3 Means of transport - History of the bicycle

For much of man’s history on earth, he had two choices for getting around, either on foot or on the back of an animal. With the invention of the bicycle man had a third transportation option which multiplied human efficiency by a factor of approximately five. But who actually invented the bicycle? Well, it’s difficult to say, because it went through a number of changes as various people improved on what had gone before. The dandy horse was the first means of transport to make use of the two-wheeler principle. It had a rear brake but no pedals and is regarded as the forerunner of the bicycle. It was invented by the German Baron Karl von Drais in 1817. The first mechanically-propelled, two-wheeled vehicle may have been built by Kirkpatrick MacMillan, a Scottish blacksmith, in 1839, although the claim is often disputed. In the early 1860s, Frenchmen Pierre Michaux and Pierre Lallement took bicycle design in a new direction by adding a mechanical crank drive with pedals on an enlarged front wheel. Theirs was the first company to construct bicycles with pedals on a large scale, but at the time the machine was called a velocipede. The next change in design was to enlarge the front wheel, make the rear wheel smaller and the frame lighter to enable higher speeds. This type of bicycle was later nicknamed the penny-farthing. They were fast, but unsafe. In the event of an accident the rider could end up with two broken wrists. Although French and English inventors modified the velocipede into the high-wheel bicycle, the French were still recovering from the Franco-Prussian war, so English entrepreneurs put the high-wheeler on the English market, and the machine became very popular there. Over a twenty-year period, the British brought the bicycle to its present form, thanks mainly to James Starley of the Coventry Sewing Machine Company. Pneumatic tyres, wire-spoked wheels, chain drive, variable gears, and cable controls were added, and Starley's 1885 Rover is usually described as the first recognizably modern bicycle. Today this nineteenth-century invention is still the most common and most efficient form of personal transport in the world.