The point I would make about cycling in the last decade of the nineteenth century is that the transition from the "ordinary" to the "safety bicycle" was not only a technological step change – which is the point I originally made on this list – but I believe it was also a social change. Because of cost and the difficulty of riding it, the ordinary was the province of the middle class and the upper-class. You have only to look at the contemporary material to see that the nonprofessional riders belonged to the elite.On the other hand almost anybody could ride the safety bicycle, and the cost came down as production volumes increased – the normal economic cycle of a product that finds a market.
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