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July 05, 2003
Japanese claim to have invented the bicycle
This sort of this makes the Flea's chains rattle in irritation:
The world's first bicycle was developed by a Japanese feudal lord in 1732, a model recently created on the basis of a Edo-Period drawing has suggested.
Here is a claim the bicycle was invented in Japan some time before its emergence in France. If so, why did it not take off there? Probably because "most of the roads in the country were bumpy at the time." Let us say this boat-on-wheels is a proto-bicycle instead of being what it manifestly is, i.e. a boat-on-wheels. So what? I imagine the roads of France were bumpy circa 1861 and yet they had the sense to do something about it. And bumpy roads are no impediment to a determined cyclist in any event.
File this claim to the origins of the bicycle alongside equally ludicrous claims China "discovered" the Americas and invented ice cream or "Africanist" claims to having constructed the pyramids. This sort of junk archaeology is only slightly less ludicrous than alien intervention theories but crosses a more problematic line in its openly racialist intent. Blah.
And then... Self-hating morons keep leaving outraged remarks about this post. Question your own biases before spluttering away about the superiority of any technology, belief-system or economic arrangement other than the one which actually produced the bicycle. I will not publish your pet peeves about the French or anybody else. Feel free to pay for your own blog.
Posted by Ghost of a flea at July 5, 2003 01:07 PM
Comments
French roads were horrific as well! I remember reading a history about bicycling (I was bored) and they said that many French thought the greatest invention was the pneumatic tube so that roads weren't the bone numbing to bike riders.
Posted by: Steven Martinovich at July 7, 2003 02:44 AM
I believe that we Europeans will not know that in Asia, China and Japan invented the bicycle and many other things long before they have invented things in Europe and the USA.
Posted by: peter at September 27, 2003 06:05 AM
Peter, I believe you either need to read my post again and maybe, just maybe, some history. Your wish to place non-European peoples in a la-la-fantasy land is frankly ethnocentric and the result of an intellectual laziness. This goes double for your claim to speak for all Europeans.
Posted by: Nicholas Packwood at September 27, 2003 08:48 AM
