Little-Known History Of the First-Ever Bicycles

The bicycle appears to be a solved problem. We have two wheels, a frame, pedals, and handlebars.

They’re so familiar that we no longer really see them. The journey from the first clumsy two-wheelers of the early 19th century to what we recognize today was longer, stranger, and more contested than most people realize.

There was a fight over credits. There was a whole branch of design that was abandoned.

There was ridicule, and then there was glory. Some of what we take for granted was not so obvious to the people who decided to do it.

Some good ideas had to be reinvented before they stuck. The story of the bicycle is a strange one, and most of it is not part of what we think we know.

A volcanic eruption that may have started everything

But the history of the bicycle, indirectly, starts with the biggest volcanic eruption in the history of the world: the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815. This volcano threw so much ash and debris into the atmosphere that the following year, there was a phenomenon called the Year Without a Summer.

Food crops failed all over Europe and North America. Horses, which ate food crops and hay, became expensive to maintain.

In some places, horses were scarce. A German civil servant and inventor, Karl von Drais, set out to develop a human-powered substitute for the horse.

He designed a machine that would allow people to travel without the need for a horse. The context is important.

The bicycle was not invented because it was a challenge to make a new machine. It was invented because there was a food and transport crisis caused by a volcano on the other side of the world.

The draisine and the first recorded ride

Karl von Drais built his Laufmaschine, or running machine, in 1817. His first recorded journey was on the 12th of June of the same year.

He rode about 14 km in about an hour on the road between Mannheim and Schwetzingen, now in Germany. His Laufmaschine had two wheels connected in a line, a padded seat, and a front wheel that steered.

It did not have pedals. He propelled the vehicle by pushing his feet against the ground, alternating feet in a running motion, then picking his feet up and coasting.

He patented his invention in the German territory of Baden, later in France, where it was known as the draisienne. In England, it was known as the velocipede or, more commonly, the hobby horse.

It was a novelty, and for a time, it was taken very seriously.

The hobby horse craze that faded quickly

The draisine sparked a brief craze in England and France between 1818 and 1820. Wealthy young men rode hobby horses through parks and along fashionable streets.

Riding schools opened specifically to teach the technique. English coachmakers built their own versions, some more refined than Drais’s original, with better cushioning and adjustable seats.

And then, fairly rapidly, the enthusiasm collapsed. The machines were expensive.

They were tiring on unpaved roads, which is to say almost all roads. They were genuinely difficult to steer, and falls were common and public.

Pedestrians complained that riders used footpaths rather than the rutted road surface. Several English towns banned vehicles from public walkways.

By the early 1820s, the hobby horse had largely disappeared from fashionable use, and the concept sat dormant for nearly two decades.

The pedal question — who actually invented it

The addition of pedals is where bicycle history becomes genuinely contested. The most commonly cited story, and the one that appears in many popular accounts, credits Scottish blacksmith Kirkpatrick Macmillan with attaching pedals to a two-wheeled machine around 1839.

The evidence for this is thin and largely circumstantial — a brief newspaper account from 1842 describing a two-wheeled vehicle ridden by a man from Dumfriesshire, and a reconstruction made decades after Macmillan’s death by a descendant. Historians have debated whether the account actually describes a pedalled machine and whether Macmillan’s invention had any broader influence on subsequent development.

The more firmly documented claim belongs to Pierre Michaux, a French blacksmith who began fitting cranks and pedals directly to the front wheel hub of a velocipede around 1863, producing what became the first commercially successful pedalled bicycle.

Pierre Michaux and the boneshaker years

Pierre Michaux and his son Ernest began producing pedalled velocipedes in Paris in the mid-1860s, and the machines sold quickly enough that a small industry formed around them. The design placed the pedals directly on the front wheel axle, which meant one full rotation of the pedals produced one full rotation of the wheel — the same relationship a child’s first tricycle uses.

The ride was notoriously rough because the frame and wheels were made entirely of iron with no suspension and no rubber tyres. Riders on cobbled Paris streets described the experience in terms that explain the machine’s nickname, the boneshaker.

Despite this, velocipede riding clubs formed in France, Britain, and the United States. The first recorded bicycle race took place in Paris in 1868.

The boneshaker era lasted only a few years, but it established that a pedalled two-wheeled vehicle had a real market.

Why the front wheel started growing

The boneshaker’s direct-drive problem — that one pedal rotation equalled one wheel rotation — had an obvious solution from an engineering standpoint: make the driven wheel bigger. A larger wheel covers more ground per rotation, allowing the rider to travel faster with the same pedalling effort.

This logic drove the development of what became known as the ordinary bicycle, or more colloquially, the penny-farthing. The front wheel grew progressively larger through the 1870s, eventually reaching diameters of 1.5 metres or more on racing models.

A taller rider with longer legs could use a bigger wheel and therefore go faster, which created an odd situation where a rider’s height became a significant competitive advantage. The machines were undeniably fast by the standards of the era, but the riding position — seated high above a very large spinning wheel, with the rider’s weight almost entirely forward — made falls particularly dangerous.

Coming off the front of a penny-farthing from height was known as taking a header, and serious injuries were common.

The pneumatic tyre that changed everything

John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish veterinarian working in Belfast, made one of the most consequential contributions to the bicycle’s development in 1888, not by redesigning the frame or the wheels, but by solving the ride comfort problem with an inflated rubber tyre. Dunlop invented the pneumatic tyre after his son complained that his solid rubber-tyred tricycle was uncomfortable to ride on rough Belfast streets.

Dunlop fitted an inflated rubber tube wrapped in canvas to the wheels and found the difference in ride quality dramatic. He patented the design and began manufacturing.

The pneumatic tyre immediately transformed cycling because it absorbed road vibration, improved traction, and allowed for faster riding on rough surfaces. It was rapidly adopted across the industry and remains the fundamental tyre technology used today.

The safety bicycle and the end of the penny-farthing

While the pneumatic tyre was changing how bicycles felt, a parallel development was changing how they were built. John Kemp Starley, working in Coventry, England, produced the Rover Safety Bicycle in 1885 — a machine with two wheels of roughly equal size, a chain driving the rear wheel from centrally positioned pedals, and a diamond-shaped frame.

The chain drive allowed gearing, meaning the pedal rotation ratio to wheel rotation could be adjusted without changing the wheel size. This solved the fundamental mechanical problem that had made the penny-farthing so large and dangerous.

The rider sat between the two wheels rather than above the front one, dramatically lowering the centre of gravity and reducing fall risk. The safety bicycle, combined with the pneumatic tyre, produced, by the early 1890s, something that closely resembles the bicycle you would recognise today.

The penny-farthing became obsolete within a decade of the Rover’s appearance.

The cycling boom of the 1890s

The convergence of the safety bicycle design and the pneumatic tyre triggered a social phenomenon. Cycling became enormously popular across Britain, Europe, and the United States in the 1890s in a way that touched almost every aspect of daily life.

Hundreds of manufacturers entered the market. Cycling clubs formed in every significant town.

Cycling magazines launched. The roads of England and Europe were suddenly full of riders who had not previously owned any form of personal transport.

The social implications were significant — particularly for women. The bicycle gave women a degree of independent mobility that they had not previously had, at a moment when arguments about women’s social freedoms were already intensifying.

American suffragist Susan B. Anthony said in 1896 that the bicycle had done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world. Historians debate the claim’s scope, but the point about mobility and independence was genuinely felt at the time.

Women, dress reform, and the bicycle

The practicalities of riding a bicycle in the clothing women were expected to wear in the 1890s created a confrontation between fashion conventions and physical reality. Long skirts caught in wheels, tangled in chains, and made mounting and dismounting genuinely hazardous.

Some women began wearing bloomers — loose trousers gathered at the knee — specifically for cycling, which generated significant public controversy. Newspapers published editorials both for and against.

Clergy preached against the reform. Doctors weighed in on both sides.

The women who rode bicycles in rational dress, as it was called, were making a visible statement about their right to dress practically, and the bicycle gave that statement a specific and public context. The dress reform movement did not originate with cycling, but cycling pushed it into mainstream visibility faster than it might otherwise have arrived.

The forgotten women who raced

While the social arguments played out in newspapers and church halls, some women were simply racing. Annie Londonderry, a Boston newspaper vendor, became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by bicycle in 1895, completing the journey in fifteen months and winning a wager of ten thousand dollars in the process.

Her story attracted enormous press coverage at the time and was largely forgotten for over a century until a journalist researching family history discovered it and published a book about her in 2007. Women’s bicycle racing clubs existed across Britain, France, and the United States in the 1890s.

Their records, times, and achievements were documented in cycling publications of the era and then simply dropped from the mainstream account of cycling history as the sport developed along increasingly male lines in the 20th century.

The bicycle’s role in the early automobile and aviation industries

The mechanical knowledge and manufacturing skills that built the bicycle industry directly seeded the automobile and aviation industries that followed it. Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler both worked in an industrial environment shaped by the bicycle trade.

The Wright Brothers ran a bicycle repair shop in Dayton, Ohio, and applied their understanding of bicycle balance and control to the problem of powered flight. Their first aircraft used bicycle components — chain drive, sprockets, hubs — in its propulsion system.

The factories and machine shops that made bicycles in the 1890s had developed precision metalworking techniques, reliable chain and gear manufacturing, and lightweight structural approaches that proved directly applicable to the new machines. The bicycle was not just a predecessor to the automobile and the aeroplane in a historical timeline sense.

It was a physical training ground for the industries that built them.

The racing traditions that shaped modern cycling

Cycling as a contest took root during the 1890s, birthing events that continue even now. Starting in 1903, the Tour de France emerged when a publication dreamed up a race to sell more copies.

Then there’s Paris-Roubaix – dubbed the Hell of the North – which rolled out for the first time back in 1896 on rough stone paths across northern France. In 1892, Liège-Bastogne-Liège was established, holding the status of the longest-running among the big single-day challenges.

Far beyond mere competitions, these rides tested how much both machine and rider could withstand; their demands shaped bike innovation much like car tech evolved under pressure from motorsport. Back then, racers dealt with rough terrain – dirt tracks, zero backup trucks, legs stretched beyond belief.

Some days in the first Tour de France required nearly 467 straight kilometres on a bike.

What the bicycle solved that nothing else could

That long path, starting with von Drais’s early runner and ending with the 1890s safety bike, shows something quiet but deep: every fix opened another puzzle needing its own answer. Moving forward without horses meant adding foot-powered cranks, which led to gears, gears brought chains into play, and chains demanded parts made exact, down to the millimetre.

Wheels first needed soft rubber grips just to roll smoothly – so air-filled tyres came next. Air pockets inside meant someone had to figure out how to strengthen rubber using heat treatment, done in large batches.

Going faster only worked once things got lighter; lightness demanded hollow metal rods instead of solid parts. Those thin bars held shape best when arranged like a kite, forming what we now call the diamond layout.

Step followed step, each idea resting on earlier fixes dreamed up over eighty slow years. Inventors scattered through different lands added pieces without knowing the full picture.

What rolls down streets today did not come from a single flash of genius. Forgotten faces solved small puzzles they saw right in front of them, never realizing their part would last.