“On 12 July 1817 Drais drove his Laufmaschine from Mannheim to Schwetzingen, round trip, covering a distance of 28 kilometers; and a few weeks later he managed to cover almost 80 kilometers: it was the dawn of a new era”. I quote We are technology, the beautiful book by Massimo Temporelli, to talk about the beginnings of the bicycle.
Karl Drais was a German baron who, says Temporelli, was looking for a way to replace the horse in an urban context (the train would take care of the rest). The two-wheeled vehicle he invented – and which took his name, “draisina” – did not yet have pedals, which is why the Baron called it “running machine”, in German Laufmaschine. The car was made entirely of wood and the driver was moving forward, facilitated, so to speak, by the wheels which were covered with an iron strip.
At most the draisine it could reach 15 kilometers per hour, which is why it didn’t need brakes, which were invented many years later, when a French mechanic added pedals for the first time, turning it into a bicycle or a velocipede, which would later become a bicycle around 1895.
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