Professor and Information Literacy Librarian Chris Sweet has just published a new article in The Wheelman on Leonard “Baby” Bliss, a Bloomington, Illinois native famous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for his impressive weight. Sweet’s article discusses how the heavyset Bliss was able to make a living combining two Victorian passions: bicycling and sideshows.
By the mid-1890s, Baby Bliss was well-known in Central Illinois for his tremendous size. Multiple accounts state his weight at this time to have been around 500 pounds. Around the country, and particularly in nearby Peoria and Chicago, the bicycle boom was underway. During the 1890s, Illinois was home to nearly 400 bicycle companies. The sheer number of bicycle companies meant intense competition between these companies to distinguish their particular bicycle from everyone else’s. . . . Eventually someone had the idea to put the heaviest cyclist they could find on their bicycle for visual proof of durability. Enter Baby Bliss. (2)
Image copyright McLean County Museum of History.
Sweet is an historian of bicycles and cycling in the Midwest. You can read about the life and times of the remarkable Leonard Bliss in Sweet’s “Baby Bliss: World’s Heaviest Cyclist.”