Invention
The earliest forebears of the bicycle were velocipedes, and included many human-powered vehicles. One, the scooter-like dandy horse or celerifere of the French Comte de Sivrac, dating to 1790, was long cited as the earliest bicycle. Most historians now believe these unsteerable hobby-horses probably never existed, but were made up by Louis Baudry de Saunier, a 19th-century French bicycle historian.
The most likely originator of the bicycle was the German Baron Karl von Drais, who rode his 1816 machine while collecting taxes from his tenants. He patented his draisine, a pushbike powered by the action of the rider's feet pushing against the ground.
Read more about this topic: French Bicycle Industry
Famous quotes containing the word invention:
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills with his own voice and humour, and the whole cyclopedia of his table-talk is presently believed to be his own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
““Art” is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers.... What we call art is a game.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)