Cycling has passed through many phases - first an eccentricity, then a craze, then a past fashion, until now it has settled down into a very popular sport, a still more popular pastime and a means of locomotion that makes the country habitable for many people to whom the automobile has not yet become possible. Nobody has ever denied the value of cycling from the point of view of health, and as there are said to be ten million cyclists in the country, the influence of the push-bike on the national health must have been immense. Sir Harold Bowden, who is now the head of a firm that employs 3,500 people making bicycles, has been in the trade all his life, and there is not much about the cycling habit that he does not know.