Made In America - Bill Bryson [176]
Soon people everywhere were getting in on the mania for wheeling, as it was known. Cycling quickly developed its own complex terminology. The more energetic adherents went in for scorching or freewheeling (sometimes shortened by the linguistically debonair to freeling). Scorchers who showed a selfish disregard of others were known as road hogs. Such was their capacity to startle or surprise other road users – one popular model was called the Surprise – that in some places laws were passed requiring cyclists not simply to slow down and dismount when approaching a horse, but to lead it to safety before continuing.19
As early as 1882 people were referring to them familiarly as bikes. Such was the popularity of the sport that in 1885 a playing-card company in Cincinnati was inspired to try to cash in on the craze, which is how Bicycle brand playing-cards came about. By the mid-1880s cycling seemed to be as popular as a sport could get, but in 1888 came the invention of the pneumatic tire by the Scotsman John Dunlop, and other developments like lighter frames, handbrakes, gears and safety chains, and biking moved on to a higher plane of popularity.
A large part of bicycling’s popularity was that it was one of the few exhilarating enjoyments permitted to women, though some authorities worried that perhaps it was too exhilarating. The Georgia Journal of Medicine and Surgery for one believed that cycling was unsuitable for females because the movements of the legs and the pressure on the pelvis of the saddle were bound to arouse ‘feelings hitherto unrealized by the young maiden’.20 The Wheelman magazine defended bicycling as a healthy pursuit for women, but added this ominous warning to its female readers: ‘Do not think of sitting down to table until you have changed your underclothing.’
By 1895 ten million bicycles crowded America’s roads, and manufacturers were producing a vast range of vehicles with jaunty, buy-me names like the Sociable, the Quadrant, the Rudge Triplet Quadricycle, and the Coventry Convertible Four in Hand. The craze looked set to run and run, but less than a decade later most people had packed up their bikes for ever, having lost their hearts entirely to the greatest of all American passions, the automobile.
The first two decades of the twentieth century were a period of relative calm in the world of crazes, but in the 1920s America made up for lost time. Among the phenomena that gripped the nation in that lively decade were dance marathons, flag-pole sitting competitions (the champion was one Alvin ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly who maintained his perilous perch atop a Baltimore flagpole for twenty-three days and seven hours), beauty contests, coast-to-coast car races, coast-to-coast foot-races known as bunion derbies, and miniature golf.
Miniature golf – at first called dwarf golf – was born in 1927 when a developer named Garnet Carter built a resort hotel called Fairyland on Lookout Mountain in Tennessee and added a miniature links complete with mechanical hazards. He intended it as a diversion for children, but to his astonishment the adults soon drove the mites off. Realizing that there must be something in this, Carter formed a company called Tom Thumb Golf and began producing factory-built courses. In just three years 25,000 Tom Thumb courses were erected across America.21
At home, three other forms of amusement entered the American vocabulary in the period. One was mahjong (or mah-jongg), a game from China that swept the nation beginning in 1922. Mahjong – the name is Mandarin for ‘house sparrow’, from a figure on the most important piece – was particularly fashionable among the smart set (a term roughly concurrent with the birth of the game in America). People paid up to $500 for their mahjong sets – more than the cost of a Model A Ford. Some even redecorated rooms of their houses in the Chinese style and invested in silk robes for themselves and their guests to help the mood along. For a decade or so, you couldn