Shooting Star: a Biography of a Bicycle
SHOOTING STAR: A BIOGRAPHY OF A BICYCLE Geoff Mentzer 2 SHOOTING STAR: A BIOGRAPHY OF A BICYCLE Copyright © 2020 by Geoff Mentzer All rights reserved. 3 In a scientific study of various living species and machines, the most efficient at locomotion – that is, the least amount of energy expended to move a kilometre – was found to be a man on a bicycle. –SS Wilson, Scientific American, March 1973, Volume 228, Issue 3, 90 The Dandy Horse of 1818, said to be the first velocipede man-motor carriage. Sharp, Bicycles & Tricycles: An Elementary Treatise On Their Design And Construction, Longmans, Green, and Co, London, New York and Bombay, 1896, 147 4 INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS What began as a brief biograph of the author's forebear Walter William Curties soon doubled into a study of two men, and expanded into an account of early bicycle – and a little motoring – history in New Zealand. Curties is mostly invisible to history, while Frederick Nelson Adams – who rose to national pre-eminence in motoring circles – by his reticence and reluctance for public exposure is also largely overlooked. Pioneering New Zealand cycling and motoring history – commercial, industrial and social – have been variously covered elsewhere, in cursory to comprehensive chronicles. Sadly, factual errors that persist are proof of copy and paste research. As examples, neither Nicky Oates nor Frederick Adams' brother Harry was the first person convicted in New Zealand for a motoring offence, nor was the world's first bicycle brass band formed in New Zealand. It must be said, however, that today we have one great advantage, ie Papers Past, that progeny of the Turnbull Library in Wellington.
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