研究故事

The bicycle was the first mass-produced form of human-powered transport. As such, it’s a fascinating symbol of the world’s progress and yearnings over the past 120 years, as a forthcoming book illustrates.

The bicycle has been all things to all people, associated with both Chinese communism and Western industrial capitalism, high-tech luxury and back-to-nature movements, women’s liberation and patriarchy. Mix that together with its intimate associations with modernity and continued symbolic strength in a post-modern world, and it is a rich subject of study.

Dr Paul Smethurst, Associate Professor of School of English, is putting the finishing touches to a book that looks at how the bicycle as an everyday object has reflected social change and at the same time marked the modern experience of space and time, starting from the West and spreading around the globe.

“As a prime example of everyday technology, the bicycle lends itself to comparative historical and trans-regional analysis. It is the subject of a complex history in which its cultural value provides a lexicon for the social formation of global modernity,” he says.

Predecessors to the modern bicycle were mainly clumsy playthings of the rich, but when the safety bicycle was developed in Europe in the 1880s – incorporating new inventions such as the ball bearing, pneumatic tire and reverse tension spokes in wheels – it captured the imagination of the wider public. “A seminal product of the second industrial revolution, the bicycle’s other connection with modernity was social modernity and the imperative for mobility,” he says.

"It became an expression of the struggle of the mind to overcome the inertia of matter."

Dr Paul Smethurst

The full version of this article was originally published in Bulletin. Please click here to view this HKU publication.