The problem with spoon brakes on the front wheel of a bicycle

Is that your bicycle in a fast stop would pitch forward and throw you on the ground with the bicycle on top of you. I can see stopping with just your feet if you weren't going too fast but you also might run over one of your feet doing this. So, injuries likely happened a lot when the bicycle was first invented.

I myself in Junior high school had a 10 speed Hercules bike and I put my gym clothes in my tennis shoes because I had worn them in gym for at least a month. Then I draped the shoes hanging over the handlebars from the shoe laces.

Bad idea because one shoe got caught in my spokes and flipped my bike on top of me in front of a car. Luckily the car did not run over me and I was just bruised because I was young and could still take a beating somewhere between age 12 and 13 years old. But, I didn't knock any teeth out like I did when I ran into a 1949 Dodge while waving at friends in a park. Then I broke off my two front upper teeth and so I was a snagglepus until I was 15 when my parents got caps for my two top front teeth and then girls were more interested in me when I wasn't a snagglepus anymore with broken off teeth since age 9.

So, I survived those two crashes and many more from age 5 (when they gave me my first adult size bicycle and graduating high School. But, I owned my own car too from age 16 on and have almost always owned a car since then for the last 62 years I have owned one or more cars and sometimes a motorcycle  or two since I was 16 years old in 1964.