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History of the Bicycle

No single time or person can be identified with the invention of the bicycle. Its earliest known forebears were called velocipedes, and included many types of human-powered vehicles. One of these, the scooter-like dandy horse of the French Comte de Sivrac, dating to 1790, was long cited as the earliest bicycle. Most bicycle historians now believe that these hobby-horses with no steering mechanism probably never existed, but were made up by Louis Baudry de Saunier, a 19th-century French bicycle historian.

The ancestor of the bicycle was most likely first created by a German Baron, Karl Drais, who invented his machine in 1817, and patented it. A number of these draisines still exist, including one at the Paleis het Loo museum in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. These were pushbikes, powered by the action of the rider's feet pushing against the ground. Scottish blacksmith Kirkpatrick MacMillan refined this in 1839 by adding a mechanical crank drive to the rear wheel, thus creating the first true "bicycle" in the modern sense. His system employed a pair of treadle drives connected by rods to a rear wheel crank, rather like a steam locomotive's driveshaft. Although the design was copied by at least two other Scottish builders, it was overtaken in popularity and influence by an arguably inferior one. In the 1850s and 1860s, Frenchmen Ernest Michaux and Pierre Lallement took bicycle design in a different direction, placing pedals on an enlarged front wheel. Their creation, which came to be called the "Boneshaker", featured a heavy steel frame on which they mounted wooden wheels with iron tires. Lallement emigrated to America, where he recorded a patent on his bicycle in 1866 in New Haven, Connecticut. The Boneshaker was further refined by James Starley in the 1870s. He mounted the seat more squarely over the pedals, so that the rider could push more firmly, and further enlarged the front wheel to increase the potential for speed. With tires of solid rubber, his machine became known as the ordinary. British cyclists likened the disparity in size of the two wheels to their coinage, nicknaming it the penny-farthing. The primitive bicycles of this generation were difficult to ride, and the high seat and poor weight distribution made for dangerous falls.

The subsequent dwarf ordinary addressed some of these faults, by adding gearing, reducing the front wheel diameter, and setting the seat further back with no loss of speed. Having to both pedal and steer via the front wheel remained a problem. Starley's nephew, J. K. Starley, J. H. Lawson, and Shergold solved this problem by introducing the chain and producing rear-wheel drive. These models were known as dwarf safeties, or safety bicycles, for their lower seat height and better weight distribution. Starley's 1885 Rover is usually described as the first recognizably modern bicycle. Soon the seat tube was added, creating the double-triangle, diamond frame of the modern bike.

While the Starley design was much safer, the return to smaller wheels made for a bumpy ride. The next innovations increased comfort and ushered in the 1890s Golden Age of Bicycles. In 1888 Scotsman John Boyd Dunlop introduced the pneumatic tire, which soon became universal. Shortly thereafter the rear freewheel was developed, enabling the rider to coast without the pedals spinning out of control. This refinement led to the 1898 invention of coaster brakes. Derailleur gears and hand-operated, cable-pull brakes were also developed during these years, but were only slowly adopted by casual riders. By the turn of the century, bicycling clubs flourished on both sides of the Atlantic.