It was the late J. K. Starley’s “Rover” of 1885 that opened the way for cycling’s modern development. It was a design rightly claimed to have “set the fashion to the world,” and the difference between it and patterns of the current season is only in detail. Already, before Starley, attempts had been made to produce a “safety,” as shown by Lawson’s patent of 1876 and his “bicyclette” of 1880, together with the designs by Shergold and Bate in 1876 and later, in which 26- to 30-inch wheels, provided with gear, were to do the work of the 56- and 58-inch ungeared wheel. But none of these designs attained any commercial success. The “Rover” brought many thousands more into the ranks of cyclists, and gave an added prosperity to Coventry, but what has been called the “great boom” was yet to come. A contributory cause of that event, although antedating it by some six years, was the introduction of the pneumatic tyre. So long ago as 1815 a pneumatic rubber tyre for carriages had been invented by Thompson, and forgotten, and it was not until 1888 that Mr. J. R. Dunlop designed the first pattern of the tyre bearing his name. Like many another epoch-making invention, its importance was originally not so much as guessed at, and it was only as a home-made device for securing the easy running of his children’s cycles that it first came into being. It began to be manufactured in 1889, and certainly since 1891 pneumatic tyres for cycles have been universal. They practically first rendered it possible for ladies to adopt the pastime, and first made cycling luxurious, rather than necessarily an athletic exercise. The result was the “boom” that began in the early summer of 1895. Suddenly, from being looked down upon by all who pretended to any culture or social consideration, cycling became fashionable. Cyclists, who had cycled ever since the days when Edmund Yates in the _World_, speaking for Society, had bitterly called them “cads on castors,” smiled sardonically when they saw all Mayfair and St. James’s cycling in Hyde or Battersea Parks, and submitted to be knocked down by wobbling novices—Earls and Countesses—upon the road with an ill grace. It is a mad world, and time brings strange revenges in it. No one, least of all the cycle manufacturers of Coventry, had any prevision of the great “boom.” In former years business had eased off with the coming of summer. “Previously to 1895,” said a representative of the trade, “business was sound, and all the best houses did well, but were more or less subject to a very dull period, lasting from the beginning of August until the end of November. This period began slowly, and, reaching its dullest point about the end of October, caused much distress among the more improvident workers. There was no slack time in 1895, _and you know what ’96 was_.”