2 Replies to “Bicycles, 1946 (Barnett)”

  1. It was a good idea to start with the past technologies and explain how we got their. My project was on something similar to yours and I made a bunch of the same points you did, the point you made about the automobile and bicycle having similar streamline shapes is something i brought up in my slidecast. I liked how you took your project and talked about the marketing and advertising aspect of the bicycle. I didn’t know just how much marketing went into the bike, especially geared towards children. Furthermore, I never knew that the space race and the atomic age influenced bicycle design. I really liked how you used 2 pictures per slide for a few of the picture. It really drove the point home. There’s not much to critique about this slidecast the one thing would be to try and get better voice quality. The mic would go in and out sometimes making it difficult to hear what you were saying. Besides this it was a great slidecast and very informative about the bicycle and its history.

  2. One thing I thought you did very well was to talk about how different bikes were marketed differently, and towards different target audiences, over time. That these companies didn’t just make a bike, but adjusted it to men, women, and children, demonstrates that the technology’s use was only one part of its appeal, and that the sociocultural conditions surrounding its development can impact it dramatically, as we’ve discussed many times in class this semester. I also really enjoyed some of the other pictures you included, especially the 1948 model of the quadri-bike.

    I do think you probably could have focused on one specific image of a bike, rather than just how bikes have been imagined over time and it would have made the slidecast more clear. However, you researched these images and ideas very thoroughly and it shows and I think overall your slidecast was really informative and fun to watch!

  3. Wow that image of the man with the wheels attached to his feet as an early form of roller blades is hilarious. It both looks incredibly dated by todays terms, as well as somewhat futuristic because it looks somewhat like a overboard. Noting the importance of advertising throughout the slide cast was an important touch. Its interesting to see how bicycles were compared to other innovations of the time such as air travel and space travel. It shows how advanced society viewed bicycles to be. What makes it especially interesting is that today, bikes are so commonplace that its hard to imagine a time when they were considered a cutting edge technology. The Tour-de-France was another cool point.
    My only minor critique is that you started to focus on bikes after your main bike in the 1940s. Bikes in the 1960s would have been inspired by different events than your initial bike from the 40s.
    All in all, this was a very well done, highly informative video. I learned more about bikes in these 6 minutes than I had ever learned in my life.

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