I. The Machine That Set the World Moving
In the summer of 1885, a thirty-year-old inventor named John Kemp Starley wheeled a bicycle out of his workshop in Coventry and changed the world. He did not know he had done this. He thought he had simply solved an engineering problem.
The problem was the penny-farthing — that magnificent, terrifying contraption with its enormous front wheel and its seat positioned so high above the ground that a rider's fall was, in practical terms, a plunge. Starley's solution was almost insultingly elegant. Two wheels of equal size. A chain drive. A low centre of gravity. He called it the Rover Safety Bicycle, and within a decade, millions of people who had never considered riding a bicycle were riding one.
"The bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world."
— Susan B. Anthony, 1896
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"The bicycle is a curious vehicle. Its passenger is its engine."— John Howard
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