Nicholas Clayton - A Short History of the Bicycle

Diamond-framed pneumatic safety 1891.

NOMENCLATURE

Karl von Drais (rhymes with ice) named his 1817 invention a velocipede (swift foot), while in England Denis Johnson called his copy of von Draiss machine a pedestrian curricle. It became known to the public as a hobby-horse or dandy-horse.

Over the next fifty years, human-powered machines were rare but they were still known as velocipedes and, confusingly, this same name was then used for the Michaux pedal bicycle when it arrived from France in 1869. The French, however, had coined the word bicycle and this was quickly adopted into English. It was then applied to the high bicycle, which succeeded it in 1870.

By 1878, safer, lever-driven, high bicycles began to be introduced so that, while they were termed safeties, the ordinary high bicycle became simply the ordinary. It is a name still fondly used by the cognoscenti today.

Hillmans 1884 Kangaroo was called a dwarf front-driver and was then overtaken by 1886 by the dwarf rear-drivers of the Rover pattern. Rudge exported their 1886 Bicyclette rear-drive model to France where it supplied an alternative name to le petite reine. Rear-drivers were initially of two types: the Rover style, open-diamond frame and the cheaper Hillman cross-frame. By the end of the 1880s the safety bicycle had ousted the ordinary to become the bicycle, while the ordinary was nostalgically referred to by devotees as the Grand Old Ordinary. Street urchins called it a penny-farthing.

The 1890s saw enthusiasm for crypto-geared front-drivers and bicycles with shaft-drive replacing the chain. From 1903, three-speed hub gears became popular in England while derailleur gears were refined during the 1920s in France. Hand-built lightweights of the 1930s1960s are often referred to in the UK as classic bicycles, while Americans reserve the term for balloon-tyred models from roughly the same era. The 1930s saw a growth in recumbents that were quickly banned from competition by the ICF, but which have remained popular among enthusiasts.

The cross-frame design was reinvented in the 1960s by Alex Moulton with small wheels, high-pressure tyres and rubber suspension. This led to a rash of shopper bicycles with lower specification that gave the small wheelers a poor reputation.

Mountain bikes were introduced in California in the 1970s and are now known as MTBs or ATBs all-terrain bicycles while fixed-wheel, low-riding bikes, beloved of cycle couriers, are familiarly called fixies.

Since the days of the boneshaker, cycle magazines and bicycle histories have been the natural accompaniment to peaks in bicycle sales. Many small booklets were published in 1869 explaining the history of human-powered machines to those who might be contemplating purchasing a velocipede. These were often anonymous, under-researched tracts, recycling old myths and giving them new legs. The misinformation spread and with every new cycling wave the stories became entrenched in the cannon. New names have regularly emerged over the years to be hailed as the inventor of the bicycle, and it was only well after the end of the Second World War that the subject became considered worthy of proper academic scrutiny.

During the great bicycle boom of the belle poque, Baudry de Saunier, H. H. Griffin, Archibald Sharp, Henry Sturmey and others wrote books on the history of this important new invention, as well as articles for the regular cycling periodicals of the period. It was a time when there was great competition between France, Germany and England to claim the inventor of the bicycle as one of their own. The French built a monument to Pierre and Ernest Michaux in answer to the statue the Germans had raised to Karl von Drais, while England had earlier built its own memorial to James Starley in Coventry.