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Velocipedes - First Bicycles1817 - 1864 The term "bicycle" means "two wheels" and arose in France in the late 1860s, gradually replacing the earlier term "velocipede". Since 1990 the International Cycling History Conference has met every year in a different country, and this assembly of academic and private investigators has finally reconciled the variety of ideas about bicycle history which were mostly wrong and influenced by nationalism.
The ICHC no longer distinguishes between a "first true" bicycle with pedals and any precursors, and regards as the start the two-wheeler principle which requires balancing and is the basis of cycling (and motorcycling). As of today there is no generally accepted evidence that the two-wheeler existed before the year 1817. There are a number of controversial claims of earlier existence. Comte de Sivrac has been said to have developed a two-wheeler in 1791, but it is most likely an error created by an illustration created by historian Baudry de Saunier in 1891. A church window in Stoke Poges that was installed in the 16th or 17th century shows an angel on a device that some argue looks like a bicycle. Medieval iconography however often associates angelic figures with a one-wheeled contraption. A drawing said to be from around 1493 of a bicycle that was attributed to Giacomo Caprotti, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, is accepted by most to be a hoax. Cycling was not invented simultaneously in different places. In Germany Karl von Drais, a civil servant to the Grand Duke of Baden, who had studied mathematics, physics, and architecture at the university of Heidelberg invented his Laufmaschine (running machine) of 1817 that was called Draisine by the press and then later, velocipede. He did it in response to starvation and dying horses after a crop failure the year before ("eighteen hundred and froze to death," a snow summer due to the volcanic eruption of Tambora). Drais had begun with his four-wheeled Fahrmaschinen, i.e. driving machines, with a cranked axle between the rear wheels trodden by one passenger. The requirement of balancing was nearly insurmountable for the average population, with only a few young men being ice skaters at that time. Therefore his two-wheeled Draisine was pushed by the feet against the ground and no attempt was undertaken by Drais nor by mechanics elsewhere to take the feet off safe ground and to put them on pedals On his first reported spin from Mannheim on June 12, 1817, he covered 8 miles (13 km) in less than an hour. The wooden Draisine weighed 48 pounds (22 kg) or less, had brass bushings within the wheels, a rear-wheel brake and 6 inches (152 mm) trail of the front-wheel for a self-centering castor effect. Several thousand copies have been built and used worldwide, and this is regarded to be the origin of horseless personal transport. The first cycling races were reported from Ipswich and elsewhere. Yet beginning with the good harvest in autumn 1817, riding velocipedes on side-roads was forbidden worldwide (nicknamed hobby-horses, they couldn't use the rutted carriageway), in Mannheim, Milan, London, New York and even Calcutta! This and the triumph of the upcoming railways plus the fear of balancing stopped further development of the bicycle for 50 years. Instead, mechanics now built pedal- or handle-driven three- or four-wheeled iron velocipedes for stability, but with higher rolling resistance. Willard Sawyer in Dover was a successful manufacturer with exports worldwide.
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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