The draisine and the velocipede: how the bicycle began.

Why there is no single inventor

The answer depends on what counts. If a bicycle is any two-wheeled machine a person sits on and steers, Britannica, seen only as a search summary, calls Karl Drais's machine of 1817 the first such rider-propelled machine for which there is firm evidence. If it needs pedals, the sources point to Paris in the 1860s but disagree about who and when, and a Scottish claim for an earlier machine is still argued over. Much of the research is recent: the University of Missouri Libraries notes that the International Cycling History Conference began only in 1990.

Karl Drais and the running machine (1817)

The City of Mannheim and the Technoseum published a flyer for their Drais-Route that gives the fullest account in our research. It says Drais was born in Karlsruhe on 29 April 1785, worked first as a forestry official for Baden, and was later released from active duty, still on pay, to work as an inventor. The city says nearly all his main inventions were made in Mannheim. Besides the running machine, the flyer lists a device that recorded piano music on paper tape, an early typewriter with a keyboard and a stenography machine.

Drais called his machine the Laufmaschine, the "running machine". The rider sat between two wheels and pushed along the ground with the feet. The front wheel could be steered, and that, the flyer explains, is what let a rider keep balance with both feet off the ground. Britannica, seen only as a search summary, calls Drais's machine the draisienne. Copies built in England, some partly of iron, were nicknamed the "hobby horse".

The first ride, 12 June 1817

According to the flyer, Drais made his first ride on Thursday 12 June 1817. He set off from his home near Mannheim Palace along what it calls the best road in Baden towards Schwetzingen, turned at the Schwetzingen relay post-house, in what is now the Rheinau district, and rode back. The round trip took a little under an hour. The German text of the flyer puts the wooden machine's weight at about 22 kg and the average speed at about 15 km/h.

How far he rode is not agreed:

• The German text of the Mannheim flyer describes a route of about 7 km including the return.
• The English summary on the same flyer says he turned after a little under 5 miles, which it calls half the distance.
• Britannica, which we could see only as a search summary, says he rode 14 km. This is unconfirmed.
• VeloNews, in a 2017 article also seen only as a search summary, gives a round trip of about 13 km in under an hour. Also unconfirmed.

What the sources share is a round trip of several kilometres in under an hour.

Why a running machine?

Mannheim and the Technoseum connect the invention to the crop failures of 1816, which followed the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815: horses were slaughtered for lack of feed, and the running machine offered another way to travel. A search summary of the 2017 VeloNews piece calls this a theorised motive rather than one Drais is recorded as giving; we could not read the article to confirm it.

Bans, copies and the end of the craze

Riders soon took to the smoother pavements and went too fast for people on foot. The flyer records that Mannheim banned the machine from its pavements as early as December 1817. A hire business opened in the palace garden in 1820, and riding there was banned in 1822. The flyer says authorities in Germany, Great Britain, the United States and even Calcutta banned velocipedes, and that the craze ended for decades. It also says races were held in Ipswich in 1819; that is the only source for those races in our research, so we treat them as unconfirmed.

Search summaries of Britannica add two points we could not check on the page itself: that Drais showed his machine in Paris in 1818, and that the London coachmaker Denis Johnson bought one and in 1818 patented an improved version he called the "pedestrian curricle".

Drais, the flyer says, was a committed democrat who supported the revolutions of 1848 and gave up his noble title in 1849. He died in poor circumstances in Karlsruhe on 10 December 1851. His running machine is the direct ancestor of the children's balance bike, which the flyer says was rediscovered at the start of the 21st century.

The Macmillan claim (Scotland, about 1839)

Popular histories often name Kirkpatrick Macmillan, a blacksmith from Dumfriesshire, as the builder of the first pedal-driven bicycle, a machine with levers driving the rear wheel, in about 1839. The historian Nicholas Oddy of the Glasgow School of Art notes that the National Museum of Scotland has presented him this way. It is a contested claim, not an established first.

• The evidence for it. Wikipedia, which we saw only as a search summary, says the case rests on articles from the 1890s by a relative, James Johnston, and that no original Macmillan machine survives.
• The sceptics' case. The same Wikipedia summary reports critics who argue that the design Johnston presented was a composite of two 1869 velocipedes by Thomas McCall, and that an 1842 Glasgow newspaper report of a rider from Dumfriesshire does not say the vehicle had two wheels. Unconfirmed, as it comes from a summary only.
• Oddy's view. In "MacMillan Revisited", published in Cycle History 33, the proceedings of the 32nd International Cycling History Conference (2024), Oddy argues that the claim is fundamentally mistaken because the bicycle developed after 1860. He first made the argument at the first conference in 1990, and he calls Andrew Ritchie's later survey of the evidence on Macmillan, Gavin Dalzell and Thomas McCall one-sided in Macmillan's favour.

The pedal velocipede of the 1860s

The next step, putting cranks and pedals on the front wheel, produced the machine nicknamed the "boneshaker". The University of Missouri Libraries says it appears to have come from Paris around 1863. Who did it is one of the oldest arguments in cycling history.

The case for the Michaux family

The French account credits Pierre Michaux; Wikipedia, seen only as a search summary, names his son Ernest alongside him. John Lienhard's "Engines of Our Ingenuity" programme from the University of Houston (episode 1083) says the French version has Michaux taking the idea from a crank-driven grinding wheel in 1861.

The case for Pierre Lallement

Lienhard says Pierre Lallement began thinking about bicycles in 1862, aged 19, while working for a maker of baby carriages, then took his design to the United States and received the first US patent for a pedal bicycle. The University of Missouri Libraries confirms that the US Patent Office granted him that patent in November 1866. The exact date often given, 20 November 1866, and the patent number 59,915 come from Wikipedia and were not checked against the patent office, so they are unconfirmed.

What later research found

Lienhard reports that records show no Michaux pedal-bike production before 1867, against French claims of hundreds built in 1865, and that a ship's manifest shows Lallement reached America in 1865, not 1866. He also reports that the historian David Herlihy identified two brothers named Olivier, engineering students, who probably brought in the elder Michaux to run their bicycle business and probably worked with Lallement before he left. Even the encyclopedias changed their minds: Lienhard notes that the 1911 Britannica hinted that Lallement and Ernest Michaux worked together, while the 1970 edition said Lallement left Michaux's employment in 1866. Lienhard concludes that the invention was a shared one and that Lallement was certainly part of it. Lallement died in Boston in 1891. The University of Missouri Libraries said in April 2023 that it is still unclear who made the breakthrough and who founded the original Michaux company.

Which year?

The high wheeler that grew out of the velocipede, and the safety bicycle that replaced it, are on the safety bicycle and the pneumatic tyre. The first races on velocipedes are on the first races, and every date here is also in the timeline.