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Snippets on the Hobby Horse
You’ll be relieved to know that today’s dive into history is more obviously horse related than yesterday’s.
This time, I was looking for some bio information on one Lord Sherbrooke. One of the first articles to pop up (again from “Talk of the Times”) is titled “Lord Sherbrooke’s Race.” The 1885 article discusses stages in the development of the bicycle, and you will be fascinated to know, I am sure, that the original nick-name of the bicycle appears to have been “the bone-shaker” and that initially the weight of the bicycle itself meant that they could not be ridden for long distances. However, the invention of the suspension wheel and certain other improvements meant that “a racing bicycle for a man of 11 stone need not weight more than 27 pounds.”
Vast improvement!
However, before the article ever dives into the dramatic advances in bicycle technology, it pauses to recount the race of Lord Sherbrooke, on a hobby horse, against a horse-drawn carriage:
He [Lord Sherbrooke] tells the story of his race with the Oxford coach, in which for a mile he kept ahead of the mail. The driver put his horses into a gallop, but did not catch him till a rise in the ground proved too much for his wind. I asked him the other day whether I might tell the story, and he said, “Perhaps to be strictly accurate you ought to add that I was careful to choose ground that was just a leetle downhill.”
The article author (Viscount Bury) goes on to say that Sherbrooke could certainly reproduce this feat (outracing a mail coach) on a modern bicycle. Which made me curious: if Sherbrooke was not on a bicycle in 1830, when he raced the mail coach, what was he riding? What, exactly, was a hobby horse?
Call me naive, but I thought a hobby horse was a stick with a horse’s head on it, but clearly, from the context of this article, it wasn’t.
So far as I can tell, “hobby horse” is what they called early bicycles. Also note in the following images that the contraptions had no pedals, and would have been pushed along with the rider’s legs. No wonder the weight of the invention mattered so much: think how unwieldy it is to scoot along on a modern bike like that, and then think that a 27-pound bicycle some forty years later would be hailed as “light”!
For some images (some pretty amusing), visit “Velocipede Mania”. (Note: site appears to be selling prints; I’ve never heard of them and have no comment on/experience with their services.)
Having seen the images, and realizing the hobby-horse Lord Sherbrooke rode on when he raced the mail coach probably had no pedals, I have to say that it is a pretty cool achievement. Well, depending on how downhill “just a leetle downhill” really is…
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On May 25, 2009, Funder said:
I had completely forgotten that early bicycles didn’t have pedals. He almost won a race versus a mail coach with no pedals!? How cool.