The History of the Bicycle

There is no single answer to "the first bicycle" without a modifier attached. That is because the rightful inventor changes depending on which standard you choose. Some judge it by two wheels placed inline, while others judge it by feet leaving the ground. Once we divide the story across five milestones, they stop competing and settle into their proper places.

First, two wheels propelled by pushing against the ground with your feet. In June 1817, Karl von Drais rode his machine in Mannheim. It differed from earlier contraptions because the front wheel could pivot around an axis to steer. Second, feet leaving the ground. In 1866, Pierre Lallement was granted U.S. Patent No. 59,915, which attached cranks and foot pedals to the front axle. The specification noted, "the more rapid the speed the more easily the upright position is maintained."

Third, the front wheel growing massive. This was the high-wheel bicycle of the 1870s. Because the pedals were attached directly to the front wheel, the only way to cover more ground per rotation was to enlarge the wheel; according to a U.S. Census report, by around 1886 it had reached a 60-inch front wheel and a 16-inch rear wheel. Fourth, equal-sized wheels with a chain driving the rear wheel. This was the Rover, built in Coventry in 1885, and it gave today's bicycle its definitive architecture.

Fifth, the pneumatic tire. John Boyd Dunlop patented "improvements in tyres of wheels for bicycles, tricycles, and other road carriages" in 1888. Yet a patent based on the exact same idea had already appeared in 1845. The U.S. Census report explains why that earlier patent remained obscure: "There were no bicyclists then and little call for such tires."

These five milestones did not unfold within a single generation. Between the first and the last lies the span of an entire human lifetime. That is why no single year can answer the question, "When was the bicycle invented?" And that final milestone previews the central question of this series: even when a great thing exists, nothing happens unless there is a place to use it. For the tire, that place was the bicycle; for the bicycle, that place was the road.

In January 1818, Drais received a 10-year privilege from the Grand Duchy of Baden. Baden had no patent law at the time, so a grant from the Grand Duke served in place of a patent. What is fascinating is the content of his application. In describing how fast his machine was, he divided its speed into four grades based on road conditions.

As quoted in a U.S. Census report, the passage reads: On a well-maintained post road, even uphill, it goes as fast as a person walks. On flat ground, even after heavy rain, 6 to 7 miles per hour. When the road is dry and firm, 8 to 9 miles per hour. On a downhill, it matches a horse running at full gallop. Unable to sum up its performance with a single number, he broke it down by road surface.

Why did he do this? Because this vehicle had no horse. When a carriage ran into deep mud, you simply hitched another horse to pull through. It cost more money, but it didn't stop you from going. But the only power driving a bicycle was the rider's own legs, so there was nothing extra to hitch. On top of that, while carriage wheels were wide and large, bicycle wheels were narrow and thin, sinking right into ruts, gravel, and sand.

There was one more thing. Two wheels must roll to stay upright. It was just as Lallement wrote in his patent specification. Yet mud and loose stones stole away that very speed. If a bad road meant "getting more expensive" for a carriage, for a bicycle it was closer to "not being able to move at all."

That is why from the very start, this vehicle was only useful when paired with a good road. Buying a bicycle and securing a road were two completely separate things; the former could be done with your own money, but the latter could not. This is also why pneumatic tires became such a huge sensation later on. If the tire can absorb some of the rough surface on its own, you bounce less and lose less speed on the exact same road. If you couldn't fix the road, you had to fix the wheel instead.

So why had nobody paved the roads up to that point? It wasn't out of laziness; it was just how the math worked out. It wasn't that people didn't realize the roads were bad, either. Everyone knew it. It was simply that nobody had settled who would pay to fix them.

Road laws in many U.S. states were built on the practice of "working off" road taxes. Residents were considered to have paid their taxes if they showed up with their own wagons to work on the roads for a set number of days. In his 1888 annual report, the Secretary of Agriculture described this system as: "unsound in principle, unjust in operation, wasteful in practice, and unsatisfactory in results... a relic of feudalism borrowed from the statute labor of England." Because neighbors came out for a day to push dirt around instead of professional contractors, the roads could hardly improve. What's more, it is difficult to measure effort when taxes are paid in labor. The record shows that you showed up for the day, but it says nothing about how hard you worked.

Another factor compounded the problem: Railroads had already taken over long-distance freight. The dirt roads between towns had become mere feeder routes to haul cargo to the train station, making it difficult to justify spending large sums of money on them.

Roads are also tricky things by nature. You can buy and use a vehicle all on your own, but you cannot pave a road by yourself. Paving only the stretch in front of your own yard is useless if the stretches before and after it are mud, and once a road is paved, even those who didn't pay for it will use it. It is something where the ones demanding it and the ones paying for it are misaligned from the start.

Cyclists were therefore faced with two choices. One was to try paving the roads they rode on with their own money; the other was to get others to pave them. The former was worthless unless the roads connected across vast distances. So they chose the latter: forming organizations, publishing newspapers, and petitioning state legislatures.

In 1880, bicycle clubs across the United States came together to form the League of American Wheelmen. They had two goals: protecting the right of bicycles to use public roads, and pushing for those roads to be improved.

On a page recording its history, the League describes the conditions of the time like this: riders suffered on rutted roads of churned dirt and gravel, and faced hostility from equestrians, carriage drivers, and pedestrians. Membership at one point surpassed 100,000. The League published periodicals focused on good roads, distributed pamphlets, and lobbied state legislatures. For a hobbyist organization of this scale to speak out on a nation's road policy was an unfamiliar sight back then.

Something similar happened in Britain. In 1886, the Cyclists' Touring Club and the National Cyclists' Union joined forces to establish the Roads Improvement Association. This was before automobiles ever appeared on British roads. That said, since we haven't attached hard numbers to this section, take it simply as a note that such an organization existed around that time.

There is one thing worth pointing out: an organization demanding roads is not the same as an organization building them. The League had neither the money nor the authority to pave roads. All they could do was make the terrible condition of the roads visible, and persuade those who could actually foot the bill. That is what makes the next scene the most intriguing part of this chapter.

This brings us to the weightiest sentence in this chapter. In the "Bicycles and Tricycles" chapter of the 1900 U.S. Census report, it reads: "The very extensive use of the bicycle led to the organization of the League of American Wheelmen, which initiated the movement for better roads that has resulted in great improvement of the public highways in many states." This was written directly in an official statistical report issued by the government.

In 1891, the National Committee on Road Improvement of the League of American Wheelmen published a booklet. Its title was *The Gospel of Good Roads*, with the subtitle 'A Letter to the American Farmer.' It was the signature publication of a cycling organization.

Yet if you look through the text from start to finish, there is not a single mention of bicycles. Neither 'bicycle' nor 'rider' appears in the main body even once. The word 'wheelman' appears in just three places: the publisher credit on the cover, the acknowledgments, and the directory of league officers at the very end of the book. All three are outside the main text. Instead, from beginning to end, it is entirely about horses, wagons, and hauling costs.

The author lays out a calculation: American farms are feeding at least around 2 million extra horses that would be unnecessary if roads were in good condition. He puts the cost of hay and oats to feed those horses at around $114 million a year. This was the author’s own estimate, so it should be read as such. He also writes at length about traveling a muddy road with a farmer after spring rains. There is a scene where he tells a neighbor hitching five horses to pull a wagon that 'two would do the job.' The booklet is structured to lay the cost of fixing roads side by side with the cost of feeding extra horses, inviting readers to see which is cheaper.

Why was it written this way? Because the people who would pay for the roads were not urban bicycle riders, but taxpaying farmers and politicians eyeing their votes. To carry your demand through, you had to speak not from the reasons of the one asking, but from the reasons of the one footing the bill.

Not that they concealed this, either. The cover clearly identified the League of American Wheelmen as the publisher. It was a document that staked its own name while setting aside its own self-interest. And this approach actually worked. As farmers and rural mail carriers adopted the argument as their own, the call for good roads ceased to be a cyclists' demand and became a demand from the countryside itself.

Demands soon began turning into policy. In April 1891, New Jersey passed a law directly subsidizing road improvements with state funds. It was the first of its kind in the United States, structured so that the state covered one-third, adjacent landowners paid one-tenth, and the county funded the rest. Federal Highway Administration records note that this law was pushed through by the League of American Wheelmen alongside a state association. The following year, Massachusetts established the nation's first state highway commission.

The federal government's turn came in 1893. The Department of Agriculture appropriations bill, signed into law on March 3, included $10,000 for road inquiry. It was not money to pave roads. It was funding to investigate the best ways to build them and share that knowledge. On October 3 of that year, Roy Stone established the Office of Road Inquiry within the Department of Agriculture, staffed by just a single stenographer. That modest office would later grow into the Federal Highway Administration.

Even then, the work of this office was not paving highways. It published bulletins, convened meetings, and built short "object-lesson roads" to demonstrate proper construction. The first object-lesson road, laid in June 1897, was 8 feet wide and 660 feet long, surfaced with 6 inches of stone at a cost of $321. It was not a transit network, but a demonstration.

The sequence of events tells the real story. The Duryea car, recorded by the Smithsonian as one of the earliest gasoline automobiles in America, took its first test drive on September 21, 1893. The Office of Road Inquiry opened just twelve days later, and the legislation authorizing it had been signed half a year earlier. By 1900, there were still only 8,000 registered cars in the entire country. State aid laws and state highway commissions had arrived well before that.

This is why the assumption that "roads were paved because cars arrived" does not hold true in America. Of course, the office did not pave the nation in a single year, and the massive federal spending came much later. Still, the fundamental fact remains: the offices, personnel, and budget lines dedicated to managing roads were already created first.

There is a claim that circulates most widely in bicycle lore: the story that Leonardo da Vinci drew a bicycle. We need to separate this story into four layers.

The first layer is the popular rumor itself. The second layer is what the presenter actually argued. In 1974, when philologist Augusto Marinoni unveiled a drawing that looked like a bicycle on the back of a folio in the Codex Atlanticus, he did not claim it was by Leonardo's own hand. He explained it as a pupil's copy of a lost original. In other words, the widely circulated rumor differed from the actual presentation right from the start.

The third layer is the famous rebuttal. At the 1997 International Cycling History Conference, Hans-Erhard Lessing delivered a paper arguing that the sketch was a 20th-century forgery, and the press widely publicized it under the narrative that "a monk doing restoration work drew it in." If you search for this story on the internet today, this is usually as far as it goes.

Yet stopping here simply means siding with the fashionable counter-narrative. The fourth layer is re-evaluating that rebuttal. Within the scope verified while writing this piece, the basis of that presentation rested on circumstantial evidence and textual collation, and I could not find any publicly available data showing that the sketch itself was physically dated. I was also unable to access the original text of the paper, and the material compiling counterarguments from the opposing camp came from a personal research page rather than an academic journal. That is why this piece does not rule in favor of either side and leaves the matter divided.

What we should take away here is not who is right. It is that quoting a famous rebuttal can easily feel as if you had examined the primary sources yourself. The more widely known a rebuttal becomes, the less reason people see to re-measure it. And even if this sketch were genuine, the story of this chapter would not change. Even if someone had drawn such a machine, without roads fit to ride it on, it would have remained nothing more than a drawing.

There is another quote that is frequently cited: the claim that the bicycle emancipated women. Its source is relatively clear. It comes from an interview published in the New York World on February 2, 1896. It was an article written by reporter Nellie Bly after meeting Susan B. Anthony.

The passage opens like this: “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.” In the same interview, the conversation turns to clothing, expressing the view that long skirts and delicate lace catching in bicycle wheels were simply impractical.

This is as far as the facts can be verified. And this is where we must stop. This is a remark made by one person in an interview, not the findings of a survey. This article does not measure how many women actually rode bicycles, nor how much truly changed afterward. What this text can substantiate is strictly this: “such words were spoken at the time, and a conversation about dress reform accompanied them.”

It is also worth taking a look at the faces of those who made these demands. The very league that championed making roads public property passed a resolution at its national assembly on February 20, 1894, restricting membership to white people, through a secret ballot vote of 127 to 54. It passed only on the third attempt. That resolution remained in effect for a very long time, and only in 1999 did its successor organization finally repeal it and apologize. This is a fact that the league itself has recorded on its own history page.

There is a reason to place these two stories side by side. It is because the central question of this chapter is “who was making the demand?” Even the organization demanding roads for the public drew a line within its own ranks. Reading this history accurately means not assuming that every demand made for reform was a demand made for everyone.

In the 1890s, the American bicycle industry grew rapidly. The number of bicycle and tricycle factories jumped from 27 in 1890 to 312 in 1900. Over that same period, the value of production surged from the $2.56 million range to the $31.91 million range.

Yet the census report noted that the peak occurred around the middle of the decade, followed by a distinct decline. The reason it cited was not the automobile. It was the fierce price competition that erupted after the number of factories grew more than tenfold, along with smaller companies being pushed out during the crisis at the end of the decade. In 1900, the average factory price of a chain-driven bicycle was $18.91. The report noted that "the boom of a few years ago has passed, and in its place a normal demand for it as a vehicle has become established."

Looking closely at the timeline makes this even clearer. In the very year that report tallied, bicycle factories built just 56 automobiles. They made 159 motorcycles. In that same year, 1,182,850 bicycles were manufactured in the United States. To claim that the automobile pushed out the bicycle simply does not match the scale of the numbers.

Nor was this the first time a bicycle boom had died down. In 1869, the velocipede craze reached its peak, with indoor riding rinks and academies popping up everywhere, only to fizzle out about two years later. Back then, what killed the craze was not the price, but the machine itself. With iron wheels and an iron frame, riding was so exhausting that it was nicknamed the "boneshaker."

What matters is that the two booms died down for completely different reasons. The first time was because the machine wore riders out; the second was because there were far too many manufacturers. Through it all, the demand for better roads never faded. What remained after the boom passed was not the factories, but the road agencies created at the state and federal levels.

Demands become institutions only when there is someone to take them up. The Good Roads Movement, begun by cyclists, soon shifted toward farmers and rural mail delivery. Documents from federal road agencies note that the movement was "originally based on bicycle popularity and grew even stronger in the automobile era."

What was inherited first were the roads and the administrative system to manage them. When the federal government conducted its first nationwide survey of roads outside cities in 1904, there were about 2 million miles of rural public roads, but only about 154,000 miles were surfaced with gravel or stone. While that meant there was still a long way to go, the survey agencies and statewide road organizations were already in place. The Federal Aid Road Act, signed on July 11, 1916, allocated $75 million while requiring that to receive aid, a state must establish a highway department. In that year, 3,617,937 automobiles were registered in the United States.

Components crossed over as well. One industrial historian summarized that the automobile industry inherited lightweight yet strong tubular steel frames, chain drives, ball and roller bearings, and differential gears from bicycle manufacturers. Sheet metal stamping processes and steel tubing manufacturing methods were also nurtured in the bicycle industry. There are also many examples of people who made bicycles going on to build automobiles. In short, the experience of mass-producing lightweight, sturdy machines crossed over into an adjacent industry.

Still, let us make one crucial distinction here. Recall that in 1900, American bicycle factories produced just 56 automobiles. The fact that something was passed down is a different statement from claiming that one directly gave birth to the other. Automobiles had multiple ancestral lineages that evolved completely independent of the bicycle, and all this account confirms is that the bicycle was "one of the preceding sources."

Records on Korea are sparse. So I will lay them out just as sparely as they are.

The National Archives of Korea dates the bicycle's first appearance in Korean records to the late 1890s, citing a record from 1896 of an official riding a bicycle through the streets of the capital. Encyclopedia entries note that no one can confirm for certain who first brought it in, or when. There is also a record that around 100 bicycles were imported in 1903 for government officials. Stories in this vein were mostly compiled by later generations, so it is best to read them while distinguishing contemporary documentation from later recollections.

There is, however, one solid, verified point. In December 1905, a clause stating that riding a bicycle at night without a lantern was prohibited was included in the Street Management Regulations. Korea's very first regulation dealing with bicycles appeared not in a law governing vehicles, but within rules for managing streets. It aligns precisely with the central axis of our story.

After that, what remains in the record are stories of races. On April 22, 1906, the first competition was held at Hunryeonwon with 100 won in prize money, and on April 13, 1913, Um Bok-dong won the All-Joseon Bicycle Race held in Yongsan, Seoul. Right after liberation, bicycle counts in Seoul were tallied at 29,507 in 1946 and 52,451 in 1947. However, because the scope of counting for these numbers appears to have differed by year, I did not connect the two years to calculate a growth rate.

When compared to the United States, a clear difference emerges. In America, riders banded together first to demand roads, and those demands created institutions. In Korea, as soon as the machines arrived, the government stepped in with regulations, and those regulations were placed inside documents meant for managing streets. Demands bubbling up from below and rules handed down from above take on very different shapes. That said, because the historical materials are thin, I will leave it here.

This isn't a prediction, but a viewing guide. Whenever a new mode of transportation appears, a few familiar questions keep repeating.

First, who demands it, and who pays for it. In this story, the ones who demanded it and the ones who paid for it were different right from the start. Cyclists initiated the demand, states, counties, and the federal government paid the bill, and farmers and rural mail delivery added the political weight. Whenever you look at a newly emerging vehicle, separating these three makes the story much clearer.

Second, look at what the numbers are actually counting. The "8,000 registered cars" mentioned in this story refers to vehicles registered with states, not necessarily the number running on the roads. And in the phrase "about 154,000 miles of surfaced roads," "surfaced" even included compacted earth. It is always worth double-checking these details when reading articles about transportation.

Third, does the road come first, or does the vehicle? Even today, the same question returns whenever a new vehicle emerges. Do we build the space first and then welcome the vehicle, or do we let the vehicles multiply first and designate space later? It is not this article's place to judge which side is right. But looking back at history, the record shows that demand came first.

Fourth, keep an eye on what remains unsettled. Both the sketch in the Renaissance codex and the claim that it "liberated" women are still debated today. The former will shift once the scientific dating of the drawing is made public, and the latter will evolve as more historical records from that era emerge. Remembering open questions as open makes it much easier to see what new evidence really changes.

One last thought. The true protagonist of this story was never the machine, but the demand. The ones who demanded the road, the ones who paid for it, and the ones who inherited it were all completely different—that is the lasting takeaway of this story.