The Wasp — 1895 — page 17: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This satirical page imagines absurd future uses of bicycles in American public life. The top panel mocks toll collection by showing a "Toll Tax Collector" on a bicycle chasing citizens. Another panel depicts "Governor Jim Budd" riding instead of walking—satirizing political laziness. Lower panels show increasingly ridiculous scenarios: a blind man riding (labeled "I Was Born Blind"), suggesting bicycles enable the disabled; legal figures riding to court; and the Supreme Bench using bicycles to deliver heavy decisions. The final panel references "Obstruction" near a monument, likely critiquing how bicycles obstruct public spaces and traffic. The satire targets the bicycle craze of the 1890s-1900s, treating the new technology as a solution to every civic problem, mocking both technological utopianism and specific California political figures.