Earliest Unverifiable History
There are several early but unverifiable claims for the invention of bicycle-like machines. The earliest comes from a sketch said to be from 1493 and attributed to Gian Giacomo Caprotti, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci. In 1998 Hans-Erhard Lessing said that this last assertion is a purposeful fraud. However, the authenticity of the bicycle sketch is still vigorously maintained by followers of Prof. Augusto Marinoni, a lexicographer and philologist, who was entrusted by the Commissione Vinciana of Rome with the transcription of da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus.
Later, and equally unverifiable, is the contention that Comte de Sivrac developed a célérifère in 1791, demonstrating it at the Palais-Royal in France. The célérifère supposedly had two wheels set on a rigid wooden frame and no steering, directional control being limited to that attainable by leaning. A rider was said to have sat astride the machine and pushed it along using alternate feet. We now know a two-wheeled célérifère never existed (though there were four-wheelers) and it was a misinterpretation by the well known French journalist Louis Baudry de Saunier in 1891.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Bicycle
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