>> Deb Crawford: Thank you for coming. My name is Deb Crawford and I'm here to welcome
David Herlihy who is joining us as part of the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. David
has researched the invention and early development of the bicycle and will be discussing his
new book Bicycle, a History. He is a historian and a writer. His work has been featured on NPR,
in the New York Times and several other publications. He's also the author of The Lost Cyclist,
the epic tale of the American adventurer and his mysterious disappearance. Please join me in
giving him a warm welcome. [applause]
>> David Herlihy: Thank you. Thank you Deb. Thank you very much. What I'm going to show
you today are photos taken in 1891 by two young Americans who were cycling around the
world and you see them pictured here. This was kind of their studio shot when they started
this tour taken in London in the fall of 1890. And they were riding what were known as safety
bicycles which is really the prototype of contemporary bicycles that would eventually replace
the high wheelers and you'll see a few photos of those in a minute. That was one of the novel
aspects of this tour was the fact that they were going to ride this type of bicycle. And the other,
another novel aspect was they bought before they started a pair of Kodak cameras and they
were relatively compact compared to conventional cameras of the day, and instead of using
glass plates, they used film and so they were also kind of on the state-of-the-art from the point
of view of photography as well. And something like 40 years ago UCLA came across a collection
of something like 400 of the original nitrate negatives taken by one of those Kodaks and that's
what we'll be looking at in a moment. But I want to give you a little more background first
about these two. They were both Midwesterners. They graduated from Washington University
in St. Louis and they weren't cyclist until their senior year when the safety became all the rage
and they decided as soon as they graduated that they would go over to Liverpool England and
buy a pair of safety bicycles. The original idea was just to tool around the British Isles, but they
had such a great time of it that they decided that they would continue around the world and in
London they made their announcement. Just to give you a little more background before we
actually look at some of the photos they took from the point of bicycle technology, there's
really three basic phases. There's the original what we call boneshaker which was introduced
around the year of 1867, ‘68 and its curious to note that the original, one of the first cycling
journals in France [indiscernible] in 1869 carried a series of articles about a certain Jonathan
Schopp who was supposedly on his way around the world on a bicycle, but in fact, of course, it
was fictitious because you wouldn't want to ride, you wouldn't get very far around the world on
that. It weighed probably a hundred pounds and it was solid iron frame and wooden carriage
wheels et cetera. But the bicycle developed fairly rapidly; so by the 1880s you had what some
people know as the Penny Farthing pictured there. Whoops, that's the wrong device. This is
what I want. Okay. So this thing comes along and in some ways it might look like a regression
because the profile was a lot more intimidating than this one was, but it was much better
constructed so tubes, wire wheels, solid rubber tires and it was reasonably roadworthy. So the
idea of going around the world on a bicycle was no longer the stuff of pure fantasy by the 1880s
and a gentleman by the name of Thomas Stevens was credited with the first round the world
journey starting in 1884 and he logged about 14,000 miles on three continents. Allen and
Sachtleben begin their trip about three years later, but they again opted for the safety bike, so
they had the distinction of riding the first sort of what we might call modern bicycle around the
world. Shortly after they started a gentleman named Frank Lenz also went, began a trip around
the world on a safety, but he used pneumatic inflatable tires so that was kind of his new spin.
There's actually a connection between this gentleman and Lenz in that Lenz would actually not
make it home. He would disappear in Turkey which is the subject of my other book, The Lost
Cyclist and Sachtelben would be the one who would go searching for him, so that's kind of an
aside. So it was the globe girdling that would make Allen and Sachtleben famous but the other
interesting aspect of the trip again was the technology they were using for photographs and
that part has not, has been relatively overlooked. So again, if you go back to the boneshaker
era, photography by then was already about 20 years old at that point, but originally it was just
the Garrick types and it was one off images and by the 1860s they were using glass plates, glass
negatives so that you could reproduce the images on paper and that really brought down the
cost and popularized photography. So of course it was very natural to think well why not give a
photographer a bicycle and then they could go ride around then take photos wherever they
want. So that idea was immediately apparent, but again, the technology really precluded that
because first of all the bike was still very crude but also photography, they were using
something called the wet process which meant you had to have a portable darkroom. You had
to prepare the glass plates with chemicals and then ten minutes later take your expose it, and
then go back in the darkroom and develop it, so you'd have to carry a small laboratory and a
portable darkroom on this kind of bike. So the idea was there but it wasn't very practical. But
again, when you get to the high wheel era it did, the idea of a cycle photographer really was
possible though not necessarily easy because again, this was a rather precarious vehicle as you
can imagine. It had the tendency to flip over and you could suffer what was called a header, so
first of all you had to be bold enough to ride one of these things and you had to carry a fair
amount of hardware with the glass plates. So the dry process did simplify things so at that
point you no longer had to prepare the glass plates before exposing them nor did you have to
develop them right away, so it was theoretically possible to be a cycle photographer as Frank
Lenz would be. And I'll show you some of his work as well. But what Allen and Sachtleben did
is they combined this technology with the new Kodak and so they really showed for the first
time how, at that point almost anyone really could be a cycle photographer. You didn't have to
be an expert cyclist to ride this and you didn't have to be an accomplished amateur
photographer to use a Kodak. And you could also take snapshots, spontaneous pictures rather
than the more staged variety of -- so it really opened up a whole new era of cycle photography.
So again, what made these guys famous was their trip around the world. This is a letter of
introduction. The last leg of Allen and Sachtleben’s world tour was crossing the United States in
early 1893 and this was a letter they used -- they were on their fourth set of bicycles at that
point and Victor was the maker and the agent in San Francisco provided them with this little
letter of introduction which mentions, you know, their famous world journey and so forth. But
again, it's really photography that we are focusing on here. So again, this image of cycle tricycle
dates from 1869, so you can see that this is again the wet process, so the inventor had to
conceive of a portable darkroom plus enough space to carry all the chemical, again, not a very
practical idea. But here's Frank Lenz. He becomes one of the most, one of the earliest
accomplished cycle photographers on his high wheeler. He was clever enough, he devised a
method of taking photos in motion which was rather tricky. He had a little -- so he'd set his
camera up which was a big boxy affair like this and he attached a hose with a bulb at the end of
it in such a way that when he rode over he put the bulb on the road and when he rode his tire
over that that would take the photo, so he would know when to tip his cap. So he was
definitely on the cutting edge and you can see a little, he was from Pittsburgh. A local
newspaper spotted him with his gear and made remarks about how bulky the equipment was
but nevertheless Lenz appears to be hearty enough to lug all of that around. So I'm going to
show you some of his photos just to give you an idea before we get to the Allen and Sachtleben
ones so it gives you an idea so you can kind of compare. You know, arguably Lenz’s photos are
as nice or nicer, but again, think of what he has to haul around to do it. So these are scenes
from around Pittsburgh in the 1880s during the high wheel era. You can notice the roads
weren't particularly good either. This is one of my favorite shots in Washington Pennsylvania.
Again, so that's Lenz taking his own photo using glass plates and he toured with a buddy, made
several trips along, that's our national road. That was a superhighway back in 1890 [laughter].
That's in Indiana I think. And Cleveland, so again, they are slightly posed. He had to do a
certain amount of setup before taking the photo. Again, here he is with his buddy in Illinois this
time, 1890. And a another view near Pittsburgh, so you got the idea of sort of the kind of
photos that he was taking in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Again the national road in new
Concord Ohio which is the birthplace of astronaut John Glenn, although it seems a long way
from the space-age era. Again, that's Lenz looking at the, surveying the road over the
Appalachians. When Lenz took off on his world tour, he did switch to the safety bicycle because
he wasn't going to get a sponsor to ride the old fashion high wheeler, but he kept a kind of a
conventional -- this camera here in the case it did use film, so he did switch from glass plates to
film, but it was still a very boxy affair, so it was still not exactly a practical photo set up. Getting
back to Allen and Sachtleben, what they bought when they got to London was this little camera,
the Kodak, which had been on the market for about three years. I think it was actually a Model
2 and you can see their slogan, you press the button, we do the rest, so it's a lot smaller than
the conventional cameras and the fact that it uses film makes it a lot lighter, so you can see
how it's much better suited in theory for cycle touring. What they didn't tell you, though, is
that when you were done, I think you could get up to a hundred exposures, you were supposed
to send the camera back to the factory and they would reload your film, so it wasn't quite as
practical as they make it sound, but still an advance over the previous models. After Allen and
Sachtleben left London in the fall of 1890, they peddled across France and Italy and, you know,
and initially they corresponded with a paper in London and they would send their negatives
back and the paper republished it, but the quality is not particularly good. And unfortunately,
the UCLA collection doesn't include the negatives that they took when going across Europe.
We don't know what happened to those, so we have some idea based on the ones that were
published what their European photos look like, but we have very few of them. But now
starting, you know, so they got to Greece, to Athens at the end of 1890 and then they decided
to stay there for the winter while they planned there trip around the world. They had to get
across Asia, so this is where the UCLA negative, where other collection of negatives start and
they were just scanned like a few weeks ago, so nobody has really seen these images in at least
120 years, or very few people anyway. So you can see the quality is a lot better when you scan
it from the original nitrate negative. That's a very delicate process by the way because, you
know, they would learn over time that the original film was highly combustible and it got worse
with time so today if you have a collection of these, they need to go into special storage and to
get them scanned is a big process. You've got to get a special van and take them to a special lab
and special equipment and so forth, but you can see the quality actually is quite impressive. So
here they are in the Acropolis and each of these negatives was in a little envelope and
Sachtleben wrote copious notes, so we have a good idea about who’s in the photo and when
they were taken, so this is a guard at the Acropolis who initially refused to let them in with their
bicycles, but when they offered to teach him how to ride, he relented. So again, more shots
here of -- do you think we should dim the lights or I just wonder if that would improve the
image at all? Yeah. I think that's better, huh? Let me just backtrack a bit so you can get better
views of those. Okay. So here again, looking down from the Acropolis, racing at the Acropolis,
so you can see that these are not, I mean these are really snapshots. There's not a lot of
thought put into them. They're pretty spontaneous basically. So this is a photo of, they're in
costume. It's the Greek New Year's in 1891, so they got dressed in traditional costumes, but
they road their bicycles around Athens. And this is a, this was our ambassador at the time, the
American ambassador in Athens, a fellow named Snowden. I don't know if he's related to the
current Snowden in the news, but that's his son who like a lot of young people at the time was
getting increasingly interested, so as the cycling world transitioned from that high wheel bicycle
to the safety, more and more people including women started getting interested. It started to
seem like something a lot more feasible. In fact, so here we have the consul's daughter, this is
the American consul in Athens and this is his daughter, so she actually didn't know how to ride,
but nevertheless, she was very interested in cycling and posed for Sachtleben and we know -- I
tell you a little bit as an aside, kind of the story of how, sort of interesting story about how
those negatives, these negatives came to UCLA in the first place. So it seems that sometime in
the ’60s workmen were cleaning out a house in Houston and we believe that was Sachtleben’s
residence. He died in 1953. For many years he would manage a theater in Houston, so
apparently some relatives decided it was time to get rid of Uncle Will’s stuff and the workmen
were like dropping boxes of his old papers from the third-floor window into a backyard bonfire.
And apparently one of the boxes missed the target and exploded on the lawn and somebody
who just happened to be driving by noticed, you know, a bunch of old papers and photos and
stopped the car and got out and offered to take that off of their hands. And that's what's now
known as the Sachtleben Collection at UCLA and unfortunately it makes you think that that
might have been where the European and also the China photos, which we don't have the
negatives from their ride across China either, so that might be where they wound up. But we
also, one of the things that was rescued was a diary that Sachtleben kept in Athens, so we know
quite a bit about, we know that he had a huge crush on this young lady. I tracked down her
grandchildren and sent her, sent them this photo and they were quite pleased to have that.
Here's another kind of snapshot, a street scene of Athens. That, of course, is one of their
bicycles because bicycles were not really in use in Athens at this point. I mean they were
basically the only cyclist in Athens. If you notice carefully you see the little child peeking out
smiling. I think that's one of the, kind of a fun photo. Again, the ability to take spontaneous
images, you can see that in these photos, so they just happen to pass by the Queen coming out
of a service, so they photograph the Queen of Greece, getting into a royal carriage here. I like
this photo too, so if you see, you might see Sachtleben there. You can see his front wheel there
and he's grinning at the end of this human corridor. What's happening is Allen, his buddy is
cycling down this corridor and taking the photo, so you can see the expressions on the faces of
people who aren't used to seeing cyclists, so I think they were kind of amazed, blown away by
both the bicycle and the camera. Both technologies were new to most locals anyway. Here's a
kind of tribute to the bicycle on a pedestal. Oh, and this is kind of a fun scene. Again, thanks to
the diary we know a lot of the back story. So this is Allen -- so at a certain point these were, this
bicycle was one of the two we saw in that photo in the studio in London. So that was actually
already their second pair of bicycles. The first pair they just discarded after touring the British
Isles and they basically got a London manufacturer, this was called the Minnehaha to give them
two of his bicycles as kind of a sponsorship. But by the time they got to Greece they realized
that they were way too fragile to try to bicycle across Asia, so they decided that Allen had to go
back to London to pick up a pair of sturdier bicycles and so here they are at the train station.
He's about to catch his train, but, you know, these guys were starting to become celebrities of
sorts and they were concerned, Allen was concerned. He didn't want to be recognized on a
train going to London because that didn't really fit with the image of, you know, a cycling
globetrotter, so he donned a disguise which is what you see here, the top hat. The cane’s a
good, he's gotta cane, so he borrowed -- we also know who these characters were thanks to the
diary. This was an Armenian radical who had just been tossed out of Turkey for causing
trouble. And this was the son of a very wealthy Greek shipper, shipping magnate and he had
actually already ordered some bicycles from England before he met Allen and Sachtleben. He
happened to see them at a café in Athens with their bicycles and he approached them because
he didn't know how to ride his own bicycle, so he got them to become his cycle teachers. And
he's the one who loaned the elements of that disguise there to Allen. So now we'll move
through Turkey; I'll show you a few scenes of Turkey. This is when they decided, so the winter’s
over and the spring of 1891 when they start their ride across Asia, but first they stop in
Constantinople, now Istanbul for a month or two to continue to work out some of the details.
So this is Sachtleben crossing the old, the bridge between Parra and Istanbul and you can see
he's getting a few looks here. And here’s, so these are now the Humber bicycles. When Allen
came back with a couple of Humber bicycles which were a lot sturdier and these, those two
bicycles, this one included, actually survive. So one is owned by the London Science Museum
and the other is owned by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. And that, of course, is
August Sophia in the background. Again, you can sort of see the attention these -- it's not clear
sometimes whether it's the camera or the bicycle that's drawing such interesting looks. You get
a sense of the roads at the time from this photo. And this was the family, so they stayed with
an Armenian doctor. After they returned to the United States, they wrote a book Allen and
Sachtleben called Across Asia on a Bicycle. So they didn't describe any of their adventures in
Europe; they just started the story here. The opening paragraph describes the 12-year-old son
of the doctor escorting them to the Basra so now we know what he looked like thanks to this.
And this gives you a sense of some of the roads, some of the desolation crossing Turkey. So
everybody advise them not to go across Turkey, but they were keen on adventure so. I like this
photo too. They were compelled, the authorities would generally compel them to hire armed
guards on horseback which the cyclists really didn't want because they'd have to tip them at
the end of the day, but occasionally they would actually out sprint them at the end of the day
so as not to have to pay them, but they did occasionally come in handy helping them get across
these swollen streams. That's Will taking a bath, a nice view of his equipment. [laughter].
Another scene, you get a sense of what the traffic was like. And it seems to be checking out his
tire there. Again, these are the guards on horseback that they were compelled to hire. And
there's a view of somewhere in Turkey of some kind of volcanic area I think. And that looks like
a pretty tough mule path. I think even with a modern-day mountain bike you'd have a hard
time with that. And again, there's not a whole lot of -- you kind of wonder if you got hungry
there where you would go. So again, they would often when they stopped in little towns they'd
stay at inns. They'd have to meet with the authorities and announce their presence. Of course,
there was really no need for that because the whole town would spot them and surround them
and they would be hounded to give cycling demonstrations, so they had to do that every
evening. They've just done one here. I think that's the local -- oh that's the local chief, I guess,
and that's his son I believe. So now we'll move-in to see a few scenes from Persia.
>>: Question? Do you know how much these bikes weighed and like how many days would
they be away from a town [indiscernible]
>> David Herlihy: Well the bikes, the original Minnehahas were pretty light. I believe
something like 26 pounds which proved to be too light. I believe these Humbers were more like
40 pounds, you know, which is certainly very heavy by today's standards. There's also no gears
and they were using what were known as cushion tires, so they are not actually inflated.
They're just a tube, a squishy tube. I don't think they did much more than 50 miles a day, but
they would usually come across -- I think occasionally they did have to sleep outside, but they
were generally able to find at least an inn where they could stay for the night. Again, another
scene of them stopping and probably cooling off because at this point, you know, they had to
deal with temperatures that reached as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit. More images from
Persia, some of the buildings they saw. This gentleman is an American missionary in Tabriz
Persia, Whipple his name was and he was we know from the inscription that he's having a
conversation three beggar women. According to Sachtleben they are asking for alms and it
doesn't look like they're getting very far with Mr. Whipple. Here's a shot of the family. So they
would often, Allen and Sachtleben would often stay with missionary families along the way
because that way, you know, they get some of the comforts of, you know, Western comforts
that they were used to and also they could get advice from the missionaries who knew the area
well about where to go, what roads to take, that sort of thing. This fellow Allen Whipple
actually grew up to become a very famous of surgeon, invented something called the Whipple
process or Whipple system, something to do with the pancreas in the ‘50s I believe. They
would also occasionally stop at telegraph stations. This is a German telegraph operator and his
family, so if they could find a Western host, they would usually stay there. Otherwise they'd
have to go to the local inn and they would occasionally have some confrontations with the
locals. I think Allen described one night when people were so curious to see these guys and
their belongings, that they were climbing on the roof of the inn trying to force their way into
their room. There's a view of, I think that's a private mosque, and that's the ruins of an ancient
bridge. So the final stretch of the photos cover their journey across today's Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan, so here are some scenes. Again, usually you see some photos of the bikes. They're
I think are with local authorities. So the governor, when they got to Ozkabad [phonetic] I think
it's called, he insisted that the cyclists take -- this was -- just open the trans-Caspian railway, so
he insisted that they take that for 400 miles to avoid a desert and they reluctantly agreed to do
that, so that's the train. This is Madrasah, a religious school and that's Sachtleben silhouette.
He seems to be carrying on a conversation, a deep conversation with somebody. Again, this
would be the palace of one of governors. A Russian church and, again, scenes from the city.
I'm not sure what these two are up to but they got some kind of wheel it looks like, grinding
machine. And again, they would, they, that would be a Russian officer and that's probably his
residence there. Here they're coming across, they took the ferry across the river. They're
probably the first people to bring bikes on it, I would guess. So again, they would, so they
would spend the second winter in Tashkent and that's where unfortunately the photo
collection ends. So the next spring in 1892 they were crossing China across the Gobi Desert and
unfortunately we don't have the negatives of the photos they took. But we do have one photo
showing them in China taken by this gentleman who wanted to be a photographer wanted to
be in the picture, so he set it up and then jumped into it. So this is nearing the end when they
were getting, nearing Beijing. This was basically an announcement. I think it explains to the
locals not to hurt them basically. And here it gives you the date, October of 1892 and the
location. So when they got to the United States for the last leg, again, I mentioned they got
their fourth set of wheels by that point. They discarded the Humbers and they got the Victors,
this time with inflatable tires. And I don't think they use their Kodaks at that point and we don't
have very many photos of them in the United States. I just found this one in Los Angeles that
Sachtleben had been in. There's Allen and they are being escorted around by the Los Angeles
bicycle club. So finally here we see Sachtleben again four years after the journey, so they
return home in 1893 and two years after that Sachtleben made a return visit to Turkey. But this
time his mission was to find whatever happened to the missing cyclist Frank Lenz so here we
have one photo which looks a little bit staged, but this is the missionary, the Canadian
missionary who hosted Sachtleben. He went to the town in Turkey nearest to where Lenz had
disappeared and so you see the missionary here interviewing the locals if, asking if they know
anything about this lost cyclist and there's Sachtleben taking notes. Apparently, the UCLA
collection, not all the negatives have been scanned and it appears that there are some which
relate to a second journey to Turkey but we haven't seen those yet, so it'll be interesting to see
what those entail, but I think what has come out of the UCLA collection is already quite
extraordinary. I mean, just to basically have this kind of album of the year on the road in 1891
is pretty remarkable. So I can take any questions if, yes?
>>: I noticed some of your plates appear to have the numbering identification, but it looks as
though if these were slides they were mounted backwards. Were they scanned backwards?
>> David Herlihy: Oh. You're talking about the round ones?
>>: If you go back to any of them with the numbers in the upper left, all the digits…
>> David Herlihy: Oh. I see what you're saying. Yeah.
>>: So then their facial features are switched and whatnot. Or you can think about that later.
>> David Herlihy: Yeah. That's kind of how they gave, how UCLA gave it to me. That would be
a question to ask them.
>>: [indiscernible] in them that would tell us [indiscernible]
>> David Herlihy: Let's see. I wonder. You think they might all be reversed? What about here?
>>: [indiscernible] trailer?
>>: [indiscernible]
>> David Herlihy: It's hard to see. We have to zoom in.
>>: It says number 41 on it. It's [indiscernible], so probably the person who wrote in there
wrote on the slide with the slide turned opposite and then it was turned right side when I was
scanned with modern equipment.
>> David Herlihy: That sounds plausible to me.
>>: Probably when you shine the light through it anyway, you know, like when comparing with
a slide projector versus a scanner it would be the orientation such that if you were trying to flip
through the slides and then stick one in the machine, it might make more sense to do it in that
orientation [indiscernible]
>>: Actually, [indiscernible] emulsion. Rather it might not be the [indiscernible] like a pin
because it's writing on black-and-white.
>> David Herlihy: I mean, I don't actually know who, I mean maybe -- I don't know if that's
Sachtleben himself writing notes.
>>: So I have a question. What was their daily distance compared to other ways to travel on
those types of roads at the time, for example, comparing to horse or anything like that?
>> David Herlihy: I think they could pretty much out do the horses. They could do, I think on
the average 50 miles a day and that's a lot, I think, on a horse.
>>: That's basically why they were able to find food and water and accommodations, because
all of the other modalities for transportation at the time…
>> David Herlihy: Were no faster than theirs, that's true. Yeah. And this was the old caravan
road that they were on, so as we can see it was desolate in many places, nevertheless there
were stops along the way. Yeah, that would probably be every 50 miles, yeah. So I don't think
they ever really got stranded. Yes?
>>: So modern bicycles occasionally break down, change brakes, tires come off rims. These
didn't have clincher tires; they were like glued or sewed onto rims. If they had any kind of the
mechanical in the middle of nowhere, there were no bicycle mechanics around.
>> David Herlihy: That's true.
>>: How did they deal with those kinds of problems?
>> David Herlihy: They would have to -- I can give you an example. So Allen’s bicycle I
mentioned is in the London Science Museum and at a certain point in China the top tube broke,
and you can still see today that there's a telegraph wire wrapped around it. I actually after my
book came out I was contacted by a relative of Sachtleben who had a paper she wanted to
show me and one of the things she had was a letter written by missionary wife in China who
had just hosted these two. And in that letter she describes how her husband helped them
repair the bicycle by finding a blacksmith who could wrap the wire around it. So yeah, there
were definitely issues like that. I think they had to be pretty resourceful. You know, Lenz had
the additional problem in that, you know, he had inner tubes and you couldn't pick those up
very easily. He actually shipped a trunk ahead of himself filled with additional spare parts. I
don't know that Allen and Sachtleben did, but no. I think one of the things, when they got to
Tashkent I think they did order parts, spare parts from London while they were waiting out the
winter, so yeah, that was definitely a concern, breakdowns. So they had to improvise I think.
Yes?
>>: It surprised me when you said that a bunch of pictures were basically being discarded with
a bunch of boxes. Do you have any idea how they went from being a a pretty significant
historical event to being a bunch of random stuff that had been shoved in a closet and some
other room.
>> David Herlihy: I think part of that might have to do with the fact that, so all of these -- this
trip really helped to spark what's known as the great bicycle boom, so these guys were kind of
evangelists promoting the new safety bike and they have a role, so I think in the mid-1890s you
had this huge boom, you know, which finally cycling became something that anyone could do.
And women got interested in it, and so that was kind of a heyday of the bicycle golden era, but
that kind of faded pretty abruptly by the end of the 19th century and then when the
automobile came along I think the relatives thought, you know, old Uncle Willy. Maybe it
struck them as almost foolish that someone would bike around the world. It's like who needs
this stuff? It is kind of astonishing that somebody wouldn't have thought maybe we should
hang onto this stuff. But I guess we can be thankful that the whole thing wasn't lost. And I
don't know that all the other negatives were lost, but maybe they will turn up somewhere,
but… There was Allen’s camera and I don't know what happened to his negatives. So
unfortunately, I think over time maybe people lost interest and it just didn't seem all that
important. Yes?
>>: During this 1890s boom of cycling what was the relative cost of a bicycle at that time
compared to a horse or something else and like do you have any data on per capita? How
many people were on horses or bikes? Like is it a totally upper-class, privileged people got
them?
>> David Herlihy: It wasn't a high wheeler era, so yeah, they cost over a hundred dollars, which
was a lot of money back then. I mean I think workmen might have -- I think that might have
represented at least a couple months salary at the time for most people and plus it was elitist
anyway. The high wheeler wasn't something, it was purely recreational. So when the safety
bike came along the price didn't really, initially, it was at least as expensive and even a little
more because there was more hardware on it, but the fact that it was so appealing I think -and so factories started to sprout up everywhere and I think something like several million were
made during the peak year in the United States, so that helped to create like a used market. So
even though it was still pretty pricey during the boom, it was already becoming popularized
after the boom when, during the bust and the price really plummeted. So in the early part of
the 20th century bikes became very affordable, but I think you're already seeing a transition in
this period from kind of an elite vehicle to a popular vehicle. Yes?
>>: What did these guys do? I mean who were their parents to where they could afford to take
three years off after college? [laughter]
>> David Herlihy: Well, tuition wasn't what it is today. So Sachtleben’s dad was a clothier, I
think is the term, so he sold suits and things like that in a little town called Alton Illinois, just
north of St. Louis and I guess he made a pretty good living. Allen’s dad I think was a county
judge, so they did come from fairly wealthy families, not obscenely wealthy. It seems like they
weren't really in need of sponsorship, so in London they did set up a correspondence with a
paper called the Penny Illustrated Press. I think they probably got their Kodaks for free. They
visited the Kodak offices. They got the deal with the two Minnehaha bicycles, but pretty much
all of their arrangements fell through; at a certain point they stopped corresponding. They got
tired of the editor. They had some kind of falling out and they ditched their Minnehahas, but
they kept the Kodaks. But I don't think they really needed the sponsorship, so that's why they
weren't actually all that well known in this country until they arrived on the West Coast because
they weren't, unlike Lenz who was corresponding with a magazine, Outing Magazine, these
guys were pretty much free agents and they weren't really discovered by the American media
until they had already crossed Asia and they arrived on the West Coast and then they became
real celebrities. Yes?
>>: So after 15,000 miles of riding they obviously were fairly fit, but around the time the end of
their journey I guess bicycle racing kind of started. Did they ever take an interest in the athletic
side?
>> David Herlihy: I think Allen really wasn't all that athletic. I think he kind of just, Sachtleben
was kind of like his big brother and he just kind of followed him around, but Sachtleben I think
actually was pretty athletic and he did participate in races when he got back to St. Louis. He
doesn't seem to have done all that well, but nevertheless, I think he had some interest in
racing. You know, they were both celebrities, but neither one went on for a career in racing. I
don't know if they had that level of ability. Certainly there were quite a few famous racers in
the 1890s who were more or less their age, people like Major Taylor.
>>: Do you have any idea what gear they carried with them? It seems rather minimal. Looks
like it weighs less than an ice chest for this kind of trip.
>> David Herlihy: I think they didn't have, maybe they had one change of clothing, some tools.
Let's see, they had some lubricant for the chains. They would carry some, they did have some
food that they would carry with them, some, I'm not sure what exactly, like bread, pita bread
kind of thing. But overall, I don't think they were carrying more than say 20 pounds especially
when they got to the Gobi desert, then they really had to pare down to a minimum. I think
they even ditched one of their two cameras at that point to really be absolutely at the
minimum. But yeah, I think it varied, between say 20 up to 30 pounds, maybe. I think they did
have a cover with them, so if they did get stranded and had the sleep, you know, in the desert,
they'd have something. But yeah, it was pretty minimal. Okay. Thank you all for coming and if
anyone needs a book I have them. [applause]