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Two Wheels That Changed the World
In 1817 a German forest official named Karl von Drais unveiled a curious wooden device: two wheels set one behind the other in a single frame, joined by a beam on which the rider sat. The machine had no pedals. To move forward the rider pushed against the ground with alternate feet, and slowed himself the same way. Drais called it a Laufmaschine, or running machine; the British, less kindly, called it the hobby horse.
For nearly fifty years the idea went almost nowhere. Then, in the 1860s, a workshop in Paris belonging to the Michaux family fitted cranks and pedals directly to the front wheel, so that a rider could propel the machine without touching the road at all. The result, the velocipede, was heavy, and its iron-shod wooden wheels transmitted every stone in the street straight to the saddle. Riders gave it the nickname boneshaker.
Because those pedals turned the front wheel once for every turn of the legs, the only way to cover more ground with each stroke was to enlarge the wheel itself. By the mid-1870s the front wheel of the high bicycle — later nicknamed the penny-farthing — measured well over a metre across, and with it came greater speed. The machine was also notorious: perched above the axle, a rider who struck a rut was thrown head first over the handlebars.
The answer came from Coventry. In 1885 John Kemp Starley’s Rover seated the rider low between two wheels of equal size and used a chain to drive the rear wheel, so that gearing could be chosen freely and safety no longer depended on nerve. Three years later John Boyd Dunlop patented the pneumatic tyre, whose cushion of air absorbed the shocks that had made earlier machines so cumbersome to ride.
The consequences reached far beyond sport. A sturdy safety bicycle soon cost little more than a month of ordinary wages, and it handed cheap mobility to clerks, factory hands and — most disruptively — to women, whose skirts and chaperones were both abandoned on the road. Cycling clubs went on to campaign for smoother, better maintained roads, winning improvements that motorists would quietly inherit a generation later.
Reference Text
In 1817 a German forest official named Karl von Drais unveiled a curious wooden device: two wheels set one behind the other in a single frame, joined by a beam on which the rider sat. The machine had no pedals. To move forward the rider pushed against the ground with alternate feet, and slowed himself the same way. Drais called it a Laufmaschine, or running machine; the British, less kindly, called it the hobby horse.
For nearly fifty years the idea went almost nowhere. Then, in the 1860s, a workshop in Paris belonging to the Michaux family fitted cranks and pedals directly to the front wheel, so that a rider could propel the machine without touching the road at all. The result, the velocipede, was heavy, and its iron-shod wooden wheels transmitted every stone in the street straight to the saddle. Riders gave it the nickname boneshaker.
Because those pedals turned the front wheel once for every turn of the legs, the only way to cover more ground with each stroke was to enlarge the wheel itself. By the mid-1870s the front wheel of the high bicycle — later nicknamed the penny-farthing — measured well over a metre across, and with it came greater speed. The machine was also notorious: perched above the axle, a rider who struck a rut was thrown head first over the handlebars.
The answer came from Coventry. In 1885 John Kemp Starley’s Rover seated the rider low between two wheels of equal size and used a chain to drive the rear wheel, so that gearing could be chosen freely and safety no longer depended on nerve. Three years later John Boyd Dunlop patented the pneumatic tyre, whose cushion of air absorbed the shocks that had made earlier machines so cumbersome to ride.
The consequences reached far beyond sport. A sturdy safety bicycle soon cost little more than a month of ordinary wages, and it handed cheap mobility to clerks, factory hands and — most disruptively — to women, whose skirts and chaperones were both abandoned on the road. Cycling clubs went on to campaign for smoother, better maintained roads, winning improvements that motorists would quietly inherit a generation later.