Academic Reading: 2

The History of the Bicycle

The bicycle is such a common form of transport today that it is easy to forget it took many decades to develop into the machine people now recognize. The earliest ancestor of the modern bicycle appeared in Germany around 1817, when an inventor named Karl von Drais built a wooden machine with two wheels. Riders sat on this machine and pushed it forward with their feet, since it had no pedals at all. Because of this walking motion, the machine became known informally as the running machine.

Pedals were not added until the 1860s, when French inventors attached them directly to the front wheel of the bicycle. This design, often called the boneshaker, allowed riders to move faster without touching the ground, but the wooden and metal wheels had no rubber tyres, so riding on rough roads was uncomfortable. To go faster, some designers made the front wheel much larger than the back wheel, since a bigger wheel could travel farther with each turn of the pedals. This produced the tall bicycles now remembered as penny-farthings, which were fast but dangerous to ride.

A major improvement came in the 1880s with the invention of the safety bicycle. This new design used two wheels of equal size and introduced a chain that connected the pedals to the rear wheel, so riders no longer needed a giant front wheel for speed. The safety bicycle was much easier to balance and far less likely to cause serious injury when a rider fell. Soon afterward, air-filled rubber tyres, invented by John Boyd Dunlop in 1888, made rides noticeably smoother and more comfortable than ever before.

By the end of the nineteenth century, bicycles similar to those used today had become extremely popular across Europe and North America. They were affordable for ordinary workers, unlike expensive carriages or early automobiles, and they gave many people, including women, a new sense of independent mobility. For this reason, some historians argue that the bicycle played an important role in changing social habits, well beyond its practical use as a simple mode of transport.