Timeline of the Bicycle
The bicycle, from Karl Drais's 1817 running machine through pedal velocipedes, high-wheelers and the chain-driven safety bicycle to derailleurs, mountain bikes, carbon frames, bike sharing and e-bikes outselling conventional bicycles in Germany in 2023.
- Category
- Engineering & Technology
- Tags
- transport inventions
- Events
- 26 events 1817 – 2023
- Generated
- by claude-opus-5-5
1817: Drais rides his running machine near Mannheim
On June 12, Karl Drais, a forestry official in the Grand Duchy of Baden, rode a wooden two-wheeler with a steerable front wheel from Mannheim to a coaching inn on the road to Schwetzingen and back in a little over an hour. Riders pushed along with their feet, as there were no pedals. Copied across Europe as the draisine, velocipede or dandy horse, it established that a rider could balance on two wheels in line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Drais1818: Denis Johnson patents the pedestrian curricle in London
London coachmaker Denis Johnson patented an improved version of Drais's machine in December, with a curved wooden frame that allowed larger wheels. He made at least 320 in the first half of 1819 and opened riding schools, and the "hobby horse" became a fashion among Regency dandies before the craze faded, helped by bans on riding on pavements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Johnson_(inventor)1839: Macmillan is later credited with a lever-driven bicycle
Scottish blacksmith Kirkpatrick Macmillan is often credited with building a two-wheeler driven by treadles and rods around 1839. The claim rests on accounts gathered in the 1890s by a relative, James Johnston, and no machine or contemporary record of a two-wheeler survives; historians such as David Herlihy doubt it, suggesting any such experiments may have involved tricycles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkpatrick_Macmillan1866: Lallement receives a US patent for a pedal velocipede
Pierre Lallement, a French mechanic who said he had fitted cranks and pedals to the front wheel of a two-wheeler in France in the early 1860s, received US patent 59,915 on November 20 for a velocipede improvement. Whether the idea originated with him or with the Paris blacksmith Pierre Michaux and his son Ernest remains disputed; Lallement failed to find a US manufacturer and sold his rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Lallement1868: Michaux et Cie mass-produces pedal velocipedes
Pierre Michaux and the Olivier brothers formed Michaux et Cie in Paris on May 7, generally described as the first company to mass-produce pedal velocipedes. Its iron-framed machines with wooden, iron-tired wheels, nicknamed "boneshakers" in English, fueled a velocipede craze in France, Britain and the United States from 1867 to 1869 that faded with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Michaux1869: Eugène Meyer patents the wire-spoke tension wheel
Paris mechanic Eugène Meyer received French patent 86705 for a bicycle wheel with thin wire spokes held in tension and individually adjustable. The light, strong wheel removed the limit of roughly 1.2 meters that wooden construction set on wheel diameter, and Meyer is now regarded as the person most responsible for making the high-wheel bicycle practical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Meyer_(inventor)1870: Starley and Hillman build the Ariel high-wheeler
In Coventry, James Starley and William Hillman patented an all-metal high-wheel bicycle with a wire-spoked front wheel, sold as the Ariel. Because each pedal turn moved the bike one circumference of the driving wheel, front wheels grew to 1.5 meters or more. The "ordinary", later called the penny-farthing, was fast but prone to throwing riders over the bars, and became mostly a sport for young men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Starley1878: Pope launches Columbia bicycles in Hartford
After importing English high-wheelers, Boston businessman Albert Pope contracted the Weed Sewing Machine Company of Hartford, Connecticut, to build 50 copies, completed in September as the first Columbia bicycles and often cited as the first commercially made bicycles in the United States, though American shops had built pedal velocipedes during the 1869 craze. Pope bought up key patents and collected royalties from other makers, and his company became one of the largest US bicycle manufacturers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Manufacturing_Company1880: League of American Wheelmen founded in Newport
Cycling clubs meeting in Newport, Rhode Island, in May formed the League of American Wheelmen to defend riders' access to roads and parks. From 1888 it campaigned nationally for paved roads and in 1892 began publishing "Good Roads" magazine, helping start the Good Roads Movement that pushed states and the federal government into road building later used by motorists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_American_Bicyclists1880: Hans Renold patents the bush roller chain
Swiss-born engineer Hans Renold, who had bought a small chain-making business in Salford, England, in 1879, patented a roller chain in which each roller turned on a separate bush, cutting wear compared with earlier pin chains. The bush roller chain gave chain-driven bicycles an efficient, durable transmission and remains the basic design of bicycle and industrial chains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Renold1885: John Kemp Starley introduces the Rover safety bicycle
James Starley's nephew John Kemp Starley built the Rover in Coventry, with two wheels of similar size, a chain drive to the rear wheel and the rider seated between them. Earlier rear-drive "safety" designs existed, including Harry Lawson's of 1879, but the Rover is generally credited as the first commercially successful one. By the mid-1890s the high-wheeler had nearly disappeared and diamond-framed safeties had become the standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kemp_Starley1888: Dunlop patents the pneumatic tire
Belfast veterinarian John Boyd Dunlop fitted air-filled rubber tubes to his son's tricycle in 1887 and was granted a British patent on December 7, 1888. Racing successes on his tires in 1889 quickly converted riders, though the patent was ruled invalid in 1890 because Robert William Thomson had patented a pneumatic tire in 1845. Air tires made safety bicycles faster and far more comfortable than solid-tired machines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_Dunlop1890s: Bicycle boom reaches women and the middle class
Mass-produced safety bicycles with pneumatic tires set off a boom in Europe and North America that peaked in the mid-1890s, before prices and sales collapsed near the end of the decade. Cycling gave women unchaperoned mobility and spurred dress reform; in a February 1896 interview with Nellie Bly, Susan B. Anthony said the bicycle had "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cycling1902: Sturmey-Archer three-speed hub gear appears
William Reilly had a working three-speed hub by 1902, patented under his colleague James Archer's name. Frank Bowden of the Raleigh Bicycle Company in Nottingham acquired rights to it and to a rival design by Henry Sturmey, and Reilly's hub went into production as the Sturmey-Archer three-speed, with its gears sealed inside the rear hub. Internal hub gears became standard on everyday European utility and roadster bicycles for much of the 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmey-Archer1903: First Tour de France starts outside Paris
Organized by Henri Desgrange to raise the circulation of the sports newspaper L'Auto, the race left Montgeron on July 1 and covered 2,428 kilometers in six stages, some of them run through the night, finishing on July 19. Maurice Garin won by almost three hours, and 21 of about 60 starters finished. The Tour became the best-known event in professional cycling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1903_Tour_de_France1937: Tour de France permits derailleur gears
Henri Desgrange had long banned multiple gears in the Tour de France, but under pressure from manufacturers the 1937 race allowed derailleurs, which shift the chain between sprockets; Roger Lapébie won using a Super Champion derailleur designed by Swiss rider Oscar Egg. Campagnolo's cable-operated parallelogram Gran Sport rear derailleur, shown in 1949, set the pattern that later derailleurs followed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derailleur1950: Tianjin factory launches the Flying Pigeon
A state factory in Tianjin began producing the Flying Pigeon, a heavy single-speed roadster modeled on 1930s English designs. Bicycles became a household staple in the People's Republic of China under the planned economy, and the brand is often said to have exceeded 500 million units, a figure that cannot be independently checked. Foreign observers in the early 1980s called China "the kingdom of bicycles".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Pigeon1965: Amsterdam activists launch the White Bicycle Plan
Members of the Dutch anarchist group Provo painted bicycles white and left them unlocked in Amsterdam for anyone to use; the bikes were quickly stolen or impounded and the scheme collapsed, and accounts of how many bikes were involved range from about ten to 50. The idea led to coin-deposit systems such as Copenhagen's Bycyklen in 1995 and later to bike-sharing systems in cities worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle-sharing_system1973: Stop de Kindermoord campaigns for safer Dutch streets
With more than 3,000 road deaths a year in the Netherlands in the early 1970s, including over 400 children, the campaign Stop de Kindermoord ("Stop the child murder") held demonstrations and street occupations demanding safer streets. Together with the 1973 oil crisis and the Dutch Cyclists' Union founded in 1975, it pushed governments to build separated cycle paths, and cycling's decline in the Netherlands reversed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands1981: Specialized sells the Stumpjumper mountain bike
Riders in Marin County, California, had spent the 1970s racing modified balloon-tire bikes downhill, and frame builders such as Joe Breeze and Tom Ritchey made purpose-built off-road frames. Specialized, based on a Ritchey design, had the Stumpjumper built in Japan and sold it for $750; it is generally described as the first mass-produced mountain bike, and mountain bikes became a major category within a decade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialized_Stumpjumper~1987: Kestrel introduces the all-carbon 4000 frame
Kestrel, founded in 1986 by former Trek employees, introduced the 4000, commonly cited as the first all-carbon-fiber monocoque bicycle frame; sources date its release to 1986 or 1987. Carbon frames, stiffer and lighter than steel or aluminum and moldable into aerodynamic shapes, became standard in professional road racing by the 2000s, and the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) set a minimum bicycle weight of 6.8 kilograms for racing in 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kestrel_USA1990: Shimano combines brake and gear levers
Shimano, an Osaka-area company that introduced reliable indexed shifting with its Shimano Index System (SIS) in 1984, released Shimano Total Integration (STI) Dual Control levers, which let road riders brake and shift with one lever without moving their hands from the bars. Campagnolo and later SRAM followed with integrated levers of their own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimano_Total_Integration1993: Yamaha launches the PAS power-assisted bicycle
After Japanese regulators agreed to treat it as a bicycle, Yamaha unveiled the Power Assist System (PAS) bicycle in July and began limited sales in November, with nationwide sales following in April 1994. Its electric motor added power only while the rider pedaled, the principle of the pedelec. Yamaha calls it the first such bicycle, though a German pedelec may have been sold the same year; about 200,000 PAS bikes were sold by mid-1997.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedelec2008: Hangzhou opens a large public bike-sharing system
Following Paris's Vélib', which opened in 2007 and reported more than 20 million trips in its first year, the Chinese city of Hangzhou launched a docked public bicycle system on May 1 with 2,800 bicycles. By 2016 it had more than 84,000 bikes, recognized by Guinness World Records as the largest. App-based dockless services such as Mobike and Ofo then flooded Chinese cities before a shakeout in 2018 and 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangzhou_Public_Bicycle2009: Shimano releases Dura-Ace Di2 electronic shifting
Shimano's Dura-Ace 7970 Di2 replaced shift cables with wires and servo motors in the derailleurs, powered by a frame-mounted battery, and debuted in racing at the Tour of California in February. Electronic and later wireless shifting, including SRAM's eTap, unveiled in 2015, spread from professional racing to mid-priced road and mountain bikes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimano2023: E-bikes outsell conventional bicycles in Germany
After pandemic lockdowns in 2020 drove a worldwide surge in bicycle demand and shortages, Germany's industry association, the Zweirad-Industrie-Verband (ZIV), reported that about 2.1 million electric bicycles were sold in Germany in 2023 against 1.9 million without motors, the first time e-bikes held a majority of the market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_bicycle