdam



22. In Israel, on Yom Kippur eve, much of the population observes the holiday and therefore the streets are almost completely empty. Secular Israelis have made it a holiday tradition to bike and rollerblade through the empty streets.



23. The San Francisco Police Department estimates that 90% of bike thieves are drug addicts, and bicycles are considered a form of street currency.



24. The world’s fastest bicycle was custom designed for £1,000,000, took four years to make, has a theoretical top speed of 250 mph and has such a high gear ratio that it can travel 150 feet for every turn of the pedals.



25. Race Across America is a bicycle race that is 700 miles longer than the Tour de France and has no stages. This means the competitors race about 3,000 miles and rarely stop.

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