From the Journals of Basil Bromley, Artist and Mechanician
Entry the Fourth , 17th of May, 1873
The morning at Hayle began with a misapprehension. The inn’s ostler, charged with feeding the horses, took it upon himself to “water” my Steam Unicycle as well, pouring half a pail into the firebox whilst I still slept. I was awakened by a terrific hiss, as if a hundred serpents had invaded my chamber. Rushing down in my nightshirt, I found the contraption venting indignation like a Roman fountain, the ostler nowhere to be seen. Mercifully, no damage was done, though I now comprehend that men of good intention may yet be the greatest danger to invention.
Once properly fed with coal and replenished with water (this time under my own supervision), I set off along the road to Redruth. The air was sharp with the tang of tin workings, those yawning scars of Cornish industry where engines puff more diligently, though less elegantly, than my own. Several miners, emerging from their shift, beheld my machine and declared it a “travelling boiler.” One wagered I could not manage the hill ahead; when I did, he saluted me with the grin of a man bested but secretly pleased to have been so.
Alas, triumph was not unalloyed. On a steep descent, the unicycle, giddy with gravity, attained such speed that my hat was carried off into a hedge. I dared not stop to retrieve it until the bottom of the hill, whereupon I was assisted by a Methodist preacher, who, having plucked it from the brambles, inquired sternly whether my machine was “something a gentleman should be riding.” I replied that it was of great design, and was both natural and inevitable. He frowned, yet conceded that locomotion by a single wheel might serve as a parable of faith: all balance dependent on unseen forces. I promised to consider the matter further.
By late afternoon I reached Redruth proper, soothed by the hospitality of a kindly widow who offered lodging in exchange for a sketch of her deceased husband’s likeness, rendered from a small daguerreotype. I laboured at it by lamplight, the unicycle stabled once more among horses, who regard it with a sort of dull resignation, as though acknowledging a strange cousin in brass.
Thus concludes this day’s travel: slower in distance, richer in conversation. Each mile upon the Steam Unicycle seems to provoke speculation not merely upon machinery, but upon the very order of things,faith, industry, art, and the fragile tether that keeps them all in balance.
