How a nineteenth-century curiosity became one of the world's most practical machines
Few machines look simpler than the bicycle: two wheels, a frame of metal tubes, handlebars to steer and a chain linking the rider's feet to the rear wheel. Yet it took nearly eighty years of trial and error in the nineteenth century to arrive at this familiar design. Surprisingly, the story began with a volcano on the other side of the world. After the massive eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, ash in the upper atmosphere cooled the climate across Europe, ruining harvests in 1816, the 'Year Without a Summer'. Oats became so scarce and expensive that many horses starved or were slaughtered, prompting inventors to ask whether a practical carriage could be propelled by human muscle alone.
The first convincing answer came in 1817 from Karl von Drais, a German civil servant and inventor living in Mannheim. His 'running machine', soon nicknamed the draisienne or hobby-horse, consisted of two wooden wheels set one behind the other beneath a wooden beam. The rider sat astride the beam, held a steering bar attached to the front wheel, and pushed against the ground with alternate feet, rather like someone on a modern balance bike for toddlers. On a smooth, level road, Drais could travel at more than double walking pace. For a couple of summers the machine was fashionable among wealthy young men in Paris and London, yet the craze faded quickly. Most roads were deeply rutted, so riders took to the smoother pavements, where they knocked into pedestrians until authorities in several cities banned the machines from footpaths.
For the next four decades, inventors experimented primarily with three- and four-wheeled vehicles worked by levers or cranks, assuming that a two-wheeled machine would inevitably fall over if the rider lifted both feet off the ground. The breakthrough came in the 1860s in Paris, where craftsmen attached rotating cranks and pedals directly to the hub of the front wheel of a two-wheeled frame. Credit for the idea has long been disputed between the carriage maker Pierre Michaux and one of his former employees, Pierre Lallement, who patented a similar design after moving to the United States. Whoever thought of it first, the new machine, called the velocipede, proved that a rider could balance with both feet in the air as long as the bicycle kept moving forward.
Enthusiasm for the velocipede spread rapidly on both sides of the Atlantic, with indoor riding schools opening in major cities during the winter of 1868–69. In practice, however, riding one outdoors was punishing work. The frame was made of solid wrought iron, and the wooden wheels were bound in iron rims like those of a cart. Every cobblestone sent jolts straight through the rider's wrists and spine, earning the machine its British nickname, the 'boneshaker'. Moreover, because the pedals were fixed directly to the front wheel, one turn of the rider's legs produced only one turn of the wheel, severely limiting top speed.
During the 1870s, British makers in Coventry and Birmingham found a bold way to make the machine faster: they enlarged the front wheel until it measured up to a metre and a half across, while shrinking the rear wheel to save weight. Because a larger wheel travelled further with each rotation of the pedals, these high-wheeled bicycles, known at the time as 'ordinaries' and later as 'penny-farthings', were lighter and much brisker than the boneshaker. They were also treacherous. The rider perched almost directly above the front axle; if the wheel struck a stone or a rut, the rear of the bicycle lifted and pitched the rider headfirst over the handlebars in a fall known as 'taking a header'. High wheels required long legs, agility and nerve, which effectively excluded older people, children and women wearing the heavy, ankle-length skirts of the Victorian era.
What transformed cycling from a daring sport into everyday transport was the 'safety bicycle', introduced in its classic form by John Kemp Starley in Coventry in 1885. Starley's 'Rover' used two wheels of roughly equal size and placed the rider comfortably between them, driving the rear wheel by means of a metal chain and sprockets. By adjusting the size of the toothed gear wheels, makers could achieve the speed of a high-wheeler while keeping the rider's feet close to the ground. Three years later, in Belfast, the Scottish veterinary surgeon John Boyd Dunlop fitted his son's tricycle with tyres made of rubber tubes inflated with air. Combined with Starley's chain-driven frame, the pneumatic tyre finally tamed the vibration of rough roads.
By the mid-1890s, factories were turning out hundreds of thousands of safety bicycles a year, and falling prices brought second-hand machines within reach of factory workers, clerks and country postmen. The social effects were profound. Young people could travel to neighbouring villages for work or courtship, widening the pool of marriage partners, while women took to the roads in unprecedented numbers. Heavy corsets and trailing skirts gave way to 'rational dress' and loose-fitting bloomers, leading the American campaigner Susan B. Anthony to remark in 1896 that the bicycle had done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. Even the modern highway owes a debt to cyclists: it was cycling clubs, decades before the motor car became common, that first lobbied governments to resurface dusty country lanes and put up roadside signposts.