Madison — Among the vintage bicycles on display in a recent exhibit at the Wisconsin Historical Museum is a compact, slightly damaged bicycle built in 2012.
It is much younger than Sargent’s 1868 velocipede, the all-wood Crabtree Special he rode from Madison to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and the ornately carved monowheel. But the Razor 3Sixty is part of Wisconsin cycling history.
Because he was ridden by a very immense horse, Green Bay Packer.
“Changing Gears: A Cyclical History of Badger Mountain Biking” showcases the state’s unique and wealthy cycling heritage, from the bicycle manufacturers and tourism industry that has served cyclists since the 1890s to the efforts to build better bike roads and trails in the state.
The exhibit opened Friday at the museum on Capitol Square in Madison and will run through Oct. 10 before moving to Historical Museum in the Castle in Appleton in November. At 2,800 square feet, “Shifting Gears” is the museum’s largest short-lived exhibit in 15 years.
Among the artifacts is a bicycle whose tires must have groaned beneath Packers center Corey Linsley’s 298-pound frame as he rode through the Lambeau Field parking lot between the practice field and the team’s locker room. The tradition of kids offering their bikes to players began in the 1970s. Museum visitors also can pedal a Wisconsin-built Saris exercise bike while watching a video filmed last summer of Packers defensive back Micah Hyde riding to practice with a camera attached to the handlebars.
Joe Kapler, curator of cultural history at the Wisconsin Historical Society, said the Packers’ bike “fits in very well with the content of this show.”
Bicycles, in the form of bone-rattling velocipedes, began appearing in Wisconsin in the years after the Civil War, as the inventions gained popularity from Europe to the East Coast and west across the United States.
Wisconsin played a key role in two eras of cycling’s rise in the country: in the 1890s, when Wisconsin’s relatively flat terrain brought hordes of tourists on bikes, and in the 2000s, when the state gained a reputation as a maker of precision bicycles, including Trek Corp. and Waterford Precision Cycles.
“It’s a unique history of the Wisconsin commuter,” Kapler said. “Sometimes you put on an exhibit where the content might not be familiar to many visitors. But almost everyone rode a bike.”
The idea for the exhibition was born from the popularity of the 2013 book. “Bike Fever: How Wisconsin Became a Great State for Cyclists” Jesse Gant and Nicholas Hoffman, published by Wisconsin Historical Society Press. The exhibit features 23 bicycles, photographs and interactive displays. Artifacts include jerseys worn by Wisconsin cyclists, a bugle used by 19th-century cyclists to signal each other into formation, and bicycle lights, from an acetylene-based lamp made in Kenosha at Badger Brass Manufacturing Co. to an LED-powered airy from Planet Bike in Madison.
Cycling gained enormous popularity soon after these machines appeared in the United States, although initially only mighty and wealthy men could control bikes and afford to ride them.
The front wheel inflated, allowing for greater travel speed but greater risk—the term “headshot” came from cyclists jumping over the handlebars. Then chain technology, which began in Europe in the 1870s, transformed the industry as wheels got smaller and bikes became safer and easier to ride, Hoffman said.
“They also moved inside. It’s hard to skate outside in the winter,” Hoffman said. “So they created these indoor velocipede rinks in towns as small as Fox Lake and, of course, Milwaukee.”
In the 1890s, as bicycles became cheaper and easier to ride, Wisconsin transformed into a cycling destination because of its scenic beauty, relatively flat terrain and fairly good roads. Curators digitized several pages of a 138-page 1897 guidebook that was given to Wisconsin bike tourists. The book includes maps of bike paths and trails, hotels and bike shops.
Bicycle racing was very popular in the 1890s, when Wisconsin champions Walter Sanger and Terry Andrae won trophies. Andrae earned the nickname Flying Badger, and his father opened Julius Andrae and Sons Bicycle Shop in Milwaukee. Thousands of people bought tickets to watch the cyclists race.
“It’s right up there with boxing and baseball. It’s one of the top three sports in Wisconsin,” Hoffman said.
While some of the items came from the archives and collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society, curators also acquired artifacts on loan from museums and collectors around the state. All of the bikes were either made in Wisconsin or are notable in Badger cycling history, including a 1917 Harley-Davidson bicycle, a magnificent 1941 Schwinn Autocycle and the first B-cycle loaned from a Madison trunk when the bike-sharing business opened in May 2011.
There is also a bicycle that tells the story of an unsolved mystery. The exhibition includes a Victor Model C bicycle, the same one that he rode Frank Lenz on his journey around the worldThe Philadelphia man left Pennsylvania in 1892 and headed west across the United States, stopping in Wisconsin on his way to San Francisco.
Lenz traveled through Japan and China, Burma and Iran. Sponsored by Outing magazine, Lenz filed photographs and dispatches as he traveled. While traveling from Tabriz, Iran, to Erzurum, Turkey, in 1894, he disappeared. Lenz was never seen again. Nor was his bicycle.
