The first ride able bicycle was made by Kirkpatrick Mac Milan of Dum-friesshire, Scotland, in 1839, although an attempt to construct one had been made by Jean Theson at Fontainebleau, France, in 1645.
Before this, crude machines had been made, which had no farm o f steering and had to be propelled by publishing the feet against the ground. Machines of this type appear on bas-reliefs in Babylon and Egypt and on frescoes in Pompeii. In England, a stained glass window, dated 1580, in the church of Stoke Poges, Bucking hamshire shows a cherub astride such a machine.
But all these machines seem to have been four-wheeled. The true bicycle belongs to the 19th 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 bicycle road race –from Paris to Rouentook 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 is known as the safety bicycle and became enormously popular from about 1885 when the Rover safety bicycle was built by John K. Starley, James’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, Northern Ireland. By 1893 the design of the bicycle had been developed into the modern diamond frame with roller-chain drive and pneumatic-tyred wheels.
Picture credit: google