The saddle is the part of the bike most people feel the most but consider the least. That’s a shame, because the bike seat has a weird and wonderful history, involving dead horses, Victorian erotic panic, and secret government research. That’s why CycleHub decided to take a brief look at the history of the bicycle seat.

It started badly. The first pedal bicycles of the 1860s were built from wrought iron with wooden wheels wrapped in iron tyres, and no springs to protect your bottom.

Riders rattling along the cobblestones of Paris gave them the nickname of “the boneshakers”.

The saddle perched on a single long flat spring, which really wasn’t much protection. Most of these bikes were later melted down for scrap, which tells you something about how fondly they were remembered.

A Dead Horse Spurs Innovation

It was a dead horse that lead to the first big innovation in bike seats.

John Boultbee Brooks went to saddle up his faithful horse and found that it had died during the night. He had to borrow a friend's bicycle to get to work, but the solid wooden saddle was painful. In a flash of inspiration, he vowed to build something better.

Brooks was a success, and Brooks England still produces bike saddles and accessories today. The company’s famous B17 saddle was first made in the 1890s for touring and trekking. For over a century now, it has been Brooks’ best seller, and today it remains virtually unchanged from the original model.

The B17 is the longest-lived bicycle product in the world.

The Hot Seat

Then things got weird.

Because this is when (male) doctors began warning that women could experience up to four orgasms in one hour of bicycling. In the prestigious Dominion Medical Monthly, the editor warned that “Bicycle riding produces in the female a distinct orgasm.”

In retrospect, it’s hard to believe this wasn’t some sort of brilliant marketing campaign by the bicycle industry. But it wasn’t.

Another doctor, gynecologist Robert Latou Dickinson, published an article in a similar vein in the American Journal of Obstetrics in the 1890s. He wrote that pedalling while sitting on a bike saddle causes "friction over the clitoris and labia" and a state of arousal.

Cutting Off the Nose to Save the Penis

Unfortunately for the ladies, those doctors’ predictions turned out not to be true, to my knowledge, anyway.

But, in the battle of the sexes, it is not just the women who have suffered due to the humble bicycle saddle. Just listen to what Boston urologist Dr Irwin Goldstein had to say in 1997, about 100 years ago, about the saddle orgasm panic:

“There are only two kinds of male cyclists: those who are impotent and those who will be impotent.”

Dr Goldstein felt that long hours on the saddle put a lot of pressure on the perineum, which could cause numbness and erectile dysfunction.

Apparently, the doctor had never heard of Jacques Anquetil, the champion French cyclist who fathered children by both his step-daughter and his daughter-in-law. (The photo shows Anquetil and 'Nanou' with her children.)

And think of Lance Armstrong. He famously dated musician Sheryl Crow, actress Kate Hudson, and fashion designer billionaire Tory Burch.

Despite this evidence, the cycling industry panicked. Manufacturers scrambled to introduce new models and technology. And research on bicycle-mounted police found that those riding on noseless seats had much less numbness.

Thus, the 2008 academic paper with the unforgettable title of “Cutting Off the Nose to Save the Penis.”

The Modern Saddle

Research like that has shaped the saddles we all ride today. Modern seats come with pressure-relief channels, cutouts, and sit-bone measurements, and the very best are now 3D printed.

Specialized's Mirror saddle swaps foam for a printed honeycomb lattice of some 14,000 tiny struts, each one tuned to cradle you and spare the soft tissue that doctors Dickinson and Goldstein fretted about so much.

Trek’s carbon Aeolus RSL AirLoom Saddles have a short profile for both men and women, more width at the back to support the sit bones, cutouts to minimise soft tissue pressure, and lattice construction to further reduce weight.

So the next time your saddle feels less than perfect, take heart. You are sitting on roughly 150 years of dead horses, panic about female liberation, government-funded anatomy studies, and space-age plastic and carbon fibres. All of it has just one goal: getting you home intact.

The boneshaker riders would be amazed by today’s saddle technology. They might also, at long last, be comfortable.