Happy Bicycle Day. This is how it came to be on the 19th – and not the 16th – of April.

When Albert Hofmann was 37 years old, he experienced the world’s first LSD trip.

As he wrote his bicycle – cars weren’t allowed during wartime to save fuel – back from his lab, the world started to distort as if he was looking into a funhouse mirror. 250mcg of LSD – the smallest dose he imagined had any effect – had turned his world upside down.

Hofmann didn’t know it at that time, but Bicycle Day would change more than just his world

Three days previous, he had resynthesized LSD-25 based on a “peculiar presentiment.” A few years earlier, he had tested LSD on mice but didn’t find any changes he was looking for. This time around, he accidentally dosed himself on the 16th, and intentionally on the 19th of April.

But was it an accident? Dennis McKenna – inspired by David Nichols – questions this narrative in the introduction of ‘Bicycle Day.’ Nichols has never accidentally dosed himself, arguing this was even less likely for Hofmann: “[he] was a Swiss chemist. Swiss chemists do not spill stuff.”

Tom Roberts recounts the history of Bicycle Day in his latest newsletter. Celebrated since 1985, the 16th fell on a date in the middle of the week at that time, so the 19th was chosen as a better day to celebrate the invention of LSD.

Why Bicycle Day? Naming it after the famous bicycle ride home, versus calling it something like “LSD day” had a better ring to it. It also reminded Roberts of a poem children in America learned that marks Paul Revere’s ride to start the American revolution.

The first intentional trip, was a challenging trip

“Since my self-experiment had revealed LSD in its terrifying, demonic aspect, the last thing I could have expected was that this substance could ever find application as anything approaching a pleasure drug. I failed, moreover, to recognize the meaningful connection between LSD inebriation and spontaneous visionary experience until much later, after further experiments, which were carried out with far lower doses and under different conditions.” – Albert Hofmann, in ‘LSD: My Problem Child’

As the world melted around him, Hofmann couldn’t imagine LSD being used for pleasure. Only through further experiences, and hearing how others were using LSD, did he see its enormous potential.

Since 1943 – now 79 years in the past – the world has changed completely. In some ways, things have gotten better. Child mortality is down, malaria kills fewer mothers each year, and the Harry Potter universe has entertained billions of kids and adults alike.

In other ways, things have not progressed as much as one would have liked. There is – again – war in continental Europe, mental health has not improved substantially over decades, and psychedelics are still not widely available for recreation and therapeutic use.

Hopefully, the study and experience of psychedelics can do the same for many more.

Happy Bicycle Day for those celebrating.