The Bicycle

Where was the first bicycle made?

The first rideable bicycle was made by Kirkpatrick MacMillan of Dumfriesshire, Scotland, in 1839, although an attempt to construct one had been made by Jean Théson at Fontainebleau, France, in 1645.

Before this, crude machines had been made, which had no form of steering and had to be propelled by pushing the feet against the ground. Machines of this type appear on bas-reliefs in Babylon and Egypt and on frescoes on Pompeii. In England, a stained glass window, dated 1580, in te church of Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, shows a cherub astride such a machine.

But all these machines seen to have been four-wheeled. The true bicycle belongs to the 19^th Century.

MacMillan’s bicycle was driven by rods attached from pedals to a sprocket on the rear wheel. The first chain-driven bicycle was produced by Tribout and Meyer in 1869. In this year the first bicycle show – in Paris – and the first cycle road race – from Paris to Rouen – took place.

An Englishman, James Starley, of Coventry in Warwickshire, is known as “the father of the cycle industry”. In 1871 he introduced a bicycle with a large driving wheel and a smaller trailing wheel. This was the “ordinary” bicycle, known to everyone as the penny-farthing. In 1874 a chain-driven bicycle with two wheels of equal diameter was designed by H.J. Lawson. This was known as the Safety bicycle and became enormously popular from about 1885 when the Rover Safety bicycle was built by John K. Starley, Jame’s nephew.

The pneumatic tyre – in other words, a tyre filled with air – was invented in 1888 by John Boyd Dunlop, a veterinary surgeon of Belfast, Northen Ireland. By 1893 the design of the bicycle had been developed into the modern diamond frame with roller-chain drive and pneumatic-tyred wheels.

Related:

James Starley’s Penny-farthing

MacMillan’s bicycle

The Rover safety bicycle