The "dandy horse", also called Draisienne or Laufmaschine ("running machine"), was the first human means of transport to use only two wheels in tandem and was invented by the German Baron Karl von Drais. It is regarded as the first bicycle and von Drais is seen as the "father of the bicycle", but it did not have pedals. Von Drais introduced it to the public in Mannheim in 1817 and in Paris in 1818. The rider sat astride a wooden frame supported by two in-line wheels and pushed the vehicle along with their feet while steering the front wheel.
The first mechanically propelled, two-wheeled vehicle may have been built by Kirkpatrick MacMillan, a Scottish blacksmith, in 1839, although this claim is often disputed. He is also associated with the first recorded instance of a cycling traffic offense, when a Glasgow newspaper in 1842 reported an accident in which an anonymous "gentleman from Dumfries-shire... bestride a velocipede... of ingenious design" knocked over a little girl in Glasgow and was fined five shillings ().
In the early 1860s, the Frenchmen Pierre Michaux and Pierre Lallement took bicycle design in a new direction by adding a mechanical crank drive with pedals on an enlarged front wheel (the velocipede). This was the first in mass production. Another French inventor named Douglas Grasso had a failed prototype of Pierre Lallement's bicycle several years earlier. Several inventions followed using rear-wheel drive, the best known being the rod-driven velocipede by Scotsman Thomas McCall in 1869. In the same year, bicycle wheels with wire spokes were patented by Eugène Meyer of Paris.Bulletin des lois de la République française (1873) 12th series, vol. 6, p. 648, patent no. 86,705: "Perfectionnements dans les roues de vélocipèdes" ("Improvements in the wheels of bicycles"), issued 4 August 1869. The French vélocipède, made of iron and wood, developed into the "penny-farthing" (historically known as an "ordinary bicycle", a retronym, since there was then no other kind). It featured a tubular steel frame on which were mounted wire-spoked wheels with solid rubber tires. These bicycles were difficult to mount, dismount and brake due to their high seat over the large front wheel. In 1868, Rowley Turner, a sales agent of the Coventry Sewing Machine Company (which soon became the Coventry Machinists Company), brought a Michaux cycle to Coventry, England. His uncle, Josiah Turner, and business partner James Starley, used this as a basis for the 'Coventry Model' in what became Britain's first cycle factory.McGrory, David. A History of Coventry (Chichester: Phillimore, 2003), p. 221.
The dwarf ordinary addressed some of these faults by reducing the front wheel diameter and setting the seat further back. This, in turn, required gearing—effected in a variety of ways—to efficiently use pedal power. Having to both pedal and steer via the front wheel remained a problem. Englishman J.K. Starley (nephew of James Starley), J.H. Lawson, and Shergold solved this problem by introducing the chain drive (originated by the unsuccessful "bicyclette" of Englishman Henry Lawson), connecting the frame-mounted cranks to the rear wheel. These models were known as safety bicycles, dwarf safeties, or upright bicycles for their lower seat height. Although, without pneumatic tires, the ride of the smaller-wheeled bicycle would be much rougher than that of the larger-wheeled variety. Starley's 1885 Rover, manufactured in CoventryMcGrory, p. 222. is usually described as the first recognizably modern bicycle. Soon, the seat tube was added, which created the modern bike's double-triangle diamond frame.
Further innovations increased comfort and ushered in a second bicycle craze, the 1890s Golden Age of Bicycles. In 1888, Scotsman John Boyd Dunlop introduced the first practical pneumatic tire, which soon became universal. Willie Hume demonstrated the supremacy of Dunlop's tyres in 1889, winning the tyre's first-ever races in Ireland and then England. Soon after, the rear freewheel was developed, enabling the rider to coast. This refinement led to the 1890s invention of coaster brakes. Derailleur gears and hand-operated Bowden cable-pull brakes were also developed during these years, but were only slowly adopted by casual riders.
The Svea Velocipede with vertical pedal arrangement and locking hubs was introduced in 1892 by the Swedish engineers Fredrik Ljungström and Birger Ljungström.
In the 1870s, many cycling clubs flourished. They were popular in a time when there were no cars on the market and the principal mode of transportation was horse-drawn vehicles. Among the earliest clubs was The Bicycle Touring Club, which has operated since 1878. By the turn of the century, cycling clubs flourished on both sides of the Atlantic, and touring and racing became widely popular. The Raleigh Bicycle Company was founded in Nottingham, England in 1888. It became the biggest bicycle manufacturer in the world, making over two million bikes per year.
Bicycles and horse buggies were the two mainstays of private transportation just prior to the automobile, and the grading of smooth roads in the late 19th century was stimulated by the widespread advertising, production, and use of these devices. More than 1 billion bicycles had been manufactured worldwide by the early 21st century. Bicycles are the most common vehicle of any kind in the world, and the most numerous model of any kind of vehicle, whether human-powered or motor vehicle, is the Chinese Flying Pigeon, with numbers exceeding 500 million.
Early history and unverified claims
There are several early claims regarding the invention of the bicycle, but these remain unverified. A sketch from around 1500 AD is attributed to Gian Giacomo Caprotti, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, but it was described by Hans-Erhard Lessing in 1998 as a purposeful fraud, a description now generally accepted. However, the authenticity of the bicycle sketch is still vigorously maintained by followers of Augusto Marinoni, a lexicographer and philologist, who was entrusted by the Commissione Vinciana of Rome with the transcription of Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus. A three-wheeled wheelchair powered by hand cranks was built in either 1655 or 1680 by a disabled German man, Stephan Farffler, who wanted to be able to maintain his mobility. This three-wheeled device is believed to have been a precursor to the modern-day tricycle and bicycle.
In Japan, a pedal-powered tricycle called Rikushu-honsha was described by Hiraishi Kuheiji Tokimitsu (1696-1771) in 1732, with the record currently owned by the Hikone Public Library, Hikone. However, this tricycle was not further developed, and bicycles did not occur in Japan until they were imported from Europe. Later, and equally unverified, is the contention that a certain "Comte de Sivrac" developed a célérifère in 1792, demonstrating it at the Palais-Royal in France. The célérifère supposedly had two wheels set on a rigid wooden frame and no steering, directional control being limited to that attainable by leaning. A rider was said to have sat astride the machine and pushed it along using alternate feet. It is now thought that the two-wheeled célérifère never existed (though there were four-wheelers) and it was instead a misinterpretation by the well-known French journalist Louis Baudry de Saunier in 1891.An earlier English version appeared as "The End of De Sivrac" in The Boneshaker #85(1977)
19th century
1817 to 1819: The Draisine or Velocipede
The first verifiable claim for a practically used bicycle belongs to German Baron Karl von Drais Sauerbronn, a civil servant to the Grand Duke of Baden in Germany. Drais invented his Laufmaschine (German for "running machine") in 1817, which was called Draisine (English) or draisienne (French) by the press. He patented this design in 1818, which was the first commercially successful two-wheeled, steerable, human-propelled machine, commonly called a velocipede, and nicknamed hobby-horse or dandy horse. It was initially manufactured in Germany and France.
Hans-Erhard Lessing (Drais's biographer) found from circumstantial evidence that Drais's interest in finding an alternative to the horse was the starvation and death of horses caused by crop failure in 1816, the Year Without a Summer (following the volcanic eruption of Tambora in 1815).
On his first reported ride from Mannheim on June 12, 1817, he covered 13 km (eight miles) in less than an hour."LODA, eine neuerfundene Fahrmaschine" in: Badwochenblatt für die Großherzogliche Stadt Baden of 29th of July 1817 Constructed almost entirely of wood, the draisine weighed 22 kg (48 pounds), had brass bushings within the wheel bearings, iron shod wheels, a rear-wheel brake and 152 mm (6 inches) of trail of the front-wheel for a self-centering caster effect. This design was welcomed by mechanically minded men daring to balance, and several thousand copies were built and used, primarily in Western Europe and in North America. Its popularity rapidly faded when, partly due to increasing numbers of accidents, some city authorities began to prohibit its use. However, in 1866 Paris a Chinese visitor named Bin Chun could still observe foot-pushed velocipedes.Eesfehani, Amir Moghaddaas: "The Bicycle's Long Way to China", Cycle History 13, San Francisco 2003, pp. 94–102 The Draisine is regarded as the first bicycle and Karl von Drais is seen as the "father of the bicycle".
The concept was picked up by a number of British cartwrights; the most notable was Denis Johnson of London, who announced in late 1818 that he would sell an improved model. Johnson called his machine as a pedestrian curricle or velocipede, but the public preferred nicknames like "hobby-horse", after the children's toy or, worse still, "Dandy horse", after the foppish men, then called dandies, who often rode them. Johnson's machine was an improvement on Drais's, being notably more elegant: his wooden frame had a serpentine shape instead of Drais's straight one, allowing the use of larger wheels without raising the rider's seat, but was still the same design.
1820s to 1850s: An Era of 3 and 4-Wheelers
By the 1820s, the dandy horse had become both a fashionable novelty and a practical curiosity. It was associated with urban gentlemen, or “dandies,” who used it for exercise and display, but contemporary writers also saw possibilities for wider transport. An 1829 article in The Kaleidoscope described an improved version as a cheap and useful machine that could help a rider cover long distances with less fatigue than walking.
The intervening decades of the 1820s–1850s witnessed many developments concerning human-powered vehicles, often using technologies similar to the draisine, even if the idea of a workable two-wheel design, requiring the rider to balance, had been dismissed. These new machines had three wheels (tricycles) or four (quadracycles) and came in a very wide variety of designs, using pedals, treadles, and hand-cranks, but these designs often suffered from high weight and high rolling resistance. However, Willard Sawyer in Dover successfully manufactured a range of treadle-operated 4-wheel vehicles and exported them worldwide in the 1850s.
1830s: The Reported Scottish Inventions