Get Out Your Wheels!

UK Bike Week is set for 8-16 June, when Cycling UK urges us to pedal for fun and fitness. To get us in the mood, Graeme Wilcockson gives a brief history of cycling and tips on how to get going.

- Graeme Wilcockson

They say you can’t reinvent the wheel, yet it’s not been for the want of trying. In 1817, when Baron Karl von Drais created his ‘hobby horse’, a gentleman’s plaything became a two-wheeled solution to a four-legged problem.

The 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora had catastrophic global consequences; as what was the largest explosion in recorded history had deposited an ash cloud thousands of miles across, impacting the climate of Europe and North America. The summerless year which followed saw near-total crop failure, famine and the mass starvation of livestock across the entire Northern Hemisphere. This included the world’s then favourite form of transport: the horse.

Equine breeds of all kinds were in desperately short supply, and von Drais seized the opportunity. Stripping weight from his quad-wheeled beast and debuting a two-wheeled version, he marketed the toy across Western Europe. It was greeted with open arms — and aching legs. The 50 lb monster was a far cry from today’s ultra-light carbon fibre speed machines, but they were snapped up in droves. But it didn’t take long before a law was passed, banning them from pavements in England as a menace to pedestrians. Interest waned, and it took until the 1860s and the introduction of the bone-shaking Penny Farthing to see a resurgence. Pedals were introduced within a few years, and various patent battles were fought and lost. It was the Olivier Brothers whose design endured through mass production, and their pedal-powered velocipede became a blueprint for imitators across the globe, particularly in England where appetite was intense.