The wheel had been around for ages before anyone thought of putting two together in a line, fixing them to a frame, getting on and going somewhere. A bike-like doodle by Leonardo da Vinci dates from 1493, and a stained-glass window in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, from 1580, shows a trumpet-playing angel aboard a wheeled contraption. But the first proper push-bike, the hobbyhorse, didn’t arrive until the early 19th century.
This wooden-framed, metal-wheeled machine was the favourite mount of Victorian dandies, who moved along by swinging their well-heeled feet against the ground. In 1839, a Scottish blacksmith, Kirkpatrick MacMillan, adapted one by adding treadles and, 25 years later, Frenchmen Pierre and Ernest Michaux put pedals on the front wheel and called it a velocipede. Soon boneshakers, highwheelers and swiftwalkers were competing for the disposable income of the leisured classes - these machines cost the equivalent of three months’ wages to most people.
In a quest for speed, the front wheel grew bigger and bigger, resulting in the penny-farthing, named after the largest and smallest coins then in circulation. With a shoulder-high front wheel and no brakes, a potholed road could send its rider flying. By the 1880s, lower versions with a rear chain drive were being sold as “safety” cycles to reduce the alarming accident rate. They were more comfortable, too, thanks to the pneumatic tyre that an Irish vet, John Dunlop, invented for his son’s bicycle.
The bicycle was easily overtaken by more technologically advanced vehicles, but it led the way in the development of key components of modern engineering. Ball bearings, pneumatic tyres, chain drive and tubular steel frames all had their first test rides on a bike.
When Norman Tebbit famously told the Eighties unemployed to “get on your bike”, it wasn’t their health he was worried about. But his ungracious advice to the supposedly workshy reflected the social and political associations of the bicycle. As its price tumbled in the 1920s and 1930s, ordinary people had an affordable means of personal transport, making it an important factor in female emancipation and working-class education.
The bicycle is highly efficient, environmentally friendly and incredibly healthy for its riders. There are more than twice as many bikes as cars in the world, making it the most popular means of personal transport. And, once experienced, the freedom and pleasure of two-wheeled travel is unforgettable. Just like riding a bike, in fact.
Harvey McGavin
