The Largest Bicycle Ever Built Is Also, One Regrets to Report, the Least Thiccc Object We Have Ever Measured
Theodore Vance, Junior Cataloguer · vehicles / the boundary of the catalogue
THE THICCC BEAT: the desk reacts. The Junior Cataloguer brings in a record holder he is certain will finally clear the bar, and learns something instead.
One has been waiting, frankly, for a subject like this. On the thirteenth of June, at a cycling event in the City of London, Guinness World Records certified the largest rideable penny-farthing ever constructed. It is named Big Bertha. It stands two hundred and eighty-two centimetres to the handlebars, which is nine feet three inches, which is taller than any room one has ever lived in. Its front wheel measures two hundred and fifty-four centimetres across, a full hundred inches, double the wheel of an ordinary high-bicycle. The rider, a Mr Neil Laughton of the Penny Farthing Club, had to wear stilts merely to reach the pedals, and the whole machine has, in the great tradition of its kind, no brakes whatsoever. I read this and I confess I stood up at my desk.
I bring it to the desk for a reason the Senior Cataloguer will understand and resent. He has informed me, by memorandum, more than once, that my beloved Saturn V "is not a vehicle" and is therefore ineligible for the catalogue, a position I continue to regard as incorrect and slightly cruel. Well. A bicycle is a vehicle. There is no memorandum in the world that makes a bicycle not a vehicle. So I brought in the largest one ever made, expecting, for once, to win on eligibility and on merit in the same afternoon. Quod erat demonstrandum, I thought. I was wrong about the second part, and I would like to be the one to say so before Bart does.
Because here is the difficulty, and it is the whole difficulty. Our standard, as the Editor herself laid down from the top of the masthead only last week, is not bigness. It is girth, and girth is width with intention. And a penny-farthing, considered honestly, is a machine that spends its entire genius on the wrong axis. It is tall. It is grand. Its wheel is enormous in diameter. But run your hand across that hundred-inch wheel and you find a rim perhaps an inch through and a tyre thinner than a thumb, a frame of drawn tube that is all line and no body. Big Bertha is the most magnificent silhouette in cycling and, in cross-section, almost nothing at all. She is height masquerading as substance. She is, one must report, the anti-thiccc.
I will admit this stung for an hour. I had wanted so badly to file her under Vehicles, beside the things I love. But a philosophy minor is occasionally good for something, and it occurred to me, somewhere around the second pot of tea, that a scale of girth is useless without a zero. You cannot say a cement mixer is thiccc, or a Bagger 288, or a wheel of Double Gloucester, unless somewhere in the catalogue there sits an object that is honestly, gloriously, not. We have never had one on purpose. We have one now. The name Big Bertha is almost too perfect, given that she earns her place by having no girth at all; even the bicycle's own name, the big penny coin and the little farthing, is a lesson in how two round things of different size relate, which is the only question this desk has ever asked.
So I am not filing her with the mining trucks. I am filing her at the bottom of the ruler, where the marks begin, as the catalogue's first deliberately enshrined control specimen, against which all future girth shall be measured. Mr Bolwell of Australia, who built her by hand over several months, has given us not a thiccc object but the instrument by which we know one. I should think that is a higher honour, and I intend to defend the point at dinner.
The ruling: Not Thiccc, and enshrined for precisely that reason. The largest bicycle ever built is pure diameter and no girth, the boundary case the catalogue has long needed, and it is hereby installed as our calibration zero. Filed under Vehicles, sub-file: The Control Group. Magnitudo non est crassitudo: size is not thickness. One has waited a year to write that sentence down.
Theodore Vance, Junior Cataloguer, filing from the reading room with the good lamp, eighteen months in and, he is given to understand, still settling in.
Source: www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2026/6/wheels-of-fortune-w