The Brighton Road: The Classic Highway to the SouthHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Brighton Road: The Classic Highway to the South
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Brighton Road (London, England); England -- Description and travel; England -- Social life and customs
Thus, although the Hobby Horse was a favourite with the "bucks" of George
the Fourth's time, they exercised upon it in strictly limited doses, and
it was not until it had experienced a new birth and was born again as the
"velocipede" of the '60's, that to ride fifty miles upon an ancestor of
the present safety bicycle, and survive, was possible.[4]
[Sidenote: THE BONESHAKER]
The front-driving velocipede--the well-known "boneshaker"--was invented by
one Pierre Lallement, in Paris, in 1865-6, and exhibited at the Paris
Exhibition of 1867. It was to the modern pneumatic-tyred "safety" what the
roads of 1865 are to those of 1906. It also, like the Hobby Horse, had
iron-shod wooden wheels, but had cranks and pedals, and could be ridden
uphill. On such a machine the first cycle ride to Brighton was performed
in 1869. This pioneer's fame on the Brighton Road belongs to John Mayall,
junior, a well-known photographer of that period, who died in the summer
of 1891.
This marks the beginning of so important an epoch that the circumstances
attending it are worthy a detailed account. They were felt, so long ago as
1874, to be deserving of such a record, for in the first number of an
athletic magazine, _Ixion_, published in that year, "J. M., jun.," who, of
course, was none other than Mayall himself, began to tell the wondrous
tale. He set out to narrate it at such length that, as an editorial note
tells us, the concluding portion was reserved for the second number. But
_Ixion_ never reached a second number, and so Mayall's own account of his
historic ride was never completed.
He began, as all good chroniclers should, at the very beginning, telling
how, in the early part of 1869, he was at Spencer's Gymnasium in Old
Street, St. Luke's. There he saw a packing-case being followed by a Mr.
Turner, whom he had seen at the Paris Exhibition of 1868, and witnessed
the unpacking of it. From it came a something new and strange, "a piece of
apparatus consisting mainly of two wheels, similar to one I had seen, not
long before, in Paris." It was the first velocipede to reach England.
It is a curious point that, although Mayall rode a "velocipede," and
although these machines were generally so-called for a year or two after
their introduction, the word "bicycle" is claimed to have been first used
in the _Times_ in the early part of 1868; and certainly we find in the
_Daily News_ of September 7th in that year an allusion, in grotesque
spelling, to "bysicles and trisicles which we saw at the Champs Elysées
and the Bois de Boulogne this summer."
But to return to the "velocipede" which had found its way to England at
the beginning of 1869.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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