The Henry Ford blog has a new post which gives a basic but brief early history of bicycles.

“Hurry out to Greenfield Village — the summer season with all its old-fashioned games on the green, period-clothed strollers and ordinary bicyclists ends this Sunday, August 22!”

It’s too late to see the bikes firsthand, but you can see them in this video.

If you do get a chance to visit Greenfield Village, don’t forget to see the Wilbur and Orville’s Wright Cycle Company building, which Henry Ford bought and moved to Dearborn in 1937.

Shorpy has a great photo of Detroit’s Campus Martius and old City Hall from 1900. We have just a small portion of it showing a couple cyclists chatting in the street.

Of course there are no cars. The auto industry hasn’t created the term “jaywalking” yet.

These were Complete Streets before the introduction of cars made them incomplete.

Sandra Svoboda at the Metro Times found this historical bicycle movie made in 1925 by the Detroit News.

According to this newsreel, “Residents of Bloomfield Hills have taken up bicycle riding as a means of recreation.”

Mrs. Warren S. Booth is highlighted. Her husband eventually became the president, publisher and chairman of the board of the Detroit News — the newspaper his grandfather James Scripps founded in 1873. So, this newsreel was more of a family movie than news.

Still, those are some sweet bikes, riding clothes, and hats — a nice tweed ride.

We’ve documented how the bicycling industry helped birth the automotive and road building industries. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that bicycle racing helped birth auto racing — and the Ford Motor Company.

In 1902, Henry Ford worked with two famous professional bicycle racers, Tom Cooper and Barney Oldfield. This partnership was instrumental in the creation of the Ford Motor Company.

The below story by Anthony J. Yanik was originally published in Winter 2009/2010 issue of WHEELS, a journal of the National Automotive History Collection, located at the Skillman Branch of the Detroit Public Library.

Barney Oldfield Meets Mr. Ford

YEARS AFTER HE HAD BECOME a famous racing star, Barney Oldfield would kid everyone about the day he “made” Henry Ford. “Henry Ford said “we made each other, I guess I did the better job of it,” he commented in 1915.

That he helped add to the reputation of Henry is indisputable, but the truth of the matter was that Henry Ford launched Barney Oldfield on a career that made his name a household word on the racing barnstorming circuit prior to World War I.

In April 1902, having been let go by from his second auto company, Henry Ford had become enamored of the racing scene. He asked Tom Cooper, then the most famous professional bicycle racer of the day, to join him in a new project: the build a race car and enter it in the Manufacturers Challenge Cup that would take place at Grosse Pointe, Michigan on October 25.

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Popular Science magazine recently put all of their archived issues on-line. A quick search for bicycles brought up this interesting article from July 1936.

The bicycle is back. Four millions Americans now pedal along streets and highways. And, last year factories in the United States turned out 750,000 machines, nearly equaling the peak production of the gay nineties. News items from all part of the country tell the story of this dramatic boom in popularity.

Bike polo. Bike rental stations. Trains on bikes. The bicycle news of 1936 wasn’t all that different than today.

And, they note that Detroit has created “handlebar paths” for bicyclists in several city parks. We’re guessing that included Belle Isle and Rouge Park.

The article also documents the rise of bicycles starting in 1885 and their subsequent fall by 1904. The depression spurred Americans to rediscover this “forgotten vehicle.”

That sounds similar to what has happened during our gas price spikes and tough economy.