Origins of the Bicycle
Friday, October 1, 2021
Welcome to Food for Thought for the Weekend, where I give you in-depth coverage and data analysis that keeps you glued to your screens for a good reason, for once. Published on Fridays.
It’s the weekend. Already. You can binge, or you can learn. Perhaps a bit of both?
And keep an eye for The Week that Was, usually published on Sundays. The Week that Was is my curated, in the loosest sense of the word, look at what happened last week.
Today we’re taking a look at the origins of the bicycle, one of the greatest of all human inventions.
This is how it all started.
Credit: By Wilhelm Siegrist (1797-1843?)
I’ve been an avid bicycle rider since around age six or thereabouts. There is a lot I remember from back then, but when exactly when I started riding a bike I don’t recall exactly. I do remember my first bike. A Schwinn Stingray with a banana seat.
It was nice, and did the job back then on Butterfly Lane.
Many bicycles have followed since then, and I now own two: a bicycle for riding which, I must say, rides great and is scary fast; and the other for shopping, with a large basket on the front.
Both were built by Bicycle Mike out of parts in his bike shop, the highly estimable Bicycle Station. His motto is “Passionate and Unpretentious,” and this is true.
But how did all of this get started?
The first device that we can call a bicycle dates to 1817. Although, as you will note, there are no pedals; one powered oneself forward by essentially hitting the ground with ones’ feet. Hence one of this device’s names was Laufmaschine, or “running machine.”
Credit: Kurpfälzisches Museum in Heidelberg, Germany
Its creator was the prolific inventor Karl Friedrich Christian Ludwig Freiherr Drais von Sauerbronn, usually just called Count Karl Drais, to keep it simple. Count Drais came from the lower nobility and was also a passionate liberal revolutionary. (Back then liberals were revolutionaries, not conservatives (who in America are called “the left.”)
Count Drais’s subsequent life followed a course of encounters with political violence, including exile in Brazil for five years. He remained a passionate radical liberal (back then, not an oxymoron) and renounced his noble title during the revolutions of 1848, which proved a bad move for his finances. Count Drais, now just “Citizen Karl Drais,” died penniless in Karlsruhe on December 10, 1851.
Which is sad but hardly surprising, and somehow seems strangely to be expected for the inventor of the bicycle. Because there is something so democratic and egalitarian about the bicycle, even if a few of them now fetch $80K on the so-called free market.
I’m going to skip over three and four wheeled devices and jump to the introduction of the pedal, in 1853, again in Germany, on the Tretkurbelfahrrad (step
The inventor of this innovation was one Philipp Moritz Fischer.
But in the second half of the Nineteenth century the bicycle took a turn into the realm of a rich boy’s plaything. Those high-wheeled bicycles we see all the time were, as they look, impractical, expensive, and dangerous.
The development of the “safety bicycle,” powered by pedals linked to the back wheel by a chain, was what really made the bicycle the great device it is today, with over one billion in use around the world.
The above illustration shows the high wheeled (Hochrad) on the left, and the “safety” bicycle on the right.
The bicycle on the right is instantly recognizable as a bicycle. And the rest is history.
Although, to ride safely, you must wear a helmet. To know why, the below Danish public service announcement says it best.
If you don’t have enough to think about, I hope that this issue of Food for Thought will have alleviated that need.
Have a great weekend!
Next week on Food for Thought: I don’t know.
I’m looking for suggestions.