'Bicycle eye', 'bicycle arm', 'bicycle elbow', 'bicycle heart.' If you took up cycling towards the end of the nineteenth century, you'd be well used to these terms. They were plastered in newspapers and hurled at passing cyclists; as the use of the bicycle boomed, so did the hysteria surrounding the invention.
While the pedal-less precursor to the bike we know today was invented in 1817, the modern bicycle wasn't widely used until the 1890s. Penny farthings had been replaced by safety bicycles in the late 1880s and for many everyday people without access to horses, their worlds expanded.
