My first bicycle was a one-speed, 26-inch, balloon-tired Schwinn. It was a surprise gift for my 12th birthday, which coincidentally was the day my family moved from urban Brooklyn to suburban Queens.

I do not recall any of my friends in Brooklyn having had bikes; roller skates were our preferred means of wheeled recreation and transportation. When we grew out of the skates, we cannibalized them for their wheels, which we attached to the ends of a two-by-four, on top of which we nailed an orange crate. These homemade scooters took us everywhere, but preferably downhill, which is what it usually was for at least half of most journeys around Park Slope.

The children I met in my new neighborhood in Cambria Heights were neither skaters nor scooters. The first time I took my bike out into the street, other boys on bikes appeared out of nowhere; bike riding in the suburbs was a gregarious pastime. It didn’t take me long to get proficient on my new bike, and soon my brother and I, within or without a pack of other riders, were ranging far and wide – even into the terra incognita of Nassau County. The bicycle gave us a freedom of movement no subway or bus ever could in Brooklyn.

Bicycles seem to attract accessories as magnets do paper clips. I coveted lights, speedometers, and the more exotic accoutrements on display at Sam’s Cycle Shop on Linden Boulevard, but they were generally out of reach for a boy on a 25-cent weekly allowance and a sweet tooth. I was lucky that Sam let me earn some accessories by working around his shop. The record shop on Linden was not so cooperative, as much as I wanted to have the latest 45s. I needed a money-paying job.

Delivering the Long Island Press turned out to be well paying for a 12-year-old, and it kept me in sweets, records, and bicycle accessories – which quickly meant mainly delivery baskets. They could survive only so many crashes to the ground. Such crashes also took their toll on fenders and handlebars. Fenders got so rusty and so far out of alignment that they had to be removed before they got caught in the spokes. Handlebar grips became shredded as they skidded on the concrete, and so were abandoned, too. A paperboy’s bike soon looked like it had barely survived a demolition derby.

These are the kinds of memories I was hoping to find rekindled in David Herlihy’s history of the bicycle (Yale University Press, 446 pages, $39.95), but the bicycles he writes about are principally the ones of dandies and ladies. Nevertheless, he does trace the two-wheeler from its roots in the early 19th-century draisine, which was named after its German inventor, Karl von Drais, to the technological feats of today.

The draisine was also known as a “velocipede” (meaning “fast feet”), because it was propelled by straddling its low-slung seat. (True bicycles, Mr. Herlihy informs us, have pedals. Indeed, the term “bicycle” was not coined until the 1860s, by the French.) The velocipede was in fact an aid to walking. One Philadelphian saw great promise in it, speculating that a rider might reach “six or seven miles an hour without incurring much fatigue.”

To achieve such speeds, smoother roads than were then available were desirable. So velocipeders took to riding on the sidewalks, where naturally there were pedestrians. Not surprisingly, there were also collisions. In England, riders were declared a public nuisance and the machine was barred from public ways. Like the Segway human transporter and many another new contrivance, the velocipede faced considerable opposition to its widespread use. But it overcame that opposition.

In the 1860s, pedals attached to cranks attached to the front wheel were added to the velocipede by the Parisian Pierre Michaux. Since there was no gearing, the rider had to pedal at the same rate as the wheel turned. This naturally limited the speed that could be achieved, at least on the flat. To enable greater speeds, the front wheel grew larger, resulting in the extreme of the high wheeler, also known as the penny-farthing. But wheel height was limited by the necessity of the rider reaching the pedals. And stopping was a problem, because the feet could not reach the ground to serve as brakes. In spite of its limitations, the high-wheeler, which came to be known as the “ordinary,” continued to grow in popularity through the mid-1880s.

The introduction of the chain-and-sprocket (rear-wheel) drive provided a mechanical advantage that made greater speeds possible with a smaller wheel while at the same time putting the rider closer to the ground for braking. The resulting “safety bicycle” very much resembled a modern bicycle. Riding on rough roads was still hard on the rider, however. Relief came in the form of the pneumatic tire. Early versions, like much early technology, were not very user friendly, being expensive and prone to leaking and bursting. The improved version introduced by the Frenchman Edouard Michelin in 1891 enabled cyclists to repair their own punctures with relative ease.

By the end of the century, bicycles had pretty much achieved the form by which paperboys and others would know them in the 1950s.The rest of the technical story includes developments in lighter frames, multiplying gears, and mechanical brakes. But the technical story is not what seems most to interest Mr. Herlihy. Though he does trace the technical development of the bicycle, he appears to delight more in telling stories about bicycle outing clubs, competitive cycling, and other social interactions with the machine. These aspects of technology are not without relevance, of course. Among the interesting things that Mr. Herlihy does point out is that the demands of early cyclists for better roads predated those of motorists. And his brief telling of the story of the Tour de France is as captivating as the tradition-bound race itself.

There are many, many illustrations in this book – on average one per page, it seems – and almost all of them engaging in themselves. Mr. Herlihy’s prose style is pleasant and easy to read. The book’s title, “Bicycle: The History,” however, might more descriptively have been “Bicycling: A History.” This is not so much a book about the machine as it is one about the taming of the machine. It is not so much a history of a technology as a social and cultural history of a means of human-powered transportation, recreation, and competition. But above all, it is an immensely interesting book, even for a former paperboy who wished there were also some pictures of bicycles that had seen better days.

Mr. Petroski, the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University, is the author of “Paperboy,” a memoir of growing up in the 1950s with his bicycles in Queens. His latest book is “Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).