The Reinvention of the Bicycle

The bicycle was not invented in a single flash of genius but reinvented again and again over most of a century, each version correcting the faults of the last. Its earliest ancestor appeared in 1817, when the German inventor Karl von Drais built a two-wheeled wooden machine with a seat and a steerable front wheel. It had no pedals; the rider simply pushed along the ground with the feet, coasting where the road allowed. Nicknamed the hobby-horse, it caused a brief craze and then faded, but it had established the crucial idea that a person could balance and travel on two wheels in line. Von Drais had designed it partly as a substitute for the horse, at a time when a failed harvest had left many horses starving, and for a brief season fashionable young men could be seen sweeping along smooth paths on the strange contraption before the craze, and the paths, gave out.

Pedals arrived in the 1860s, fixed directly to the front wheel of a machine so jarring to ride over cobbled streets that it earned the name boneshaker. Because one turn of the pedals gave exactly one turn of the wheel, the only way to go faster was to make the driven wheel larger. This logic led, in the 1870s, to the extraordinary high-wheeler, or penny-farthing, whose front wheel grew enormous while the rear shrank to a tiny trailer. It was fast and, for a time, fashionable, but the rider perched high above the axle, and a sudden stop could pitch him head first onto the road. Riding one was a feat of nerve as much as skill. Falls were common, and the very phrase for a tumble over the handlebars, a header, dates from these years; the riders were almost always young men, for the machine demanded strength, courage and a certain disregard for one's own neck.

The decisive breakthrough came in 1885, when the English manufacturer John Kemp Starley produced what he called the safety bicycle. It abandoned the giant wheel altogether. Two wheels of equal, moderate size carried a rider seated low between them, and the pedals now turned a chain that drove the rear wheel, so that gearing could be chosen freely without enlarging any wheel. The machine was stable, easy to mount and far less likely to throw its rider, and its basic layout, the diamond-shaped frame and the chain drive, is essentially the bicycle we still ride today. Because the rider now sat low and could put both feet to the ground, the bicycle was suddenly safe for almost anyone to learn, and sales climbed steeply as ordinary people discovered that they could travel further and faster than they ever had on foot.

Comfort followed close behind. In 1888 the Scottish inventor John Boyd Dunlop reintroduced the air-filled, or pneumatic, tyre, a cushion of trapped air that smoothed away the jolts that had tormented earlier riders. With a safe frame and a soft ride, the bicycle at last became a machine that almost anyone could enjoy, and its price fell steadily as factories turned them out in growing numbers. Prices tumbled through the 1890s during a great bicycle boom, and for the first time a working family could realistically hope to own one, opening up the surrounding countryside to people who had never before been able to leave their own town.

The social effects were remarkable. Cheap and needing neither rails nor horses, the bicycle gave ordinary people, and especially women, a new and unprecedented freedom to travel where and when they wished. Campaigners for women's rights hailed it as a machine of emancipation, and it even helped to loosen the heavy, restrictive clothing that fashion had imposed on women, since long skirts were plainly unsuited to a moving chain. The bicycle also seeded later technologies: the brothers who built the first successful aeroplane, Wilbur and Orville Wright, earned their living as bicycle mechanics, and much of their feel for lightweight structures and balance came straight from the workshop. In its lightness, in the balancing of forces and in the careful shaping of thin metal tubes, the modest bicycle turned out to be a rehearsal for machines its earliest makers could never have dreamed of. More than a hundred years on, the basic design has scarcely changed, a rare example of a machine so nearly perfected at birth that later generations have found little to add. In an age of engines and screens, the bicycle endures as one of the most efficient means of travel ever devised, and one of the very few that runs on nothing but human effort.