The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes

Author:Oliver Wendell Holmes [Every Man his own Boswell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2014-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

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*Since the days when this was written the bicycle has appeared as the rival of the wherry. I have witnessed three appearances of the pedal locomotive. The first was when I was a boy. (The machine was introduced into Great Britain from France about 1820.) Some of the Harvard College students who boarded in my neighborhood had these machines, then called velocipedes, on which they used to waddle along like so many ducks, their feet pushing against the ground, and looking as if they were perched on portable treadmills. They soon found that legs were made before velocipedes. Our grown-up young people may remember the second advent of the contrivance, now become a treadle-locomotive. There were “rinks” where this form of roller-skating had a brief run, and then legs again asserted their prior claim and greater convenience. At the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia, in 1876, I first saw the modern bicycles, some of them, at least, from Coventry, England. Since that time the bicycle glides in and out everywhere, noiseless as a serpent,

And [wheels] rush in where [horses] fear to tread.

The boat flies like a sea-bird with its long, narrow, outstretched pinions; the bicycle rider, like feathered Mercury, with his wings on his feet. There seems to be nothing left to perfect in the way of human locomotion but aerial swimming, which some fancy is to be a conquest of the future.

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