Evan Friss. <i>The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s</i> .
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why did the U.S. undergo a sudden upsurge in cycling in the last five years of the nineteenth century? The production of bicycles, which had been only a few thousand a year up to 1893, suddenly began to shoot upward, reaching over 400,000 in 1895 and numbering nearly 1,200,000 by 1899 (34). One obvious answer was that the “pennyfarthing” cycle, with its pedals mounted directly on the hub of the large front wheel, which had been difficult to mount and ride, disappeared from usage. What succeeded it was the “ordinary” cycle with two wheels of equal size with a central pedal crank and a chain drive to a gear mounted on the rear axle. Not only were these models easier to master, but the frame could be modified by eliminating its top bar so that women could use them without a loss of modesty. Evan Friss’s The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s examines this “craze” (to use a contemporary term). Who were its promoters? People like Albert Augustus Pope, who built the Columbia Manufacturing Company in Hartford, Connecticut, and devoted much effort to promoting his brand and supporting the League of American Wheelmen as a lobby group. Enthusiasm for cycling was spurred by the well-to-do, who formed clubs in major cities whose members sported their own badges and outfits and gathered in places like New York’s Michaux Cycle Club, which even had its own indoor ring for morning riding lessons and afternoon “dances” where pedalers circled to the music of a live orchestra. As the price of a cycle came down, the middle class could buy their own wheels and form their own associations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".