On May 10, 1884, midway through his 48th year, Samuel L. Clemens reluctantly “confessed to age” by wearing glasses for the first time. That same day, the celebrated writer better known as Mark Twain sought to reclaim his youth by mounting a bicycle for the first time.

Only one of these first tries succeeded. “The spectacles,” Twain later recalled, “stayed on.”

Bodily contusions notwithstanding, Twain promoted the new sport of cycling with characteristic rhubarb tartness. “Get a bicycle,” he urged readers. “You will not regret it, if you live.”

Over the next decade, millions of Americans of all ages, trades and visual acuities would heed the pedaler’s cry. They would not only live, but would learn to stay majestically, propulsively upright, too. They would start cycling clubs, collect cycling paraphernalia, compose cycling songs, silk-screen cycling art, overhaul female fashion and rewrite the rules of social conduct.

The end-of-the-century bicycle craze also greased the gears of industrial genius, as manufacturers here and abroad scrambled to devise new ways to speed up and standardize production, to lighten the bicycle frame without compromising its strength, and to make the ride cushier through the addition of a radical new invention, the pneumatic tire.