History

Heeding my...err...bike's advice I started to snoop around, do a little research, and found the following...

Early automobile history is fraught with controversy, patent disputes, and in-fighting...so wading into that soal too deep could be all-consuming, deadly and thick black bottom mud holding you fast, and still yield no actual truths.

I mean, knowing how subjective any history is, the quest for a past reality becomes more of a personal soul-search than a hunt for absolute facts. We believe what we want to believe, see what we want to see. It takes a very strong person to search for something, find that something counter to their established beliefs, and not dismiss it outright... cognitive dissonance hard at work. This being said, it's pretty obvious then that the brief history put forth in the pages that follow is knowingly arguable depending where in the argument you yourself stand...but, either way, it does make one step back and begin to frame a bigger picture of what I believe my bike wanted us to see.

Anyway...

Shortly after the word “bicycle” was being tossed around for the first time in the 1860’s, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing and Germany’s Gottlieb Daimler was dreaming of something bigger than mere pedals and leg power. His golden dreams eventually took a physical form with cylinders of cast iron and steel directing the work of oxygen, petroleum, and spark toward a final drive, together shaping the basic structure of the modern gas engine. Engines and motors of all shapes and fuels were popping up well before this, most notably the steam-driven and electric varieties, but in 1885 Herr Daimler was the first to patent the gas-driven design that set the precedent for today’s powerful, internal combustion engines. He was also one of the first (arguable of course) to slap an engine on a wooden framed bicycle, creating a motorcycle that same year.

In 1886, Daimler’s countryman Karl Benz got the first patent for the gas fueled car and these two, Daimler and Benz, eventually started making the precision machines of the now-legendary Mercedes-Benz.

What was known as the “safety bicycle” was patented in 1885 in England by a chap named John Kemp Starley. This was not the first “bike” in the world but became the template for modern bicycle design. Indeed if you were to put the very first safety bicycle next to the latest two-wheeled offering from any big-box superstore, they'd look strikingly similar.

The safety bicycle was preceded, most notably, by a couple of non-chain, mechanically driven machines in 1839 and 1863 and then, most famously, the evidently not-so-safe, high-wheeling, directly-driven penny-farthing in 1871, so called because it resembled those two disparate-sized coins laid side-by-side. These machines had front wheels better than 50 inches in diameter and mounting pegs above the rear wheels just to get up on the saddles. A modern "10-speed" road bike by comparison has wheels about half that size. Lord knows that isn’t safe, but, lots of folks rode them none-the-less.

Prior to those mechanically driven designs, the bike really had no propulsion system, some very early on even lacked a simple steering system, sporting just two wheels on either side of a seat that you pushed around scooter-style with your feet, like Fred and Wilma. The chain and sprockets of the safety bicycle made all of these other designs old-fashioned and eventually obsolete. Now with pedal power, chain driven torque, and a gear ratio, bicycles became utilitarian, a safe and efficient means of travel across Europe and the USA.

So, the gist of this historical babble, there was really only a year between the English invention of the safety bicycle and the German Karl Benz’s patent, and no difference between that and the 1885 Gottlieb Daimler invention of the modern gas engine.

You see, modern bikes and cars were born of the same Victorian era inventiveness from a marriage of pure necessity to move faster about the landscape and the organic human ambition to build, to invent, that which is only dreamt of or imagined; to bring into the real that which only exists in the mind. Bikes and cars? Heck, these were fraternal twins destined to change the world as we knew it.