Bicycles

Bicycle - bicycles and bicycle companies

The first two-wheeled, rider-propelled machine of which there is evidence was the draisienne, invented by Baron Karl de Drais de Sauerbrun and exhibited in Paris on April 6, 1818. It was made of wood, and the seated rider propelled himself simply by paddling his feet against the ground. Steerable, crude, and clumsy, it worked after a fashion. But it was not until Kirkpatrick Macmillan, a blacksmith of Dumfriesshire, Scot., completed four years of experiments in 1839 that a self-propelled bicycle appeared.

Macmillan's machine had wheels rimmed with iron and, though lighter in appearance than the draisienne, it was still heavy. With a steerable front wheel about 30 inches (75 cm) in diameter and a driven rear wheel of about 40 inches (100 cm) in diameter, it could move at a brisk pace. In 1842 Macmillan successfully challenged a post carriage.

Instead of pedals attached directly to the rear wheel, Macmillan's vehicle had two swinging cranks mounted at the front. The rider rested his feet on the cranks and swung them back and forth, moving a pair of rods that were linked to two levers, located on either side of the rear wheel. Pressing down on one crank pulled the rod forward, which in turn drew the uppermost of the levers forward in an arc, thus turning the wheel and bringing the opposing lever uppermost for the cycle to be repeated with the other foot.

The machine never became popular and, though copied, passed out of fashion. Thus, while Macmillan may fairly be claimed as the inventor of the bicycle, the first usable mechanism that survived in principle was the work of two Frenchmen, Pierre Michaux and his son Ernest. In Paris in 1861 the Michaux family built a machine on which they attached two cranks to the front wheel. The cranks could be rotated by the rider's feet, an arrangement that, according to Henry Michaux in 1893, was an adaptation of the crank handles of a vertical grindstone the inventors had seen. Their machine immediately caught on, though its wood and iron frame gave it the sobriquet of "boneshaker." That year they made only two machines. In 1862 they made 142 of the vlocipdes, as they had come to be known. By 1865 the Michaux family was making 400 a year. In 1866 their mechanic, Pierre Lallement, emigrated to the United States, where with James Carroll of Ansonia, Conn., he took out the first U.S. patent.

On May 31, 1868, the first recorded bicycle race was won in the Saint-Cloud Park (near Paris) by James Moore, an Englishman, who also won the first road race (Paris to Rouen) in November 1869. Reportedly, he rode a 160-pound (73-kilogram) machine that had solid rubber tires and ball bearings, and he covered the 83 miles (134 km) in 10 hours 25 minutes. Some 200 bicycles started the race.

Rowley B. Turner of the Coventry Sewing Machine Company, England, persuaded that factory's management to make 400 Michaux bicycles. They were originally intended to be sold in France, but the outbreak of the Franco-German War left Turner to sell them in England. James Starley, an inventive young foreman of the Coventry Company, immediately began development work on the primitive machines and became known in England as the father of the bicycle industry. Starley set out to reduce the weight of the clumsy vlocipdes. In 1870 he made a bicycle with a large front wheel and a small rear wheel, derisively nicknamed "penny-farthing" after the largest and smallest English copper coins of the period. He developed a gear that allowed the wheel to be turned twice for each revolution of the pedals. He lightened the wheels by making them of iron with wire spokes under tension. His spokes were a single reel of wire looped through holes in the rim and the hub to which he applied tension by screwing up the threads, an arrangement improved further by the introduction in 1874 of eyed and threaded nipples to hold the spokes individually. Later that year Starley thought of tangential spoking--as distinct from radial--to ease the sideway stresses on the spokes. A party of riders rode these high bicycles from London to John O'Groats, some 690 miles (1,110 km), in 15 days. These machines typically weighed about 50 pounds but could be built as light as 21 pounds for track racing, with a driving wheel ranging from 40 to 60 inches (100 to 150 cm) in diameter, according to the owner's leg length.

The first chain-driven bicycle was designed by H.J. Lawson in 1874. It had two medium-sized wheels of equal diameter, the rear wheel being driven by a chain as in a modern bicycle. Called the safety bicycle, this design had decisive advantages in stability, braking, and mounting over the high front-wheeled "ordinary." The safety bicycle did not become fully established until the advent in 1885 of the Rover Safety model, which was manufactured by Starley's nephew, John K. Starley. This type dominated the market by 1889, and by the early 1890s no more ordinaries were being produced. The early bicycles had solid rubber tires. In 1888 John Boyd Dunlop, a Belfast veterinarian, introduced a pneumatic tire. The combination of the pneumatic tire and the safety bicycle gave an immense impetus to the bicycle industry, which was reorganized in the 1890s to build inexpensive, practical machines. By 1893 the design of the bicycle had been stabilized into the modern diamond-pattern frame with roller-chain drive and pneumatic-tired wheels. The newer models could freewheel and were easily braked.

The next improvement was the introduction of gears. Patents based on the epicyclic principle, using sun and planet wheels inside an annulus ring, were taken out by H. Sturmey and J. Archer between 1901 and 1906. Sturmey-Archer gears, first two-speed, then three, were located inside the rear hub of a bicycle and weighed about 2 pounds (0.9 kg).

Derailleur gears--i.e., gears that move or derail the chain from one sprocket to another--were less successful at first because mud from the road interfered with their operation, but eventually they proved highly reliable and convenient.

From the 1890s the basic design of the bicycle remained static, though many refinements were made to its construction, including stronger and lighter frames, improved gears and brakes, better placement of the saddle, and different handlebar designs.