legs and balanced by its own velocity. Now, instead of shunting himself along, he could pedal continuously, and in doing so reach much greater speeds than were ever possible on the velocipede. His appearance had produced great interest among the locals and a visit from the Glasgow Herald. While conceding that Macmillan’s invention was ‘ingenious’, the reporter was not that impressed. ‘This invention,’ he wrote, ‘will not supersede the railways.’
But Macmillan did nothing to broadcast his new device, and in the end it was the French who successfully reinvented the wheel. Pierre Michaux in Paris, also a blacksmith, once again added cranks and pedals to the front axle of a wooden velocipede. More importantly, he published and exploited the design, and by doing so moved the bicycle one step closer to being. This time, the idea caught on. ‘Boneshakers’, as they were nicknamed, became popular among young Parisians and then throughout Europe, though, as their name implied, they weren’t a comfortable ride. Since the wheels were wooden, every jolt and bump from the road surface was transmitted directly through the frame. Mounting required a running vault into the saddle, and since the whole thing weighed at least 30kg, any misjudgements could be permanently disabling.
Still, the impact on nineteenth-century society of the new contraptions was extraordinary. Charles Spencer, an early advocate of cycling, ran a gymnasium in London where novice riders could go to practise. One interested spectator recalled his reaction when one day in 1869 a man arrived at the gymnasium with a packing case containing ‘a piece of apparatus mainly consisting of two wheels … Mr Turner took off his coat, grasped the handles of the machine, and with a short run, to my intense surprise, vaulted on to it, and putting his feet on the treadles, made the circuit of the room. We were some half-dozen spectators, and I shall never forget our astonishment at the sight of Mr Turner whirling himself round the room, sitting on a bar above a pair of wheels in a line that ought, as we innocently supposed, to fall down immediately he jumped off the ground. Judge then our greater surprise when, instead of stopping by tilting over on one foot, he slowly halted, and turning the front wheel diagonally, remained quite still, balancing on the wheels.’ Track standing, or remaining stationary on an upright bike, was evidently a Spencer speciality. His 1877 guide to The Modern Bicycle moves briskly on from the vaulted mount to riding without using hands or feet. Once the difficulties of riding side-saddle had been mastered, it was time to try staying still. ‘Of course, this is a question of balancing, and you will soon find the knack of it. When the machine inclines to the left, slightly press the left treadle, and if it evinces a tendency to lean to the right, press the right treadle; and so on, until, sooner or later, you achieve a correct equilibrium, when you may take out your pocket book and read or even write letters, &c, without difficulty.’
An early cycling class.
As the popularity of boneshakers spread, so the design began to progress organically, first to iron or steel instead of wood and then towards the great ‘high wheelers’ of the 1870s. Back in England at the Coventry Sewing Machine Company, James Starley and his colleague William Hillman took the design one stage further. Their new Ariel model was made entirely out of steel instead of wood and iron, a change which knocked a good 40lb off the weight of the machine. As well as an optional ‘speed gear’, Starley’s other great innovation was the tension wheel. Now, instead of spokes being laced straight from hub to rim, they were laced at an angle, thereby significantly improving the wheel’s strength and setting the standard pattern for all wheels since. To prove the Ariel’s efficacy and its excellent value at £8, in 1870 Hillman and Starley decided to ride all the way from Paddington station in London to Coventry, a distance of 96 miles. ‘Mr Starley’s weight gave great velocity to his machine,’ one reporter noted, ‘a speed of at least 12mph being attained.’ The two cyclists reached home as the clock struck midnight, and apparently slept solidly for three days afterwards. Mr Starley’s weight was also the driving force behind another of his inventions. Since he was a large man with a substantial backside, the old saddles of wood or iron pained him. As he said, ‘There’s a lot of me to get sore.’ Arriving in the factory workyard one day, he got off his bike, plonked himself down on a pile of sand lying nearby, got up, examined the indent he had made and announced to his watching workers, ‘That’s how a saddle should be shaped – to fit the bum! Get a cast of that and make me a saddle of stout leather.’
As bicycles became lighter, so the front wheel got larger and larger. Since every turn of the cranks directly corresponded to a revolution of the wheel, the early riders had to maintain a very high cadence in order to move forward. The only way of lowering the cadence while maintaining reasonable forward momentum was to increase the size of the wheel the cranks were attached to. And so began the era of the Ordinary (or penny farthing). Huge and highly strung, Ordinaries were not for everyone. Like velocipedes, they were tricky to control and rapidly became notorious for flinging their riders off at odd moments. Most of the new guides to cycling devoted at least a chapter each to the complicated subjects of mounting, dismounting and how to fall off so you only broke the minimum number of bones. As Mecredy and Stoney, the authors of The Art and Pastime of Cycling, advised, ‘If you find you are unable to dismount because of the pace and steepness of the gradient, go for the nearest hedge or hawthorn bush, and just as you approach, throw your legs over the handles. You are sure to be hurt, but you may escape with only a few scrapes and bruises, whereas to hold on means more or less injury. If no hedge or hawthorn bush is near, throw your legs over the handles and put the brake hard on, and you will shoot forward and alight on your feet, when you must make every effort to keep on your feet and run as hard as you can, for your bicycle is in eager pursuit, and a stroke from it may place you hors de combat.’ If fractures didn’t deter people, then maybe impromptu tattoos would. Since many paths and tracks of the time were covered in coal cinders, riders who did fall off and graze themselves found that the coal dust got into the cuts. If the cuts weren’t cleaned immediately, the dust would tattoo itself in beneath the healing skin forever. ‘Some of the best racing men have been sadly disfigured about the face, elbows and knees this way.’ Such a potent combination of cost and personal hazard meant the market for the new Ordinaries was restricted mainly to the rich. Even at the tail end of the 1890s cycling craze, a new British-made bicycle could cost three months of a schoolteacher’s salary.
In the end, it was a simple mechanical innovation which made the difference. By fitting a chain drive to the rear wheel instead of cranks to the front, James Starley’s nephew, John Kemp, brought the cadence down to a point where wheel sizes too could be equalised. His first design, introduced in 1884, has a 36in. front wheel and a curved down tube and crossbar. Otherwise, it looks more or less identical to a modern bike and proved so successful it became cycling’s Model T – an affordable, high-quality, mass-market product which very probably converted thousands of people to the pleasures of cycling. The bike could deliver letters, take the children to school, convey newsboys from place to place. It could be used by policemen and butchers, telegraph boys and teachers. It belonged to everyone, not just to the rich. Quick, silent, unobtrusive and requiring far less skill or maintenance than a horse, the traditional diamond-frame suddenly seemed the ideal way to negotiate the streets. Just as significant was John Boyd Dunlop’s notion of fitting rubber tyres filled with air to his son’s trike. In 1889, the first Dunlop pneumatic tyre was tested on London’s streets to thigh-slapping ridicule and the confident prediction that it would never catch on.
As the popularity of cycling increased through the 1890s, so the price began to come down. Manufacturers now offered hire purchase arrangements, and the bicycle’s obvious advantages for middle- and working-class commuters brought it to the point of near-ubiquity. Back in 1869, Scientific American had foreseen the results of such popularity. ‘The art of walking is obsolete,’ it claimed. ‘It is true that a few still cling to that mode of locomotion, are still admired as fossil specimens of an extinct race of pedestrians, but for the majority of civilised humanity, walking is on its last legs.’ In America, over two million bicycles were sold in 1897 alone, and in the UK the numbers of both small- and large-scale framemakers rose from 22,241 in 1895 to 46,039 in 1897. Small framemakers found the demand so overwhelming they couldn’t keep up. Metalworkers of all descriptions took to producing frames, setting up their own little workshops in sheds and backyards at home. Larger manufacturers