On June 4, 1896, the editor of the Binghamton, New York, Republican offered what most of his readers must have regarded as a rather startling prediction. The airplane, he remarked, would likely be the work of bicycle makers. “The flying machine will not be the same shape, or at all in the style of the numerous kinds of cycles,” he admitted, “but the study to produce a light, swift machine is likely to lead to the evolution in which wings will play a conspicuous part.” The editor’s judgment was confirmed seven and a half years later. On December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright made four flights over an isolated stretch of dune a few miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Two bicycle makers had launched the air age. Was the editor’s suggestion of a connection between cycling and flying anything more than a lucky guess? If so, he deserves to be recognized as a past master of the fine art of technology assessment. As he had predicted, cycling experience and a command of bicycle technology did play a role in the formulation of a solution to the problems of flight.

When Wilbur and Orville Wright entered the cycle trade in 1892, American journalists were already touting the bicycle as a “boon to all mankind,” a “national necessity,” and a “force that has within it almost the power of social revolution.” The Smithsonian scientist W. J. McGee, assessing “Fifty Years of American Science” for the readers of The Atlantic Monthly in 1896, identified the bicycle as “one of the world’s great inventions.” A Detroit Tribune writer went a step further, predicting that history might prove “that the perfection of the bicycle was the greatest event of the nineteenth century.” Authorities of the United States Census Bureau added their own unbounded enthusiasm. “Few articles created by man,” they noted in the Census of 1900, “have created so great a revolution in social conditions.”

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