The Bicycle-A Hundred Years Hence
Toronto Globe, June 14, 1893

“The roads will be prepared especially for bicycles, the grades being very slight. The roads will be kept clean, as by that time the horses will found be only in zoological gardens. The improvement in the rider will be equally marked. From the continued and increasing use of the wheel a race of people will be evolved that will take to cycling as readily as a foreign immigrant does to politics. We may expect an average speed of 30 miles an hour on the road and 60 miles on the track. The use of the machine will be universal.
Children will be taught to ride as they are now taught to walk. The suburbs of our great cities will extend from 60 to 100 miles in every direction. All patents will have expired, and such large quantities of bicycles will be manufactured that the cost will be nominal and within reach of all. There will be no more crowded tenement houses. The artisan, who will work only four hours a day, will live with his family in a cosy little home in the suburbs, where he can see the sunshine and breathe the fresh air. The use of the wheel will have so improved the stamina and physique of the race that the only cause of death will be old age and accidents.
Everyone will own a bicycle. Those intended for distance travel will be run by small but powerful storage batteries, which may be charged at automatic electric stations by connecting the battery to a dynamo and dropping a coin of small value in a slot. With machines of this character it will be possible to attain a speed of 150 miles an hour.
The bicycle will not be used in war for the simple reason that as dyspepsia will be unknown, everybody will feel so well and be so good-humoured and disinclined to quarrel that there will be no one to go to war.”