A brief history of the bicycle

What if a person of ordinary fitness could cycle at 50 kilometres per hour? Would more people ride bikes? At 50kph riding in the Adelaide plains people could travel 25 kilometres in half an hour.

Those sorts of speeds seem to be unrealistic. Certainly fit athletes achieve those speeds for short bursts in velodromes, but is it possible to street cycle at that speed? The following history of the bicycle reveals that it is.

The normal bike began in the early nineteenth as a running machine, the hobby horse, a two wheel contraption where you sat on a saddle and ran with your legs until the speed was fast enough to lift your feet and free wheel.

Naturally when the bike was first invented, like the early cars, it followed the form of what already existed. In this case it replaced the horse and it was natural to sit up on a seat to ride.

The bicycle went through a number of developments such as the direct drive of the front wheel. It was this attempt to get more power that saw the development of the penny farthing bike. Then someone invented the chain drive and by the 1878 the bike had achieved the shape we are so familiar with today, the so called standard safety bike.

In 1896 the recumbent bicycle was invented, one that made the most efficent use of leg power. Probably you are familiar with the basic shape when you think about the leaning back, pedalling machines in the gym. These are the bikes that have set all speed records for cycling.

Recumbent bikes slowly gained in popularity and by the late 1920s were considered by the International Cycling organisations (UCI) as nuisances because they were so fast. In one event, a hundred mile hill touring event in California, the race was meant to take all day. The first competitor passed the finishing line after three and half hours. He was riding a recumbent bike.

Cyclists on recumbents were regularly cycling at sixty kilometres per hour over the course of the day. Not speed trials over a few short minutes on a smooth, banked indoor track, but out on the road in traffic. On a bent, that is a recumbent bicycle, people of ordinary fitness like you and me can ride at fifty kilometres per hour because the riding position makes most efficient use of the musco-skeletal system.

Instead of allowing recumbent bikes to remain in competitions, the UCI made up a set of rules which defined that bents, although two wheeled, were not real bikes and therefore not eligible to compete. That was 1 April 1934. No longer able to participate in competitions, especially the professional cycling races, riders gave up their recumbents and they disappeared. Some remained , especially the covered ones, Velocepedes, which remained in use in Monaco until the last one was no longer serviceable in the nineteen nineties.

In the late nineteen seventies the Gossamer Albatross won the million dollar purse for human powered sustained flight over an eight mile course. During the research for the aeroplane physiologists discovered the most efficient posture to power the machine was the semiprone position of the recumbent bike. From that point on recumbents began to make a return to the cycling scene.

Now what if that decision had not been taken? What would things be like now if recumbents had remained defined as bikes? I think the transport of the twentieth century, and the nature of our cities would have become completely different. We would have vibrant communities, safe streets and clean air because many more people would ride bikes.

Children would first have a tricycle, the usual toy young children have. Then as they grow older they would move onto safety cycles, child size with training wheels and then adult size. Eventually in the mid to late teens people would move onto proper bikes, recumbents, on which they can move at the same speed as motorised traffic.

Of course two wheels is not the only configuration for recumbents. There are numerous 3 wheel versions. 

Many older women currently use rather inefficient difficult to manouvre tricycles whose design has not changed since they were first created during Victorian times. A practical recumbent trike, designed to take into account the aging body, could make a big difference to the long term fitness, health, independence and mobility of older women in particular.