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Lorne Shields is a Canadian bicycle historian, researcher, lecturer, and one of the world’s leading collectors of early cycling material. In this presentation, Shields will illustrate the history of the bicycle through original photographs dating from 1850 to 1926. Drawn entirely from his own collection, the images encompass a broad range of photographic processes, rare and unusual examples, photographs by noted practitioners, and examples of historic photographica as a fascinating field of collecting in its own right.

Shields lives in a suburb of Toronto and has been a collector since childhood, beginning with stamps before the age of ten. Around 1965, while working in the wholesale bicycle industry, a knowledgeable antiques and collectibles dealer—who became both a mentor and a friend—suggested that he begin to collect objects relating to his profession to deepen his understanding of the trade. Over the decades, Shields assembled a world-wide collection of antiquarian cycliana spanning the late eighteenth through the mid-twentieth century. It has included historic bicycles, monocycles, and tricycles as well as other manumotive and pedimotive vehicles; nineteenth century cycling photographs and related photographica; books, periodicals and catalogues; manuscripts, posters, prints, trade cards and other ephemera; and an extensive variety of cycling memorabilia. Photographica, however, has always been his passion. His collection and research explore how the bicycle—and its rapid development—affected technology, sport and racing, manufacturing, social history, war, fashion, women’s mobility, and the Victorian world in which the bicycle became such an important social force. In his photographs, the bicycle is not merely a machine: it becomes a window into the society that surrounds it.

One of Shields’s greatest contributions to the preservation of cycling history was the 1981 donation of most of his important early collection to the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. Today, the Shields Collection and library form an important part of the museum’s national collection in transportation technology. Objects from his collections have been exhibited or used for research by institutions including the Smithsonian Institution, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Canada Science and Technology Museum, and elsewhere. He has spoken at the George Eastman House in Rochester, International Cycling History Conferences in North America and Europe, as well as many photographic and historical societies, museums, universities, and Ephemera Society meetings. His writings have appeared in Stereo World, The Ephemera Journal, The Wheelmen, and the proceedings of International Cycling History Conferences, https://www.ichc.biz. For this presentation, Lorne Shields invites us to look at the bicycle’s history through the eyes of those who actually saw—and photographed—it.