Sounds like a children's story - The Genuinely Ingenious Engine - and maybe it is, for the story of the bicycle and of cycling is not at all removed from the narrative of the child in each of us.
Part of the genius of the bicycle is precisely this: its capacity to transform us, to create much from little, to coax out of us that kindred spirit which may have been buried beneath too much 'adulthood'. The bicycle's lightness (we are travelling on air after all), combined with that natural ventilation that comes with moving through air, conspires to cancel out gravity - whether physically through our now flying - or psychologically through dispelling any grave concerns and seriousness. The air is all important...
The cyclist is not just some kind of pilot, but fundamentally, an engineer, and, by etymological extension, a genius! One could almost say that the cyclist is the engine itself since he/she is 'the device through which energy is converted to mechanical power and motion'. Moving under one's own steam might seem trivial to some, but when our society is increasingly being undone by the popular and pernicious act of being transported (both physically and mentally), it is both crucial and vital that we pay it due attention. We are all geniuses if only we could learn to move under our own steam, and decry the temptation to be carried by others.
The cyclist creates everything from almost nothing, becoming the most energy-efficient of all... animals and machines and, as such, has a [genuine] ability to challenge the entire value system of a society.... The bicycle may be too cheap, too available, too healthy, too independent and too equitable for its own good. In an age of excess it is minimal and has the subversive potential to make people happy in an economy fuelled by consumer discontent.
Jim McGurn
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