The very first motor cars – such as Henry Ford’s Quadricycle – didn’t just use bicycle wheels and bicycle chains they also used bicycle lamps and other brass accessories, including bicycle horns. A typical bicycle horn had a rubber bulb […]
Continue ReadingGoing down Hill on a Bicycle: A Boy’s Song By Henry Charles Beeching With lifted feet, hands still, I am poised, and down the hill Dart, with heedful mind The air goes by in a wind. Swifter and yet more […]
Continue ReadingEE is trying to sell folks its 4G service by using fast athletes on slow modes of transport. “You wouldn’t put Steve Redgrave on a pedalo” is one of the treatments, the other is this take on “penny-farthings” (purists prefer […]
Continue ReadingIn the late 1890s, Britain’s biggest tobacco company was the main sponsor of a chain of Cyclists’ Chalets. There were plans to build a chain of 500 such chalets, all part sponsored by W.D. & H.O. Wills. Only 40 are […]
Continue ReadingThe Twitter account @cyclehatred offers up a daily digest of spite and spittle aimed at the goodly, wonderful creatures who gad about on a benign form of unpowered transport. Such hatred is nothing new. The first two-wheeler users were also […]
Continue ReadingJudge Simon Tonking of Stafford Crown Court has today written to The Times urging for cyclists to be banned from riding on many A-roads. Sounds sensible, doesn’t it? What kind of crazy bicycle riders want to ride on quasi-motorways? (Er, […]
Continue ReadingThe War of the Worlds, the pretty Dibble sisters, Occam’s Razor, women’s liberation, and the London Olympics: all are linked by the “most famous cycling highway in the world.” On Saturday, July 29th, 2012, a fast-moving peloton of professional cyclists […]
Continue ReadingAristocrats who wished to take up a sport in the 1880s purchased how-to guides penned by peers. The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes was founded in 1885 by Henry Somerset, 8th Duke of Beaufort, owner of Badminton House, a […]
Continue ReadingToday is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. The great novelist was born on this day in 1812. On 9th June 1870, he died. Sadly, the old chap never got to ride a velocipede, which had arrived […]
Continue ReadingThis is a line-drawing of the world’s “first header”, a forward fall from a bicycle. It’s also a line-drawing of the probable creator of the world’s first pedal-operated bicycle. The rider is Frenchman Pierre Lallement. The location is Birmingham, close […]
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