Le Velocipede Bicycle

1864 - 1869

It was in Paris during the late 1860s that a renaissance of the two-wheeled velocipede now with pedals on the front wheel took place: "le velocipede bicycle," as the French said, i.e. the two-wheeled velocipede. This was preceded by a roller skating boom as skating rinks began to open. Those who could survive with rollers on both feet no longer feared on a velocipede to take their feet off safe ground and leave them on the pedals.

"The Velocipede. We can beat the swiftest steep, with our new velocipede."
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The origin of the idea is still an open question within the ICHC, the earliest year in Paris agreed upon being 1864 at present. The claims of Ernest Michaux and of the emigré Pierre Lallement, who obtained an US patent in 1866, and the lesser claims of rear-pedaling Alexandre Lefebvre, all have their partisans within the ICHC! On the new macadamized boulevards of Paris it was easy riding, although imitating the coach technology of massive iron frames doubled the weight to nearly 100 pounds (45 kg). Solid rubber tires and first ball bearings brought further comfort and advantages for the now common races. The number of inventions and patents soared, especially in the US.

One reaction of inventors to the front-pedal velocipede was: Why not drive the rear wheel? Several designs were published, even using a chain, or Thomas McCall's velocipede of 1869 with pedal rods throwing cranks on the rear wheel. In a bizarre campaign of the late 1880s corn trader and tricyclist James Johnston predated McCall's rear-pedal velocipede to 1839 and attributed it to a distant relative, Kirkpatrick MacMillan. He also connected this with a newspaper clip reporting an anonymous person's accident on a hand-driven velocipede in Glasgow by hiding the latter detail. This "first true bicycle" claim can now be put to bed and safely ignored, according to the ICHC. And also the Lefebvre claim has to struggle with the belief that rear-pedal velocipedes came after the front-pedal ones.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Bicycle" and from http://www.treadly.com

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