It's All About the Bike by Robert Penn Page A

original. No one had previously put a pair of wheels in line, on a frame, and made use of the fundamental precept of the bicycle: balance by steering. It was thought then that without your feet on the ground, you’d fall over. The Draisine taught humanity that you can balance on two wheels in line if, and only if, you can steer.
    One of the big, unanswered questions in the history of the bicycle is: why, when technology had made it feasible for at least 3,500 years, did the Draisine take so long to invent? A hypothesis is that no one believed you could actually balance on two in-linewheels. It is possible that Drais only worked it out himself by chance. He may have anticipated stabilizing the machine by almost constant use of the feet: only when it was built, and he was ripping down a hill did he raise his feet from the ground and realize he could achieve the same with the help of the steering mechanism.
    By imparting velocity to a machine, Drais also accelerated the act of walking or running, while simultaneously reducing the energy consumption required. To prove his point, he rode from Mannheim, where he lived, to the Schwetzinger Relaishaus and back in an hour, along Baden’s best road. The same journey took three hours on foot.
    With hindsight, we know that the Draisine was the earliest ancestor of the bicycle. At the time, it did not make a significant impression. The machine was expensive, cumbersome and weighed some 100 lb. The poet John Keats scornfully called it ‘the nothing of the day’. It was ahead of its time. Roads, especially in winter, were generally too awful to ride on. By 1820 the machines had been banned from pavements in Milan, London, New York, Philadelphia and Calcutta. In Europe, when the harvests recovered, the Draisine fell into obscurity and the dream of a mechanical horse was abandoned for forty years. Ironically, the Draisine is now having a popular renaissance — in the form of a toy bike thought to be
the
ideal way to help children learn balance. It’s a fine example of things going full circle.
    Today, we take the ability to ride a bicycle for granted. This is partly because we think it’s easy — once learnt, never forgotten — and partly because the vast majority of us learn when we are children. It was not always so. Throughout the history of the bicycle, adults attended ‘riding schools’ to learn how to maintain the machine in equilibrium, just as we take driving lessonstoday. Denis Johnson, an enterprising London coach-maker who custom-made Draisines, opened the first riding school in Soho, in 1819. He charged a shilling a lesson, catering for the upper-class Regency dandies, among whom the machine was fashionable for a summer, hence its nickname, the ‘dandy-horse’.

    The next great evolutionary leap for the bicycle happened in Paris during the 1860s: rotary cranks and pedals were attached to the front wheel of the Draisine and the ‘velocipede’ was born. In 1868—70 it sparked a fashionable craze — ‘velocipede mania’ — on both sides of the Atlantic. The addition of pedals meant the rider’s feet were off the ground all the time. Since the pedals were attached to the front wheel, the handlebar had to be braced against the side-to-side effect of pedalling and, when turning, the steering was encumbered by the pressure of pedalling, due to the misalignment between the leg and the plane the pedal rotates in. In consequence, everyone went to ‘school’ to learn how to ride. The first Parisian velocipede manufacturer, Michaux et Compagnie, opened an indoor training school in 1868, beside their new factory. Free lessons were given to people who bought velocipedes; the rest hired instructors by the hour. After half a dozen lessons, riders were sent out to brave the streets.
    When a velocipede from Paris was demonstrated at a gymnasium in London in 1869, people were amazed. The magazine
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