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1886 Swift Safety Bicycle. Vehicles that have two wheels and require balancing by the rider date back to the early 19th century. The first means of transport making use of two wheels arranged consecutively, and thus the archetype of the bicycle, was the German draisine dating back to 1817.
The penny-farthing is a direct-drive bicycle, meaning the cranks and pedals are fixed directly to the hub. Instead of using gears to multiply the revolutions of the pedals, the driven wheel is enlarged so the radius from the hub to the outer wheel is comfortable for the rider to reach the pedals fixed to the hub. But the rider needs to be able ...
"Bicycling", a ca. 1887 color print showing one of the few ways in which it was socially acceptable for women to ride cycles, in the years before the invention of "safety bicycles" and the woman's "bicycle suit". Sociable, 1886; more recreation than transport: Tandem tricycle, Suitable for ladies or gentlemen - safe, practicable, fast. The ...
Wooden dandy horse (around 1820), a patent-infringing copy of the first two-wheeler Original Laufmaschine of 1817 made to measure.. The dandy horse, an English nickname for what was first called a Laufmaschine ("running machine" in German), then a vélocipède or draisienne (in French and then English), and then a pedestrian curricle or hobby-horse, [1] or swiftwalker, [2] is a human-powered ...
A bicycle, also called a pedal cycle, bike, push-bike or cycle, is a human-powered or motor-assisted, pedal-driven, single-track vehicle, with two wheels attached to a frame, one behind the other. A bicycle rider is called a cyclist, or bicyclist. Bicycles were introduced in the 19th century in Europe. By the early 21st century there were more ...
It was almost 40 years until "velocipede" came into common usage as a generic term, with the launch of the first pedal-equipped bicycle, developed by Pierre Michaux, Pierre Lallement and the Olivier brothers in the 1860s. The Michaux company was the first to mass-produce the velocipede, from 1857 to 1871. That French design was sometimes called ...
The first cycle race covering a distance between two cities was Paris–Rouen, also won by James Moore, who rode the 123 kilometres dividing both cities in 10 hours and 40 minutes. [4] The oldest established bicycle racing club in the United States is the St. Louis Cycling Club.
In the early 1860s the first true bicycle was created in Paris, France, by attaching rotary cranks and pedals to the front wheel hub of a dandy-horse. The Olivier brothers recognized the commercial potential of this invention, and set up a partnership with blacksmith and bicycle maker Pierre Michaux, using Michaux's name, already famous among enthusiasts of the new sport, for the company.