Velocipedia: some ancestors of the bicycle
It was 1868, and the pages of the monthly publication The English Mechanic were about to be deluged with correspondence from inventors keen to create a perfect personal transport machine. The rise of the middle classes, the spread of technical education and the increase in literacy created a large pool of would-be inventors who shared their ideas – good, bad and indifferent – in cheap specialized journals and through “mechanics’ institutes”. An 1869 issue of The English Mechanic, featuring a velocipede. Author's collection. Up until then, horses and horse-drawn vehicles had been the main form of…