1890
ISAAC MURPHY’S SILK PURSE
The best jockey of the nineteenth century and perhaps of all time, Isaac Murphy won a record 34 percent of his 1,538 mounts.1 When the Racing Hall of Fame was founded in 1955, he was the first jockey to be inducted. His is a story of grit and athletic genius. But because Murphy was black, it is also more complicated than that. He was the greatest of the long line of great black jockeys and had the highest profile; he might well be thought of as the first black superstar athlete.
Murphy was born in Kentucky in 1861 to enslaved parents. His father joined the Union Army and died shortly after the end of the Civil War; his mother moved to Lexington. At age 12, Murphy was apprenticed to a stable.2 For a black male, this was an excellent career choice. Historically, slaves had run the day-to-day work of racing—everything from breeding to foaling to training to riding—earning themselves unusual status and sometimes a degree of autonomy.3 After emancipation, the tradition endured. Racing was an area in which the opinions of black Americans were valued. Some even moved into the ranks of ownership.
The first time Murphy got on a racehorse, though, it threw him, and he was in tears at the thought of having to remount.4 But he did. More important, he began to understand the half ton of nervous energy beneath his saddle. Murphy rarely had to use the whip; he could ride “to hand,” communicating through touch and something like telepathy. He rode his first winner in 1876, as an 87-pound 15-year-old. By 1879 he had begun to be noticed.
In 1884 he separated himself from the pack, winning the three biggest races in the state: the Kentucky Oaks, the Kentucky Derby, and the Clark Stakes. He earned about $10,000 that year,5 making him one of the most affluent black men in America. He might also have been the country’s highest-paid athlete.6
For the next six years, Murphy was the finest jockey in the land. He was known for being able to pace his mounts with uncanny precision and for winning by just enough; these close finishes were known as “Murfinishes.”7 Self-assured but reserved in public, Murphy rode that way, too, with total control and stillness in the saddle. And in a field rich in skullduggery, “Honest Ike” was considered incorruptible.8
In 1890 he had his finest year, but it ended on a troubled note. At Monmouth Park in August, Murphy ran an inexplicable race aboard the favorite, Firenze, pulling him this way and that. Firenze finished last, and Murphy looked much the worse for wear. The papers diagnosed drunkenness, and the authorities suspended him. Murphy denied the charge. In later months he wondered if he had been poisoned, and some evidence supports that idea. In the immediate aftermath, he simply said he was unwell.9 Although the executive committee that looked into the incident concluded that Murphy “wasn’t and couldn’t have been drunk,”10 he had already been convicted in the court of public opinion. Murphy would never ride quite as high again.
He won the Kentucky Derby again in 1891—in a race so slow that it became known as the “Funeral Procession Derby.”11 The winnings were presented in this silk purse.
The victory made Murphy the first jockey to win two Derbies in a row, but at age 30, making weight had become increasingly difficult, and half a lifetime of crash diets and purging had undermined his health. His career was sinking. Murphy won only a handful of times in 1892 and 1893, and not at all in 1894. Shortly after his last race in 1895,12 he caught pneumonia; he died in February 1896.
There may have been another factor in his decline. Black jockeys were being systematically squeezed out of the profession, just as black Kentuckians in general were being constrained. In 1892 the Kentucky legislature passed a bill segregating train cars, the first formal expression of Jim Crow laws. For jockeys, the most important year was 1894, when the National Jockey Club put in place formal licensing requirements for jockeys and trainers—and then denied licenses to blacks.13 White jockeys did their bit, too; they attacked their black colleagues so often during races that owners began to think that having a black jockey aboard constituted a danger to their horses.14
As racial attitudes hardened, opportunities narrowed: No black jockey has ridden a winner in a Triple Crown race since Jimmy Winkfield in the 1902 Kentucky Derby. That is particularly ironic, since Kentucky was a historic source of black racing talent, and the Derby was their race. In the first Derby, in 1875, 14 of the 15 jockeys were black,15 and black jockeys won 15 of the first 2816 races. It didn’t help that in one of the country’s spasms of righteousness, many states began to shut down racecourses; there were only 25 left by 1908.17 When a number of them reopened, it was easy to exclude blacks.18
1891
JAMES NAISMITH’S ORIGINAL RULES OF BASKETBALL
E
ven young men training to be Christian missionaries are young men, with the limited attention span not uncommon to the species. And that presented a problem to James Naismith, a Canadian chaplain working at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. He faced a rambunctious class of future administrators; the students enjoyed football in the fall and baseball in the spring but were vocally unhappy with the winter options available to them.1 Swedish drill, marching, and mass calisthenics failed to appeal, and the men flatly refused to play “drop the handkerchief.”2 They had already chewed through two instructors.
In December 1891 it was Naismith’s turn. His orders were to invent a noncontact indoor sport that the boys wouldn’t loathe. But his attempts at indoor football, lacrosse, and soccer had all failed, and the “class of incorrigibles”3 was more fractious than ever. Thoroughly discouraged, Naismith sat at his desk to think.
The men liked ball games, so any new game must use a ball, a big one so that it could not be hidden and could be easily caught and thrown. If there was no running with the ball, there would be no need for tackling. So that was another rule. What, then, to do with the ball? Well, pass it—in any direction. To what end? Some sort of a goal was required. Inspiration struck again. If the goal was placed high, the players could not cluster around it, and the ball would be lofted, rather than thrown hard. Naismith knew he had something here; he dreamed of the game that night.4
The next morning he nailed two peach baskets to the lower rail of a balcony, 10 feet above the gym floor. Then he asked an assistant to type up his 13 rules, which she did, on the two pages shown here. Naismith tacked them up to the bulletin board and went out to face the class of 18 incorrigibles. In fewer than 500 words, Naismith had sketched the outlines for what became one of the world’s most popular sports.5
Naismith would hardly recognize the above-the-rim theatrics of today’s hoops, but the game is clearly visible in and between these lines. It is still true, for example, that the ball can be passed in any direction (rule 1), that running with the ball is forbidden (rule 3), and that scoring occurs by putting the ball in the basket (rule 8). The game evolved quickly, with specialized balls and free throws introduced in 1894; five-man teams were standard by 1897. Other rules have disappeared, such as the rule against three straight fouls. Still, if a team were to play strictly by the 1891 rules, the result would look like basketball.
The sport spread far and fast. For that, the YMCA can take all the credit. Founded in London in 1844, the Y came to the United States before the Civil War and spread quickly in the rapidly urbanizing young country. Luther Gulick, Naismith’s boss, was one of the more eloquent apostles of the idea of “muscular Christianity,” which was a response to the prevailing impression that Christianity was becoming feminized, dominated by strong women and weak men. “Body and soul are both so closely related that one affects the other,” Gulick argued. “Christ’s kingdom should include the athletic world.”6 The Y used sports to draw young men away from the lures of city streets; in addition, its leaders believed that sports themselves could teach character and ethics. In effect, the Y helped to legitimize sports as a constructive activity,7 even if that was not its sole intention.
A month after the first game, the Y’s newspaper, The Triangle, printed the rules, and branches all over the country began to play. There was an international dimension almost from the start. By 1893 a French graduate had introduced the game there.8 Overseas missionaries trained by the Y spread the game. Hoops was being played in parts of China before it penetrated some areas of the United States.
Women took to basketball remarkably quickly. The game was no more than a month old when women began to play. They must have looked odd, in their street shoes and leg-of-mutton sleeves, but they kept coming back. In a few weeks there were enough females with some skill to play a game against each other. Naismith was impressed; in fact, he married one of the participants.9
Senda Berenson,10 a young Lithuanian-born physical education instructor at Smith College, about 20 miles from Springfield, came to take a look a few weeks after Naismith posted his 13 theses. She liked what she saw. After a few weeks of practice, she arranged a game between her first- and second-year students, in March 1892.11 “The girls went wild,” according to one account, “and the spectators yelled and cheered at the top of their lungs.”12
Berenson was both pleased and unsettled. She believed that exercise was important for women and had no patience with the types who “thought fainting interesting and hysterics fascinating.”13 Nor did she share the view of much of the medical profession that physical exertion would imperil women’s reproductive capabilities by depleting their “vital force.” But she did think that competition would lead to rough play that was unwomanly and harmful to the female psyche. On that basis, she refused to allow Smith to play other schools.14 For reasons of both aesthetics and principle, then, girls gone wild is not what Berenson had in mind.15
She decided to feminize the game, forbidding swatting the ball away and dividing the court into three zones that no player could stray across. Some form of this idea would be common in women’s basketball for more than 75 years. Another Berenson rule was that no player could hold the ball for more than three seconds; this made for a game in which passing and ball-handling were at a premium. Berenson wrote the first book of women’s rules in 1899 and edited it for the next 18 years.
After leaving the Y, Naismith got a medical degree and then became a physical education instructor at the University of Kansas, where he worked from 1898 to 1937 (with a hiatus for service in World War I). He started a basketball team, of course; ironically, he is the only coach in Kansas history to post a losing record (55–60). His successor was Phog Allen, who coached the Jayhawks from 1907 to 1909 and 1919 to 1956 and helped to create the National Collegiate Athletic Association end-of-season hoops tournament. Allen taught both Adolph Rupp of Kentucky (876 wins) and Dean Smith of North Carolina (879 wins). Their protégés include such coaches as Larry Brown, Joe B. Hall, Pat Riley, and Roy Williams. In short, Kansas is the wellspring of college hoops. The Jayhawks play on the James Naismith Court in the Allen Fieldhouse, which is on Naismith Drive. It is appropriate, then, that in 2010, a Kansas graduate bought the 13 rules for $4.3 million and donated them to the university.
1892
RECORD OF PAYMENT FOR FIRST PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYER
I
t’s just two lines on a loose-leaf page: “Game performance bonus to W. Heffelfinger for playing (cash) $500.00.” But that entry for the November 12, 1892, game between two Pittsburgh teams, shown in this photo, marks the first time a player was openly paid. That makes William “Pudge” Heffelfinger the first pigskin professional. Considering the average American was making around $700 a year at the time, it was an excellent payday for the all-American guard from Yale, who was recruited to play for the Allegheny Athletic Association as a ringer against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. The ploy worked: Heffelfinger scored the game-winning touchdown. He helped at the box office, too; at the time, he might have been the most famous player in the country.1
To put his pay in context, consider that it accounted for almost half the day’s total expenses ($1,062) and almost as much as the day’s profit ($621). Those figures look comically small; the day’s revenues totaled just $1,683.50. But the beginning of any enterprise is as much an act of imagination as of economics, and that is what this receipt represents.
1892
SAFETY BICYCLE
S
ocial change can occur through war or revolution. It can come from the genius of inventors tinkering in a garage or from people peacefully crossing a bridge. And it can come, entirely unexpectedly, on two wheels. That is the story of the safety bicycle, a device that, no less an authority than Susan B. Anthony boasted, “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”
The first popular bicycle dated to the 1860s. Known as the velocipede, the pennyfarthing, or the “boneshaker,”1 it had one huge and one small wheel; it was heavy, unsafe, undignified, and perilous to mount. Women found the temptation to climb aboard easy to resist.
The safety bicycle, which debuted in 1885,2 solved all those problems; its wheels were the same size, making the bike much more stable. The chain-gear drive made it easier to pedal. And the development and improvement of the pneumatic tire made for a smoother, faster ride.3 The final innovation was the “drop frame,” which made it possible for women in skirts to hop on with grace and modesty. By the mid-1890s the bike was recognizably modern4—and women took to it with verve.
At a time when it was an entirely settled matter that the middle-class woman’s place was in the home, the bicycle allowed them to expand their geographic boundaries. Many chaperones could not keep up with their charges, and it became possible, even acceptable, for young couples to go cycling together. Even with the drop frame, riding in ankle-length skirts and corsets was problematic, and this dovetailed with the “dress reform” movement, which called for less constricting attire. Many women switched to comfortable footwear, shook off their bustles and corsets, and adopted (slightly) shorter, divided skirts.
There was pushback against all this freedom. One female physician warned that cycling could lead to everything from gout to tuberculosis to epilepsy and cancer.5 A more general concern was that straddling the bike saddle could damage the “feminine organs of matrimonial necessity,” as one European put it.6 Another worry, difficult to put into print, was that women would experience new feelings and, in a sense, become debauched by the bike. Clergymen despaired that girls and women were skipping church in favor of riding into the countryside. With males. Unescorted. Where would it all end? “Bicycling by young women,” charged the Women’s Rescue League, “has helped more than any medium to swell the ranks of reckless girls, who finally drift into the army of outcast women.”7 They were willing to risk it.
So the first important consequence of the bicycle for women was that, in an astonishingly short time, it became conventional wisdom that exercise was good for them, and would help to “rid them of vapors and nerves.”8 The British Medical Journal concluded: “There is no reason whatever why any sound woman should not ride either a bicycle or a tricycle.” No racing though, and not during menstruation or for at least three months after giving birth. Still, this was progress. The idea that exercise would not undermine women’s femininity or make them unfit mothers was revolutionary.9
In 1890 there were about 150,000 Americans riding bikes; by 1896, there were four million.10 Perhaps a third were women. Just as quickly as it started, however, the bicycle craze crashed. By 1902 production was down to 250,000 a year.11 The novelty had worn off, and manufacturers who had proven so innovative a decade before had lost their creative spark.
But the influence of the bicycle did not end with the death of the craze. For one thing, the bicycle literally paved the way for the car, as the shocking condition of American roads became all too obvious. Bicyclists pushed, successfully, for improvements, in the form of smoother surfaces, better lighting, and increased signage.12 This was critical to making roads fit for cars.
In addition, bike manufacturers were in the vanguard in the use of the assembly line, the development of precision manufacturing, and the standardization of components.13 Henry Ford was a former bicycle mechanic; so were several of the pioneers of aviation, including the Wright brothers. The early automobile and aviation industries borrowed copiously from the bicycle, including the use of pneumatic tires, differential gears, ball bearings, and chain and shaft drives. The Wrights rode a specially fitted bicycle through a wind tunnel to test lift and drag.14
The safety bicycle pictured on the previous page was owned by Frances Willard—largely forgotten now, but famous and influential in her day. A temperance reformer who was also active in the suffrage, public health, and labor movements, Willard was the first woman to be featured in the Statuary Hall in the US Capitol.15 In 1892, at age 53, depressed and grieving after the death of her mother, she decided to learn to ride a bike. She adored it, and wrote a short book in 1895 that is still in print, A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride a Bicycle.
The book suffers from a surfeit of earnestness, with too much deep meaning ascribed to a two-wheeler. But Willard’s delight in Gladys, the name she gave to her metal steed, is endearing. Gladys, she wrote, was “as full of kinks as the most spirited mare that sweeps the course.” However overwrought her extended essay, Willard appears to be entirely sincere: “I found a whole philosophy of life in the wooing and winning of my bicycle.”16 Her last words to her readers ring with the fervor of the convert: “Moral: Go thou and do likewise.”17
ISAAC MURPHY’S SILK PURSE
The best jockey of the nineteenth century and perhaps of all time, Isaac Murphy won a record 34 percent of his 1,538 mounts.1 When the Racing Hall of Fame was founded in 1955, he was the first jockey to be inducted. His is a story of grit and athletic genius. But because Murphy was black, it is also more complicated than that. He was the greatest of the long line of great black jockeys and had the highest profile; he might well be thought of as the first black superstar athlete.
Murphy was born in Kentucky in 1861 to enslaved parents. His father joined the Union Army and died shortly after the end of the Civil War; his mother moved to Lexington. At age 12, Murphy was apprenticed to a stable.2 For a black male, this was an excellent career choice. Historically, slaves had run the day-to-day work of racing—everything from breeding to foaling to training to riding—earning themselves unusual status and sometimes a degree of autonomy.3 After emancipation, the tradition endured. Racing was an area in which the opinions of black Americans were valued. Some even moved into the ranks of ownership.
The first time Murphy got on a racehorse, though, it threw him, and he was in tears at the thought of having to remount.4 But he did. More important, he began to understand the half ton of nervous energy beneath his saddle. Murphy rarely had to use the whip; he could ride “to hand,” communicating through touch and something like telepathy. He rode his first winner in 1876, as an 87-pound 15-year-old. By 1879 he had begun to be noticed.
In 1884 he separated himself from the pack, winning the three biggest races in the state: the Kentucky Oaks, the Kentucky Derby, and the Clark Stakes. He earned about $10,000 that year,5 making him one of the most affluent black men in America. He might also have been the country’s highest-paid athlete.6
For the next six years, Murphy was the finest jockey in the land. He was known for being able to pace his mounts with uncanny precision and for winning by just enough; these close finishes were known as “Murfinishes.”7 Self-assured but reserved in public, Murphy rode that way, too, with total control and stillness in the saddle. And in a field rich in skullduggery, “Honest Ike” was considered incorruptible.8
In 1890 he had his finest year, but it ended on a troubled note. At Monmouth Park in August, Murphy ran an inexplicable race aboard the favorite, Firenze, pulling him this way and that. Firenze finished last, and Murphy looked much the worse for wear. The papers diagnosed drunkenness, and the authorities suspended him. Murphy denied the charge. In later months he wondered if he had been poisoned, and some evidence supports that idea. In the immediate aftermath, he simply said he was unwell.9 Although the executive committee that looked into the incident concluded that Murphy “wasn’t and couldn’t have been drunk,”10 he had already been convicted in the court of public opinion. Murphy would never ride quite as high again.
He won the Kentucky Derby again in 1891—in a race so slow that it became known as the “Funeral Procession Derby.”11 The winnings were presented in this silk purse.
The victory made Murphy the first jockey to win two Derbies in a row, but at age 30, making weight had become increasingly difficult, and half a lifetime of crash diets and purging had undermined his health. His career was sinking. Murphy won only a handful of times in 1892 and 1893, and not at all in 1894. Shortly after his last race in 1895,12 he caught pneumonia; he died in February 1896.
There may have been another factor in his decline. Black jockeys were being systematically squeezed out of the profession, just as black Kentuckians in general were being constrained. In 1892 the Kentucky legislature passed a bill segregating train cars, the first formal expression of Jim Crow laws. For jockeys, the most important year was 1894, when the National Jockey Club put in place formal licensing requirements for jockeys and trainers—and then denied licenses to blacks.13 White jockeys did their bit, too; they attacked their black colleagues so often during races that owners began to think that having a black jockey aboard constituted a danger to their horses.14
As racial attitudes hardened, opportunities narrowed: No black jockey has ridden a winner in a Triple Crown race since Jimmy Winkfield in the 1902 Kentucky Derby. That is particularly ironic, since Kentucky was a historic source of black racing talent, and the Derby was their race. In the first Derby, in 1875, 14 of the 15 jockeys were black,15 and black jockeys won 15 of the first 2816 races. It didn’t help that in one of the country’s spasms of righteousness, many states began to shut down racecourses; there were only 25 left by 1908.17 When a number of them reopened, it was easy to exclude blacks.18
1891
JAMES NAISMITH’S ORIGINAL RULES OF BASKETBALL
E
ven young men training to be Christian missionaries are young men, with the limited attention span not uncommon to the species. And that presented a problem to James Naismith, a Canadian chaplain working at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. He faced a rambunctious class of future administrators; the students enjoyed football in the fall and baseball in the spring but were vocally unhappy with the winter options available to them.1 Swedish drill, marching, and mass calisthenics failed to appeal, and the men flatly refused to play “drop the handkerchief.”2 They had already chewed through two instructors.
In December 1891 it was Naismith’s turn. His orders were to invent a noncontact indoor sport that the boys wouldn’t loathe. But his attempts at indoor football, lacrosse, and soccer had all failed, and the “class of incorrigibles”3 was more fractious than ever. Thoroughly discouraged, Naismith sat at his desk to think.
The men liked ball games, so any new game must use a ball, a big one so that it could not be hidden and could be easily caught and thrown. If there was no running with the ball, there would be no need for tackling. So that was another rule. What, then, to do with the ball? Well, pass it—in any direction. To what end? Some sort of a goal was required. Inspiration struck again. If the goal was placed high, the players could not cluster around it, and the ball would be lofted, rather than thrown hard. Naismith knew he had something here; he dreamed of the game that night.4
The next morning he nailed two peach baskets to the lower rail of a balcony, 10 feet above the gym floor. Then he asked an assistant to type up his 13 rules, which she did, on the two pages shown here. Naismith tacked them up to the bulletin board and went out to face the class of 18 incorrigibles. In fewer than 500 words, Naismith had sketched the outlines for what became one of the world’s most popular sports.5
Naismith would hardly recognize the above-the-rim theatrics of today’s hoops, but the game is clearly visible in and between these lines. It is still true, for example, that the ball can be passed in any direction (rule 1), that running with the ball is forbidden (rule 3), and that scoring occurs by putting the ball in the basket (rule 8). The game evolved quickly, with specialized balls and free throws introduced in 1894; five-man teams were standard by 1897. Other rules have disappeared, such as the rule against three straight fouls. Still, if a team were to play strictly by the 1891 rules, the result would look like basketball.
The sport spread far and fast. For that, the YMCA can take all the credit. Founded in London in 1844, the Y came to the United States before the Civil War and spread quickly in the rapidly urbanizing young country. Luther Gulick, Naismith’s boss, was one of the more eloquent apostles of the idea of “muscular Christianity,” which was a response to the prevailing impression that Christianity was becoming feminized, dominated by strong women and weak men. “Body and soul are both so closely related that one affects the other,” Gulick argued. “Christ’s kingdom should include the athletic world.”6 The Y used sports to draw young men away from the lures of city streets; in addition, its leaders believed that sports themselves could teach character and ethics. In effect, the Y helped to legitimize sports as a constructive activity,7 even if that was not its sole intention.
A month after the first game, the Y’s newspaper, The Triangle, printed the rules, and branches all over the country began to play. There was an international dimension almost from the start. By 1893 a French graduate had introduced the game there.8 Overseas missionaries trained by the Y spread the game. Hoops was being played in parts of China before it penetrated some areas of the United States.
Women took to basketball remarkably quickly. The game was no more than a month old when women began to play. They must have looked odd, in their street shoes and leg-of-mutton sleeves, but they kept coming back. In a few weeks there were enough females with some skill to play a game against each other. Naismith was impressed; in fact, he married one of the participants.9
Senda Berenson,10 a young Lithuanian-born physical education instructor at Smith College, about 20 miles from Springfield, came to take a look a few weeks after Naismith posted his 13 theses. She liked what she saw. After a few weeks of practice, she arranged a game between her first- and second-year students, in March 1892.11 “The girls went wild,” according to one account, “and the spectators yelled and cheered at the top of their lungs.”12
Berenson was both pleased and unsettled. She believed that exercise was important for women and had no patience with the types who “thought fainting interesting and hysterics fascinating.”13 Nor did she share the view of much of the medical profession that physical exertion would imperil women’s reproductive capabilities by depleting their “vital force.” But she did think that competition would lead to rough play that was unwomanly and harmful to the female psyche. On that basis, she refused to allow Smith to play other schools.14 For reasons of both aesthetics and principle, then, girls gone wild is not what Berenson had in mind.15
She decided to feminize the game, forbidding swatting the ball away and dividing the court into three zones that no player could stray across. Some form of this idea would be common in women’s basketball for more than 75 years. Another Berenson rule was that no player could hold the ball for more than three seconds; this made for a game in which passing and ball-handling were at a premium. Berenson wrote the first book of women’s rules in 1899 and edited it for the next 18 years.
After leaving the Y, Naismith got a medical degree and then became a physical education instructor at the University of Kansas, where he worked from 1898 to 1937 (with a hiatus for service in World War I). He started a basketball team, of course; ironically, he is the only coach in Kansas history to post a losing record (55–60). His successor was Phog Allen, who coached the Jayhawks from 1907 to 1909 and 1919 to 1956 and helped to create the National Collegiate Athletic Association end-of-season hoops tournament. Allen taught both Adolph Rupp of Kentucky (876 wins) and Dean Smith of North Carolina (879 wins). Their protégés include such coaches as Larry Brown, Joe B. Hall, Pat Riley, and Roy Williams. In short, Kansas is the wellspring of college hoops. The Jayhawks play on the James Naismith Court in the Allen Fieldhouse, which is on Naismith Drive. It is appropriate, then, that in 2010, a Kansas graduate bought the 13 rules for $4.3 million and donated them to the university.
1892
RECORD OF PAYMENT FOR FIRST PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYER
I
t’s just two lines on a loose-leaf page: “Game performance bonus to W. Heffelfinger for playing (cash) $500.00.” But that entry for the November 12, 1892, game between two Pittsburgh teams, shown in this photo, marks the first time a player was openly paid. That makes William “Pudge” Heffelfinger the first pigskin professional. Considering the average American was making around $700 a year at the time, it was an excellent payday for the all-American guard from Yale, who was recruited to play for the Allegheny Athletic Association as a ringer against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. The ploy worked: Heffelfinger scored the game-winning touchdown. He helped at the box office, too; at the time, he might have been the most famous player in the country.1
To put his pay in context, consider that it accounted for almost half the day’s total expenses ($1,062) and almost as much as the day’s profit ($621). Those figures look comically small; the day’s revenues totaled just $1,683.50. But the beginning of any enterprise is as much an act of imagination as of economics, and that is what this receipt represents.
1892
SAFETY BICYCLE
S
ocial change can occur through war or revolution. It can come from the genius of inventors tinkering in a garage or from people peacefully crossing a bridge. And it can come, entirely unexpectedly, on two wheels. That is the story of the safety bicycle, a device that, no less an authority than Susan B. Anthony boasted, “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”
The first popular bicycle dated to the 1860s. Known as the velocipede, the pennyfarthing, or the “boneshaker,”1 it had one huge and one small wheel; it was heavy, unsafe, undignified, and perilous to mount. Women found the temptation to climb aboard easy to resist.
The safety bicycle, which debuted in 1885,2 solved all those problems; its wheels were the same size, making the bike much more stable. The chain-gear drive made it easier to pedal. And the development and improvement of the pneumatic tire made for a smoother, faster ride.3 The final innovation was the “drop frame,” which made it possible for women in skirts to hop on with grace and modesty. By the mid-1890s the bike was recognizably modern4—and women took to it with verve.
At a time when it was an entirely settled matter that the middle-class woman’s place was in the home, the bicycle allowed them to expand their geographic boundaries. Many chaperones could not keep up with their charges, and it became possible, even acceptable, for young couples to go cycling together. Even with the drop frame, riding in ankle-length skirts and corsets was problematic, and this dovetailed with the “dress reform” movement, which called for less constricting attire. Many women switched to comfortable footwear, shook off their bustles and corsets, and adopted (slightly) shorter, divided skirts.
There was pushback against all this freedom. One female physician warned that cycling could lead to everything from gout to tuberculosis to epilepsy and cancer.5 A more general concern was that straddling the bike saddle could damage the “feminine organs of matrimonial necessity,” as one European put it.6 Another worry, difficult to put into print, was that women would experience new feelings and, in a sense, become debauched by the bike. Clergymen despaired that girls and women were skipping church in favor of riding into the countryside. With males. Unescorted. Where would it all end? “Bicycling by young women,” charged the Women’s Rescue League, “has helped more than any medium to swell the ranks of reckless girls, who finally drift into the army of outcast women.”7 They were willing to risk it.
So the first important consequence of the bicycle for women was that, in an astonishingly short time, it became conventional wisdom that exercise was good for them, and would help to “rid them of vapors and nerves.”8 The British Medical Journal concluded: “There is no reason whatever why any sound woman should not ride either a bicycle or a tricycle.” No racing though, and not during menstruation or for at least three months after giving birth. Still, this was progress. The idea that exercise would not undermine women’s femininity or make them unfit mothers was revolutionary.9
In 1890 there were about 150,000 Americans riding bikes; by 1896, there were four million.10 Perhaps a third were women. Just as quickly as it started, however, the bicycle craze crashed. By 1902 production was down to 250,000 a year.11 The novelty had worn off, and manufacturers who had proven so innovative a decade before had lost their creative spark.
But the influence of the bicycle did not end with the death of the craze. For one thing, the bicycle literally paved the way for the car, as the shocking condition of American roads became all too obvious. Bicyclists pushed, successfully, for improvements, in the form of smoother surfaces, better lighting, and increased signage.12 This was critical to making roads fit for cars.
In addition, bike manufacturers were in the vanguard in the use of the assembly line, the development of precision manufacturing, and the standardization of components.13 Henry Ford was a former bicycle mechanic; so were several of the pioneers of aviation, including the Wright brothers. The early automobile and aviation industries borrowed copiously from the bicycle, including the use of pneumatic tires, differential gears, ball bearings, and chain and shaft drives. The Wrights rode a specially fitted bicycle through a wind tunnel to test lift and drag.14
The safety bicycle pictured on the previous page was owned by Frances Willard—largely forgotten now, but famous and influential in her day. A temperance reformer who was also active in the suffrage, public health, and labor movements, Willard was the first woman to be featured in the Statuary Hall in the US Capitol.15 In 1892, at age 53, depressed and grieving after the death of her mother, she decided to learn to ride a bike. She adored it, and wrote a short book in 1895 that is still in print, A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride a Bicycle.
The book suffers from a surfeit of earnestness, with too much deep meaning ascribed to a two-wheeler. But Willard’s delight in Gladys, the name she gave to her metal steed, is endearing. Gladys, she wrote, was “as full of kinks as the most spirited mare that sweeps the course.” However overwrought her extended essay, Willard appears to be entirely sincere: “I found a whole philosophy of life in the wooing and winning of my bicycle.”16 Her last words to her readers ring with the fervor of the convert: “Moral: Go thou and do likewise.”17
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