We spent three months last year debating whether to carry a particular gravel bike for our 2025 range. The model was beautiful, the price was right, the spec was generous. We dropped it because of one detail: the rear dropouts were a non-standard spacing that would have made wheel replacements a nightmare in five years. A decision made in 1900 about how wide a rear hub should be was, in 2024, the thing that killed a sourcing call.
This is the strange beauty of the bicycle. It's 200 years old, and the choices made in its earliest decades still shape every bike we stock. So when somebody asks me — usually a child, sometimes a curious adult — "who invented the bicycle?", I take the question seriously. The answer isn't one person. It's a 60-year chain of inventors fixing three problems: how to balance, how to power, and how to stop.
1817 — The hobby-horse: balance, no power
The story usually starts with Karl von Drais in Mannheim, Germany, who in 1817 built what he called a Laufmaschine — "running machine." Two wheels in line, a wooden frame, a saddle, and steering. No pedals. The rider sat astride and walked or scooted with their feet on the ground.
Drais was solving a transport crisis. The previous year, 1816, had been the "year without summer" — Mount Tambora's eruption in 1815 collapsed European harvests, horses starved, and the resulting transport gap nudged inventors toward human-powered alternatives. The Laufmaschine could move a person at twice walking pace on a smooth road. It was clumsy, heavy, and almost impossible to ride on the cobbled streets of the time — but it cracked the first problem: two wheels can balance if you keep them moving.
Modern note: every balance bike sold for toddlers today is essentially Drais's invention with smaller wheels and a foam saddle. The 2-year-old learning on one is solving the same problem he solved.
1860s — Pedals (finally): the velocipede
For nearly fifty years, the running-machine sat at "interesting curiosity." The breakthrough came in 1860s France, when Pierre Michaux (or his employee Pierre Lallement, depending on which historian you trust) mounted pedals directly on the front wheel. Push the pedals down, the wheel turns. The bicycle could now be powered.
The velocipede had problems. The pedals on the front wheel meant turning the bars also moved the pedals — clumsy. The all-iron construction earned it the nickname "boneshaker." Riders rattled their teeth out on Parisian cobbles. But it sold. By 1869 there were velocipede races, velocipede schools, velocipede manufacturing. The bicycle had become a thing.
1870s — The penny-farthing: speed at the cost of safety
To go faster, the obvious answer was to make the pedal-driven wheel bigger — each pedal turn covered more ground. By the 1870s the front wheel had grown to enormous diameters (sometimes 1.5 metres), the rear had shrunk to a balance trailer, and the rider perched far off the ground.
This is the penny-farthing, sometimes called the "ordinary" bicycle. It was fast (an athletic rider could hit 25 km/h on a flat) and dignified-looking in photographs. It was also lethal. Falling over the front while braking — "taking a header" — was a regular cause of broken collarbones and worse. The penny-farthing ruled the 1870s, but its design wasn't sustainable.
1885 — The Rover safety bicycle: the modern shape arrives
The single biggest leap came from John Kemp Starley's "Rover" of 1885. It introduced what every modern bicycle still uses:
- Two wheels of equal (smaller) diameter — no more penny-farthing falls.
- A diamond-shaped steel frame — the basic geometry of every bike since.
- A chain drive from pedals to rear wheel — meaning the pedals could spin faster than the wheel, and the gear ratio could be tuned.
- A rear-wheel drive — the front wheel went back to being just for steering.
The Rover wasn't the fastest bike of its era — penny-farthings still won short races. But it was vastly safer, and within five years it had killed the penny-farthing entirely. Almost every bicycle from 1890 onward is a variation of the Rover.
1888 — Pneumatic tyres: the comfort problem solved
The same decade brought John Boyd Dunlop's pneumatic tyre — air-filled rubber instead of solid wood or iron. Originally invented to make his son's tricycle smoother, Dunlop's tyre quickly proved faster on every surface, not just smoother. By 1895, pneumatic tyres were universal.
The combined effect of the Rover frame and pneumatic tyres was extraordinary. Between 1890 and 1900, cycling exploded as a popular activity in Europe and America. The bicycle's golden age — clubs, manufacturers, racing, women's emancipation associated with the bike's mobility — happened in this brief window.
1900–1920 — The hub gear, the freewheel, the coaster brake
The first two decades of the 20th century gave us the rest of the mechanical vocabulary:
- Freewheel — the rear wheel could spin without forcing the pedals to spin with it. (Modern coasting.)
- Hub gears — multiple gear ratios inside the rear hub. The 3-speed Sturmey-Archer (1902) is still in production.
- Coaster brake — back-pedal to brake. Still the primary brake on most kids' bikes today.
By 1920, a bicycle had everything a modern bicycle has, minus 100 years of refinement. The shape, the drivetrain, the brakes, the tyres, the basic geometry — all of it is recognisable.
1930s–1980s — Refinement, not revolution
The next 50 years gave us derailleur gears (multiple sprockets on the rear), the lightweight steel frame (chromoly, Reynolds tubing), and the racing bicycle as a distinct category from the touring bicycle. Mass production made bikes affordable across the world. Coloured Hi-Vis paint replaced the universal black of pre-war frames.
The big design questions had been answered. The work was refinement: lighter frames, smoother gears, smaller chains, better bearings.
1980s — Mountain biking: the bicycle goes off-road
In the late 1970s, a small group in Marin County, California, started modifying old paperboy bikes for off-road descents on Mount Tamalpais. By 1981, Specialized had launched the Stumpjumper — the first mass-produced mountain bike. The category exploded through the 1980s and 1990s.
The mountain bike's design innovations — wider tyres, suspension, powerful brakes, lower gearing, upright geometry — eventually fed back into every other category. The modern hybrid is basically a road bike that learned from the mountain bike. The modern gravel bike is the marriage of the two.
What this means on our store floor
Two things, mostly:
- The fundamentals haven't changed. A safety bicycle from 1890 and a hardtail mountain bike from 2025 share their geometry, their chain drive, their pneumatic tyres, and their wheel size logic. When we evaluate a new bike, we're asking whether it's gotten the 140-year-old fundamentals right — not whether it's reinvented the wheel.
- Standards are sticky and that's a feature. The rear dropout spacing that killed our gravel bike sourcing? That standard goes back to a 1980s racing-bike spec, which goes back to a 1930s touring spec, which goes back to the original Rover. A bicycle is one of very few products you can buy today and expect to service in 30 years using off-the-shelf parts — but only because manufacturers respect the standards. When they don't, the bike becomes a museum piece five years in.
Why we tell this story
People sometimes ask why the bicycle has barely changed in 100 years while every other technology has been reinvented. The honest answer is: it hasn't barely changed. It was very nearly perfected by 1900, and the last 125 years have been incremental refinement — but the inventions of that brief 1817–1900 window are what we still ride. Knowing that helps with sourcing, with repair, with explaining to customers why their grandfather's bike feels familiar, and with knowing which "innovations" are real and which are marketing.
If you've made it this far and want to nerd out further, ask us on WhatsApp for a tour video of one of the bikes in the warehouse — I'll trace which century each part comes from. Or stop by in person if you're nearby; we'll happily do the same tour live, and the warehouse always has a few interesting machines on the stands. It's a fun ten minutes, and you'll never look at a bicycle the same way again.
— Fatema, product
