Westmount Historical Association presentation on Montreal Bicycle Club: 4 - High Wheel Bicycle comes to North America

     Three years after Starley’s 100 mile ride, on July 1, Dominion day, 1874, in Montreal, A.T. Lane, an immigrant from Liverpool, first rode a high wheel bicycle imported from Coventry.

 He worked for an importer of sporting equipment, and from then on began bringing bicycles and tricycles from England to Canada for resale. This Notman studio photograph was taken in 1880, 6 years after A.T. Lane’s first ride in Montreal. His son Bertie, mounted on his tricycle, would have been only 3 years old.


     Karl Kron’s 1887 book “10,000 Miles on a Bicycle” credits A.T. Lane as the first person to ride a high wheel bicycle in North America, I quote:


"Indeed, the first trail made on this continent by the rubber tire of a modern bicycle is accredited to A. T. Lane, one of the founders of the Montreal B. C, who imported thither a 50 in. Coventry in season to take his first ride July 1, 1874."

    However, the High Wheel bicycle however was not widely known in North America until 2 years after A.T Lane’s first ride in Montreal when it was exhibited at the Centennial world fair in Philadelphia, 1876. Over 10 million people attended that fair which also featured such new products as Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, the Remington typewriter, and Heinz ketchup.

     Colonel Albert Augustus Pope, a civil war veteran saw some of the English High Wheel bicycles at the exhibit and also began importing them. Later he founded the Columbia bicycle company, becoming America’s most successful bicycle manufacturer.

       The high wheel bicycle became a sensation and inspired a wave of bicycle clubs and organizations. Boston had the first club in North America, Feb 1878, followed by Bangor Maine. These first two clubs were both founded by patent lawyer Charles E. Pratt. 

    Pratt, the patent lawyer and Pope, the civil war veteran turned bicycle manufacturer met in Boston and joined forces.

 As Pope’s business grew Pratt became an employee and together they promoted cycling in America by founding of bicycle clubs, publishing a sporting and travel journal called Outing magazine, and the creation of the League of American Wheelmen.

 

       The bicycle was a new invention and no-one was certain what its primary purpose would become. Was it to become a new form of transportation for the masses, or a new racing sport, or a way to display one’s wealth and knowledge of the latest technology? Since Pope was a civil war veteran, and bicycles were thought of in terms of being “iron horses” he thought that bicycle clubs should be run similar to the military cavalry. His partner Pratt disdained racing as elitist and believed the bicycle should be promoted primarily as a means for ordinary people to travel out into the countryside. Many of today’s legal concepts regarding road traffic safety were formulated by Pratt.