Cycling 1: Development of the Bicycle
The history of cycling, a.k.a. bicycle racing, naturally begins with the history of the bicycle. The development of the modern bike, which seems to us like a fairly simple mechanism, took much longer from conception to full realization than the development of the automobile.
It began in 1690, when the Comte de Sivrac of France came up with a two-wheeled vehicle propelled by the rider, pushing it along with one foot while the other foot rested securely on the backbone connecting the two wheels. He called it a celerifere, or “fast-goer.” We would probably call it a scooter.
Several types of scooters were developed during the 18th century, including one called the velocipede, which was shaped like a small wooden horse. But the first real advance in design wasn't made until 1816, when Baron Karl Drais von Sauerbronn of Mannheim added a padded seat and a steerable front wheel.
A young Scottish blacksmith, Kirkpatrick Macmillan, in 1839 invented the first pedal-driven bicycle. He made several improvements on his original design during the next few years, but he was generally regarded as a crackpot despite the efficiency of his bicycle, and he eventually abandoned his invention without ever receiving any serious attention.
Macmillan was on the right track, but he had little real impact on the future of the bicycle. The next step forward in the bicycle's evolution was actually a step back from Macmillan's design. It was pedal-driven, but the pedals were attached directly to the front wheel.
The problem with that design is that one revolution of the pedals produces just one revolution of the wheel. To get more distance with each thrust of the pedals, the front wheel was made larger and larger, finally resulting in the “penny-farthing” bicycle, on which the front wheel had a diameter of 5 feet or more and the rear wheel was only about 1 foot in diameter. (The name refers to the fact that the relative sizes of the wheels were about the same as the relative sizes of a penny and a farthing .)
Two machinists at the Coventry Sewing Machine Company in England created the modern bicycle in two separate steps. In 1870, James Starling developed the Ariel, which had a gear that allowed the wheel to turn twice as fast as the crank. Four years later, H. J. Lawson invented the chain drive.
Lawson's creation, known as the “safety bike” soon became very popular because it was more efficient and more stable than any previous bicycles. Its big drawback was its hard rubber tires, which won it the nickname “boneshaker.” The invention of the pneumatic tire by J. B. Dunlop in 1888 remedied that problem and made the safety bike much more comfortable to ride, further increasing its popularity.
A Boston carriage manufacturer, Colonel Albert Pope, visited the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and saw the first bicycle exhibited in the United States. Shortly afterward, he went to England to visit bicycle manufacturers and began importing bikes for resale. In 1877, he took the next step by setting up his own bicycle factory in Hartford, Connecticut.
Pope's “Columbia” model, which incorporated all the English improvements and some of Pope's own, was the best-selling bike in the world by 1893. It cost $313, about the same as a good horse, so the bicycle was very much a vehicle for well-to-do people. Bikes weren't made and marketed for children until after World War I, when the average price had gone down considerably and the post-war economic boom had driven wages and salaries up.
Despite the cost, about 1 million bicycles were in use in the United States in 1896, and there were more than 250 companies manufacturing them, with Pope easily leading the way. In 1895, Pope began purchasing other companies; eventually he amalgamated more than 75 manufacturing firms into his American Bicycle Company.
Of course, there have been many improvements in the bicycle since those early days, the coaster brake (invented in 1898) and the ten-speed shifting mechanism chief among them. But even the very sophisticated modern cross-country mountain bike, with its full suspension and front and rear drum brakes, is built on the same design that had been well established by 1890.