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How the bicycle got its shape
The first machine that looked a little like a bicycle was built in 1817 by Karl Drais, a German inventor. It was made of wood and had two wheels, a seat and handlebars, but no pedals. Riders sat on it and pushed it along the ground with their feet, a little like a child's balance bike today. Drais called it a "running machine".
In the 1860s, makers in France added pedals to the front wheel. These machines, called velocipedes, could go faster, but they had heavy iron frames and wooden wheels covered with iron. On the rough stone roads of the time, the ride was so uncomfortable that people in England gave them a nickname: "boneshakers".
In the 1870s, a new design became popular. Its front wheel was very large, sometimes more than a metre and a half high, and its back wheel was tiny. Because the pedals were fixed directly to the big front wheel, one turn of the pedals carried the rider a long way. Later, people called these machines "penny-farthings", after two British coins of different sizes. They were fast, but dangerous: if the front wheel hit a stone, the rider could fly forward over the handlebars.
The answer came in 1885, when the English inventor John Kemp Starley produced the "safety bicycle". Its two wheels were the same size, and a chain connected the pedals to the back wheel. Riders could put their feet on the ground, and falls became much less serious. In 1888, John Boyd Dunlop developed a tyre filled with air for his young son's tricycle, and soon air-filled tyres made bicycles far more comfortable.
By the 1890s, millions of people were cycling. For many women, the bicycle meant a new kind of freedom: they could travel alone, quickly and cheaply. In 1896, the American campaigner Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle had "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world".
