The History of Bicycles: From Hobby Horse to Two-Wheeled Revolution

On June 12, 1817, a crowd gathered on a road in Mannheim, Germany. What they were waiting for was a nobleman and forestry official named Karl von Drais. He straddled a wooden contraption with neither pedals nor a chain, pushing himself forward by kicking the ground with both feet. He called it the “Laufmaschine” — the running machine. To onlookers of the time, the spectacle was closer to a comical sideshow. Yet no one could have predicted that just seventy years later, this machine’s descendants would free the women of the world from their corsets and send the Wright brothers’ airplane into the sky.

The bicycle was never merely a means of transportation. This is the unlikely history of how the principle of balancing on two wheels came to reshape technology, society, and politics all at once.

Born from a Volcano: The Creation of the Laufmaschine

The year 1817, when Drais unveiled his machine, was an exceptionally unusual one. In 1815, the Tambora volcano in Indonesia had erupted in what remains the most powerful volcanic eruption ever recorded in human history.^[1] Ash spread into the stratosphere, turning 1816 into the “Year Without a Summer,” with temperatures plummeting across Europe and North America. Grain harvests collapsed, and the horses that depended on that grain died in droves.

As documented by Drais’s biographer Hans-Erhard Lessing, this mass die-off of horses was precisely what motivated Drais to develop a personal means of transportation that could replace them.^[1] The Laufmaschine was not the product of pure engineering curiosity — it was an invention born from ecological disaster.

Drais’s machine was the first human-powered vehicle to place two wheels in a straight line and incorporate a steering mechanism that allowed the rider to change direction with handlebars.^[2] The rider sat in the saddle and propelled themselves forward by pushing off the ground with both feet, and on downhill stretches they could lift their feet and enjoy the speed. Drais completed a round-trip of roughly 14 kilometers between Mannheim and the relay station at Schwetzingen in under an hour — faster than the scheduled stagecoach of the time.^[2]

Granted a ten-year exclusive privilege by the Grand Duke of Baden, Drais promoted his invention across Europe, and by 1818 it had spread to Britain and France under the names “draisine” and “draisienne.” However, the machine was poorly suited to unpaved roads, and collisions with pedestrians when ridden on sidewalks became frequent, leading several cities to ban it.^[2] The craze faded quickly. Drais voluntarily renounced his noble title and spent his final years in poverty, dying in 1851.

The Arrival of the Pedal: Who Really Invented the Bicycle?

Some thirty years after Drais’s machine had been largely forgotten, an important experiment was underway in a Paris workshop. In the early 1860s, a pedal crank was fitted to the front wheel axle for the first time in the workshop of Pierre Michaux, a Parisian carriage-parts manufacturer. For the first time, a rider could turn the wheels by pressing pedals rather than kicking the ground — a true bicycle had been born.^[3]

The dispute over who deserves credit for the invention, however, has never been fully resolved. Pierre Lallement, who worked for Michaux, claimed that he had conceived the pedal mechanism first, and later emigrated to the United States, where he obtained an American patent in 1866.^[3] Historians have yet to render a definitive verdict on which claim is more convincing.

The firm “Michaux et Cie,” which Michaux established together with the Olivier brothers in 1868, became the first company to mass-produce pedal bicycles. These machines featured iron wheel rims covered in rubber, which rattled every bone in a rider’s body on cobblestone roads. The English-speaking world gave them the memorable nickname “boneshakers.”^[3]

The commercial success of the boneshaker sparked a bicycle craze in London, New York, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, and in 1869 the first bicycle race was held on the Paris-to-Rouen route. James Moore won the approximately 123-kilometer race in 10 hours and 40 minutes.^[4]

Pedaling at the Sky: The Age of the Penny-Farthing

The boneshaker’s fatal flaw was its speed ceiling. Because the pedals were directly attached to the front axle, one rotation of the pedals meant exactly one rotation of the front wheel. The only way to go faster was to make the front wheel larger.

This simple logic gave rise to the “penny-farthing” — also called the “ordinary” bicycle — a genuinely monstrous machine that became fashionable in the 1870s and 1880s. Its front wheel could measure up to 1.5 meters in diameter.^[5] The saddle sat well above an adult’s head height, and riders had to use a step or run alongside and leap on while in motion.

The penny-farthing’s speed was intoxicating. A skilled rider could exceed 30 kilometers per hour, and it dominated competitive racing into the early 1890s. But the price was steep. If the front wheel caught an obstacle or the rider braked sharply, they would be pitched forward in what was called a “header” — often landing head-first rather than feet-first, resulting in serious or fatal injuries.^[5]

Because of this danger, the penny-farthing was effectively the exclusive domain of young, physically capable men. Women, the elderly, and ordinary workers could hardly contemplate riding one. Yet this very exclusion paradoxically became the spark for the next revolution.

Democratizing the Bicycle: The Rise of the Safety Bicycle

In 1885, John Kemp Starley of Coventry, England rewrote bicycle history. His “Rover Safety Bicycle” shared a fundamentally identical structure with the bicycles of today: two wheels of similar size, a chain-driven rear wheel, and a diamond-shaped frame.^[6]

The chain-drive system meant that the pedals no longer needed to be attached directly to the wheel. Speed could be increased simply by adjusting the gear ratio, and the saddle was now safely close to the ground. A British cycling trade journal wrote of the Rover that it “set the pattern for the world,” a phrase that would be used in advertising for years afterward.^[6]

One more invention was needed for Starley’s design to reach its full potential: the pneumatic tire, patented in 1888 by Scottish veterinarian John Boyd Dunlop. Dunlop developed the idea of pumping air into rubber tubes in order to ease his son’s discomfort while riding a tricycle on gravel roads, and a bicycle fitted with these tires delivered an overwhelming performance at a Dublin race in 1889.^[7] Once the safety bicycle and the pneumatic tire came together, the bicycle at last became a machine that anyone could ride.

The Corset the Bicycle Undid: Cycling and Women’s Liberation

The bicycle boom of the 1890s carried a technological innovation into a social revolution. The most dramatic changes were felt in the lives of women.

Before the Rover Safety Bicycle appeared, cycling was a male domain. The penny-farthing was physically impossible for women to ride, and even if it had not been, corsets and stiff crinoline skirts posed a fundamental obstacle to any movement of the legs. But once the safety bicycle spread, millions of women took to the roads for the first time.

The garment women began wearing in order to cycle was the “bloomer” — a loose-fitting trouser-like divided skirt. This clothing instantly ignited social controversy. Conservative newspapers portrayed cycling women as domestic delinquents who had abandoned the home, and doctors even invented a spurious medical term — “bicycle face” — to warn against women riding bicycles.^[8] In some communities, women cyclists were subjected to jeering, insults, and even having hats or debris thrown into their wheels.

But women did not stop. In 1896, American women’s suffrage activist Susan B. Anthony declared: “The bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance.”^[8] This was not rhetorical flourish. The bicycle gave women, for the first time, a means of moving through the city without a male escort. They could meet a friend, visit a library, or show up at a protest. A new social figure — the “New Woman” — was born atop two wheels.^[9]

They Rode Before They Flew: The Wright Brothers and the Bicycle

The bicycle revolution left one more remarkable legacy. Orville and Wilbur Wright, who achieved the first powered flight in human history at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903, had until that point been running a bicycle sales and repair shop in Dayton, Ohio.^[10]

This fact is more than a biographical footnote. The Wright brothers installed a self-built wind tunnel in the second-floor workshop above their bicycle shop and tested over two hundred wing shapes there. The central concept they brought to aircraft design — “balance control” — was an insight drawn directly from the bicycle.^[10] Most pioneers of aviation at the time thought of flying machines as extensions of ships or balloons. But the Wright brothers, who worked with bicycles every day, understood it differently. An aircraft, like a bicycle, does not pursue passive stability — it must actively maintain its own balance. That shift in thinking was the decisive difference between their success and everyone else’s failure.

The total funds they raised from bicycle shop revenues to develop their airplane came to less than $1,000.^[10] At the same time, a competing team backed by the United States government was pouring tens of thousands of dollars into repeated failures.

Light and Shadow in the Automobile Age: Decline and Revival

In the early twentieth century, the arrival of the automobile brought the bicycle’s golden age to a rapid close. As the Ford Model T spread after 1908 in particular, the bicycle began to be seen in Western countries as a symbol of poverty. But history did not flow in a straight line.

The Netherlands was a striking exception. Already home to the world’s highest per-capita bicycle ownership in the 1910s, the country still had 2.7 million bicycles compared to just 68,000 automobiles in 1930.^[11] During the Second World War, the Nazi occupation reduced bicycle use by rationing rubber and tires, but the oil shock of the 1970s triggered a revival, alongside the “Stop de Kindermoord” (Stop the Child Murder) movement and a resurgence of bicycle-friendly urban policy.^[11] Today, more than 60 percent of all trips in central Amsterdam are made by bicycle.

The Paradox of Two Wheels

From the moment it was created, the bicycle carried a paradox within it. Faster than a pedestrian but slower than a car; inexpensive yet capable of reshaping urban space; a vehicle for the individual that became a tool of collective politics. It removed the corset, gave birth to the airplane, and planted the dream of the carbon-free city.

Today, approximately 364,000 bicycles are produced around the world every single day.^[12] The e-bike market had grown to approximately $70 billion as of 2025, and the bicycle is now recognized as a key instrument for reducing urban carbon emissions.^[12]

But the most remarkable fact of all is this: the simple principle of a human balancing on two wheels — the principle Drais built into his machine in 1817 — has not fundamentally changed in 205 years. From the day Tambora’s ash killed the horses and Drais first pushed himself forward with his feet, the bicycle has always found a way to open whatever road the age has blocked.