The most successful early attempt to build a comfortable two-wheeled vehicle was the Draisine or the Laufmaschine (running machine), constructed about 1816 by Baron Karl von Drais in Karlsruhe, Germany. It consisted of a wooden beam with an upholstered saddle attached to two carriage wheels; the rider straddled the beam and propelled himself by pushing his or her feet against the ground in a normal running motion, steering with a front handlebar while leaning forearms against an upholstered balancing board. Drais's original design included a leather cord attached to the balancing board that activated a brake on the rear wheel. In France the vehicle became known as the Draisienne, while in England it was dubbed a hobbyhorse or dandy horse (after the foppish, aristocratic riders who favored it). After a brief, intense fad in both Europe and the United States, interest in the Draisine faded, about 1819, because of its inefficiency and impracticality as well as the poor conditions of most roads.
There is historical debate as to who attached the first cranks and pedals to the Draisine to create the first pedal-powered two-wheeler, but there is no doubt that this was a revolutionary advance. Recent scholarship bolsters the claim that Pierre Lallement, who in 1863 at age 20 was working for a children's carriage maker, constructed and rode through the streets of Paris a "velocipede" with pedals fixed to the front axle (as is still done today with children's tricycles). He moved to Connecticut and took out a patent in 1866, the first for such a vehicle; but he went broke and returned to Paris to find that the velocipede business in France was going full swing, led by Pierre Michaux and his son Ernest as well as other engineers and enthusiasts. The name bicycle first was used in a patent taken out in England in 1869.
Velocipedes fired the public imagination and were given international exposure by the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and attending entrepreneurs took the design to Austria-Hungary, Britain, Germany, Italy, the United States, and elsewhere. Carriage builders began to produce velocipedes on the side and opened indoor equestrian-style "riding halls," where customers could try out models and learn to master the art of balancing. The first documented horse-race-style velocipede race was in Paris in 1867, followed in 1869 by a 76-mile (122-km) road race.
By 1869 a veritable mania over the velocipede was sweeping through Canada, the United States, and France, in part because the advent of the pedal had made it—unlike the hobby horse—a viable form of transportation as an alternative to the horse. By 1870, velocipede clubs had been founded in Belgium, France, England, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and other nations; the clubs not only organized races but also built racetracks, published newsletters, and challenged laws passed to prohibit riding velocipedes on sidewalks or in parks.
The next truly important technical advance in the evolution of the bicycle was the advent of the "spider wheel" with lightweight metal spokes. Up to now wheel design had been based on compression, as with a carriage, with the weight bearing down from the hub to the lower part of the rim; a bicycle wheel was essentially a wooden carriage wheel with thick radial wooden spokes and a wooden rim held together by a metal band wrapped around the circumference. The wooden spokes had to be thick enough to bear the entire weight of the rider and vehicle. Such wheels were heavy and frequently shook loose on rough roads, since the metal band would expand with use. A velocipede's ride was also rough (giving rise to the nickname "boneshaker"), although it could be eased by fitting a band of rubber over the metal band; the solid-rubber tire also gave better traction than metal on cobblestones. But in 1869 Eugène Meyer attempted to patent a revolutionary metal-rimmed wheel held together by lightweight metal spokes under tension—in which individually adjusted metal spokes are screwed directly into the rim (still done today). Such a wheel is enormously strong for its weight, able to bear a load exceeding 100 times its own weight. The first English velocipede to benefit from spider wheels with rubber tires was built in 1870, and soon they were nearly universal.
At the height of the velocipede craze and racing in the 1860s, designers began to enlarge the front wheel to overcome a fundamental limitation: the fact that the driven wheel (front) turned once with each turn of the pedals. Enlarging the front wheel meant that with each turn of the pedals, the wheel would cover more ground. Thus was born the "high-wheel" bicycle. The high-wheeler became widely known in England as the "penny-farthing" for the large and small coins in circulation at that time, and in the United States as the "ordinary" because it rapidly became the common, or ordinary, bicycle in use there. To make more efficient use of the rider's leg power, the saddle was moved to a position over the front wheel and the rear wheel was made smaller.
When this model was introduced in 1871, its front wheel had a diameter of 40 to 48 inches (1.0 to 1.2 meters), and its rear wheel was 16 inches (0.4 meter). Ten years later the average front wheel was 52 inches (1.3 meters), with some as large as 60 inches (1.5 meters); the largest ever made was 84 inches (2.1 meters), but it was not practical for the average rider, whose legs could not reach the pedals. The saddle was perilously high for the machine to be used for anything but sport, and it was completely unrideable by a woman in long skirts. The dangers of high-wheelers, plus the egregious condition of most roads, eventually discouraged riders. The bicycle itself remained beyond the foolhardiness and skill of most people, and the velocipede craze eventually died.
