Starting Without a Helper

Frances Willard could pedal, turn a corner and get off her bicycle. Getting on and starting without someone to steady her was another matter. In the account she published in 1895, the American temperance campaigner described a succession of instructors, some too helpful to let her learn and others frightened that she would fall. Her instruction to the people holding the machine was a difficult compromise: “Let go, but stand by.”

The bicycle was called Gladys, a gift from her friend Lady Henry Somerset. It had pneumatic tyres and guards around its gearing to keep Willard's skirts clear. At first, she recalled, three young men helped her along. Later two women steadied her, then one helper was enough. The remaining distance was between travelling under her own power and being able to set out by herself.

Willard had spent years writing, speaking and organising against alcohol. After her mother's death, she resolved in her fifty-third year to recover some of the outdoor exercise of her childhood. Her friends worried about broken bones. The machine she chose belonged to a class whose very name offered reassurance: the safety bicycle.

Its familiar outline was still recent. During the preceding decade, manufacturers had tried different ways of bringing riders down from the great front wheel of the high bicycle. Lower wheels, a chain, a sloping steering head and inflated tyres arrived through separate decisions. Gladys combined conveniences that the much-advertised Rover of 1885 had not possessed all at once.

The wheel was the gearing

The high bicycle, known to its riders as the ordinary, was a straightforward machine. Its pedals were fixed to cranks at the front hub. One turn of the pedals made one turn of that wheel. A larger wheel travelled farther with each turn, so a rider whose legs could reach the pedals could gain speed without an intervening chain or gear train.

That explains the enormous front wheel and the small trailing one. Height was doing useful work. The large wheel also crossed small irregularities more gently than a smaller solid wheel, while the curved backbone carried the saddle above and just behind the front hub. The difficulty came when the wheel met something that stopped it sharply. With the rider's weight so far forward, the machine could pitch them over the handlebar in a “header”.

A chain allowed a small wheel to do the travelling of a larger one.

Put the pedals on their own axle and connect a large toothed wheel there to a smaller one at the rear hub. Each pedal revolution can now turn the road wheel more than once. The builder can choose the relationship between the two toothed wheels instead of enlarging the road wheel to obtain the desired distance per turn. The saddle and pedals no longer have to gather around the centre of a giant front wheel.

The change did not immediately settle which wheel should be driven. The Kangaroo of 1884 used chains to gear up a smaller front wheel. It lowered the rider while retaining front-wheel drive, with separate chain mechanisms on either side. Other designs used levers. “Safety” described an ambition shared by competing machines before it described one settled shape.

Two Rovers in one year

In Coventry, John Kemp Starley and William Sutton offered their Rover safety in 1885. A single chain took power from the pedal axle to the rear wheel. The front wheel steered. With the rider lower and farther behind the front axle, an obstruction at the front had much less leverage to overturn the whole combination.

Their early steering arrangement was less familiar. The handlebar stood on a separate pillar behind the front wheel's steering head, linked to the fork by rods. In the later arrangement the fork sloped backwards towards the rider, and the handlebar turned it directly. The two versions appear in advertisements labelled May and November 1885: the first has the upright head and connecting mechanism; the second has lost that extra linkage.

The promises went beyond avoiding a fall. The May advertisement called the machine a better hill-climber than any bicycle or tricycle yet made, at a price of £22 with ball bearings, a leather toolbag and tools. In November, speed occupied the largest type: fifty miles in three hours and five minutes, a hundred miles in seven hours, five minutes and sixteen seconds. These were makers selling a new layout to people who already knew that an ordinary could travel fast.

A closer look · 1:38 · English

Mounting the old bicycles

Play film

The surviving 1885 Rover is still some way from a modern diamond frame. Curving tubes connect its steering head, saddle and pedal axle, and it runs on solid rubber. Looking back in his 1896 engineering book, Archibald Sharp described years of competing cross-frames, open frames and curved tubes before the straighter Humber arrangement became widespread.

Extra space between the pedal axle and rear wheel helped.

It allowed a straight tube to descend from the saddle towards the cranks, while a longer wheelbase improved the steering. The frame had to carry the rider at the saddle and pedals, keep the two wheels aligned and hold the crank axle steady under the pull of the chain. Braced tubes could carry much of those loads by pulling and pushing along their length. Rigid joints also mattered: as Sharp explained, the familiar diamond frame still depended on its members resisting bending.

Something softer than solid rubber

Bringing the rider down introduced another problem. Smaller wheels with solid tyres transmitted the shocks of a rough road. One answer was to put springs into the bicycle itself. The Whippet, made in London by Linley & Biggs, had a spring frame patented in 1885. The rider could be suspended from the jolting wheels, though at the cost of more mechanism.

Air offered a different place for the yielding part. In Belfast, the veterinary surgeon John Boyd Dunlop developed pneumatic tyres in 1888 after working on his son's tricycle. Rubber tubing, canvas and a wooden rim made a wheel that could give under a load. Racing helped sell the result: William Hume won on Dunlop tyres in 1889. Dunlop had reinvented an idea Robert William Thomson had already patented for carriage wheels in the 1840s.

The advantage was more than a softer seat. A hard wheel striking a small stone must lift the machine and rider; the impact consumes energy as well as shaking the person above it. An inflated tyre can deform around the obstruction, reducing that abrupt movement. Sharp's treatment of rough surfaces made the point through the wheel's passage over a stone: the nearer the tyre came to adapting immediately to the road, the less energy was lost in the encounter.

By the time Willard was learning, her pneumatic safety put a chain drive, a low riding position and an accommodating tyre beneath the same rider. It had also made room for her clothes. She could sit on a low frame rather than climb over the high top tube of a man's roadster, while the protected gearing kept the moving transmission away from her skirt. Her eventual riding outfit included a tweed skirt and blouse, walking shoes and gaiters, with the skirt three inches clear of the ground.

Starting alone

The bicycle still required a skill no manufacturer could supply with it. Willard's last instructor stayed behind the bicycle, out of the pupil's view, holding the saddle and gradually reducing her help. Earlier teachers had held on too long or passed their own nervousness to the pupil. This one let Willard discover how much she could already do.

She practised mounting and dismounting repeatedly. In her final reckoning, the lessons had occupied about three months, averaging fifteen minutes a day. Her confidence could be undone by a rut, a horse or a dog; the low bicycle had made a fall less formidable, not impossible. Once, after deciding she could dismount confidently, she rode away from her helper to demonstrate. Her left foot failed her, a knee landed on a pebble and the bicycle came down on top of her.

January 20 was the day she singled out. She had already started several times without anyone holding the machine, but a friend had always stood by for moral support. This time she mounted and rode off alone.