The Invention of the Bicycle: A Brief History

Why there is no single inventor

The bicycle was not invented in one moment. It took shape over roughly eighty years, through a chain of designs that each solved one problem and created another. A walking machine came first, then pedals, then very large front wheels, and finally the smaller, chain-driven design that most people would recognize today. At several of these steps, more than one person claimed credit, and historians still disagree about some of them.

This overview follows the main steps in order. Many individual parts, such as brakes, gears and saddles, have their own histories, and this page only touches on them.

The walking machine, 1817

The earliest widely accepted ancestor is the machine built by Karl von Drais, a German official and inventor from the region of Baden. He is reported to have ridden it in Mannheim in 1817, and he received a patent-like privilege for it in 1818. It had two wheels in line, a wooden frame, a steerable front wheel and a padded seat. It had no pedals: the rider pushed along the ground with both feet. It is usually called the draisine, or in Britain the hobby horse or dandy horse.

What made it important was that it showed a person could balance on two wheels in line while moving. The fashion faded within a few years, partly because the machines were hard work on poor roads, and the idea mostly lay dormant for decades.

Pedals arrive in the 1860s

The next step was adding cranks and pedals directly to the front wheel. This is where the credit story becomes disputed. Pierre Michaux and his son Ernest, carriage makers in Paris, are often credited with popularizing the pedal velocipede in the 1860s. Pierre Lallement, a French mechanic who later moved to the United States, received a US patent for a pedal machine in 1866 and said he had thought of it first. Historians weigh the surviving evidence differently, and there is no neat consensus.

These machines had wooden wheels with iron tires and were heavy and rough on cobblestones, which earned them the nickname “boneshaker.” A brief craze followed in France, Britain and the United States.

The high-wheeler, 1870s

With pedals attached directly to the front wheel, one turn of the pedals meant one turn of the wheel. A larger wheel therefore meant more distance per turn, and makers kept increasing the front wheel size. Lighter metal frames, wire-tensioned wheels and solid rubber tires made this practical, helped by advances in wire drawing and the use of vulcanized rubber. The result was the high-wheeler, later nicknamed the penny-farthing, after two British coins of very different sizes.

James Starley of Coventry is among the best-known names in this period, along with other British makers. High-wheelers were fast but risky: the rider sat high above the wheel, and a sudden stop could throw them forward over the handlebars. They were mostly used by young, athletic men with money.

The safety bicycle, 1880s

The fix for that problem was to separate the size of the driving wheel from the gearing. If a chain connected the pedals to the rear wheel, the wheels could be small and equal in size, the rider could sit low, and the bicycle could still go fast by choosing the right gear ratio. Several chain-driven designs appeared around the late 1870s and 1880s. One of the best remembered is the Rover safety bicycle from John Kemp Starley’s firm, introduced in 1885, which is often treated as the model for later bicycles. It was no overnight break from earlier work, though, and other makers had been experimenting along similar lines.

Air-filled tires and the 1890s

In 1888, John Boyd Dunlop of Belfast patented an air-filled rubber tire, and within a few years the new tire spread rapidly. A smoother, faster ride on ordinary roads, combined with the safety design, helped set off the cycling craze of the 1890s. Dunlop’s tire was not the first of its kind, since Robert William Thomson had patented a similar idea in 1845, so the credit for the idea is itself contested.

A quick reference timeline

These dates are approximate, and inventors in different countries often worked at the same time.

The parts that followed

Once the basic layout settled, many smaller developments made bicycles more useful. Brakes moved from simple pads pressed on the tire to cable-operated rim brakes and hub brakes. Gears moved from a single fixed ratio to hub gears and then to derailleur systems. Saddles, handlebars, pedals and locks each developed their own forms. By the early twentieth century, the main design was familiar enough that later changes mostly refined it, with lighter materials and more gears, and, much later, motor assistance in electric bicycles.

The bicycle and later machines

Bicycle makers worked with tubing, ball bearings, chains and mass production, and those skills fed into other fields. Several early car companies grew out of bicycle firms, and the Wright brothers, who ran a bicycle business before building their aircraft, used their experience with light structures and chain drive. Bicycles also helped build the case for better roads and highways, since riders were among the first large group to demand smooth surfaces. Some of those links are well documented, though how much credit bicycles deserve for each later development is a matter of opinion.

What is well documented and what is disputed

Documented with reasonable confidence are the 1817 walking machine, the pedal velocipedes of the 1860s, the high-wheelers of the 1870s and the safety bicycle of the 1880s. Disputed are who first attached pedals, whether earlier pedal machines existed, and several older claims that appear in popular books, such as a sketch attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and a French toy-like machine said to date from the 1790s. Historians now doubt both of those claims.