Friday Follies ~~ Lights, Nights, and the Advance of Progress

A recent conversation in the shop started me thinking.  One of the crew had just bought a super powerful light.  Only a few short years ago, something like this jewel would not have been available, not at any price.  Then there was a time when this kind of power could be had, but the expense was extreme, and the lights were big, heavy, and clunky.

There was a time when we didn’t think about riding bikes at night.  As kids we just rode.  We used our bikes to play.  We rode them for the fun of it.  We used them to get around, to each other’s homes, to the park to play ball, to run the occasional errand for parents, even to go to school.  All of this took place in the daylight.  When it got dark, it was time to put the bikes away.

I started doing a paper route in the summer.  That’s significant.  It was a morning route, and a relatively small one.  I could go out, pick up my bundles of papers, and load up my bike in daylight.  That soon changed.  With the coming of the Autumn the sun was rising later, and I had added more customers to my route.  I had to get out earlier.  It was dark out.  There were streetlights…  in some places… but I was dealing with a new thing.  I was riding my bike in the dark.

Eventually, with a bit of parental aid (and pressure), I added a generator light set and a good flashlight to my paperboy gear.

That generator was a headache.  It was a bit noisy.  It added a noticeable amount of drag to the bike.  It wore tires out along the sidewall.  It really didn’t make enough light to matter until I got the bike moving faster than five MPH.  I learned to carry the little bulbs with me, and I got good at changing them in the dark.

Eventually, several of my friends and I would use our bikes to get to camping spots.  We didn’t think about actually riding on trails at night.  The combination of flashlights and those wretched generator-lights simply weren’t adequate, and (amazingly) we knew it.  And that is a testimony to just how bad those systems were.  A pack of boys in their mid-teens understood that they were completely inadequate.