History of the bicycle – Product Applications Manufacturer ...

Earliest unverifiable history

Unrideable replica made 1965-72 from the alleged 1493 Caprotti sketch.

There are several early but unverifiable claims for the invention of bicycle-like machines.

The earliest comes from an illustration found in a church window in Stoke Poges, installed in the 16th century, showing a naked angel on a bicycle-like device, and from a sketch said to be from 1493 and attributed to Gian Giacomo Caprotti, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci. Hans-Erhard Lessing recently claimed that this last assertion is a purposeful fraud. However, the authenticity of the bicycle sketch is still vigorously maintained by followers of Prof. Augusto Marinoni, a lexicographer and philologist, who was entrusted by the Commissione Vinciana of Rome with the transcription of da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus.

Later, and equally unverifiable, is the contention that Comte de Sivrac developed a clrifre in 1791, demonstrating it at the Palais-Royal in France. The clrifre supposedly had two wheels set on a rigid wooden frame and no steering, directional control being limited to that attainable by leaning. A rider was said to have to sat astride the machine and pushed it along using alternate feet. We now know a two-wheeled clrifre never existed (though there were four-wheelers) and it was a misinterpretation by the well known French journalist Louis Baudry de Saunier in 1891.

1817 to 1819: the draisine or velocipede

Wooden draisine (around 1820), the earliest two-wheeler

Drais’ 1817 design made to measure

The first verifiable claim for a practically-used bicycle belongs to German Baron Karl von Drais, a civil servant to the Grand Duke of Baden in Germany. Drais invented his Laufmaschine (German for “running machine”) of 1817 that was called Draisine (English) or draisienne (French) by the press. Karl von Drais patented this design in 1818 which was the first commercially successful two-wheeled, steerable, human-propelled machine commonly called a velocipede, nick-named hobby-horse or dandy horse. It was initially manufactured in Germany and France. It was constructed almost entirely of wood. Hans-Erhard Lessing found from circumstantial evidence that Drais’ interest in finding an alternative to the horse was the starvation and death of horses caused by crop failure in 1816 (“Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death,” following the volcanic eruption of Tambora). On his first reported ride from Mannheim on June 12, 1817, he covered 13 km (eight miles) in less than an hour. The wooden draisine weighed 22 kg (48 pounds), had brass bushings within the wheel bearings, a rear-wheel brake and 152 mm (6 inches) of trail of the front-wheel for a self-centering caster effect. This design was welcomed by mechanically minded men daring to balance and several thousand copies were built and used, primarily in Western Europe and in North America. Its popularity rapidly faded when, partly due to increasing numbers of accidents, some city authorities began to prohibit its use. However in 1866 Paris a Chinese visitor named Bin Chun could still observe foot-pushed velocipedes.

Children of men

The Doris Lessing reader

The New standard encyclopedia

Going home

Doris Lessing, a biography