Few inventions look as simple as the bicycle, yet it took most of the…

Few inventions look as simple as the bicycle, yet it took most of the nineteenth century to arrive at the design we know today.

The story usually begins in 1817 in the German city of Mannheim, where an official called Karl Drais showed off a wooden "running machine". It had two wheels in a line and a seat, but no pedals: riders pushed themselves along with their feet, rather like a child on a balance bike. The machine was briefly fashionable, but it was heavy, uncomfortable and difficult to steer, and its popularity soon faded.

The next major step came in the 1860s in France, when pedals were attached directly to the front wheel. These machines were nicknamed "boneshakers", and with good reason: their iron tyres and wooden frames made every stone in the road painfully obvious. Because the pedals turned the front wheel directly, the only way to go faster was to make that wheel bigger. This led, in the 1870s, to the penny-farthing, with a front wheel that could be up to a metre and a half across and a tiny wheel at the back. It was fast and elegant, but riders sat so high that a sudden stop could throw them head first over the handlebars.

The breakthrough was the so-called "safety bicycle". In 1885 the English inventor John Kemp Starley produced a model with two wheels of similar size and a chain that carried power from the pedals to the back wheel. Riders could now go fast without sitting dangerously high. A few years later, in 1888, John Boyd Dunlop developed a practical air-filled tyre, originally to make his young son's tricycle more comfortable. Together, the chain and the air-filled tyre created a machine that was safe, comfortable and efficient.

The effects were enormous. Bicycles became affordable for working people, allowing them to travel to jobs further from home and to visit the countryside at weekends. For women in particular, the bicycle offered a new kind of independence. It encouraged changes in fashion, as long skirts gave way to more practical clothing, and it allowed women to travel without needing a companion.

More than a century later, the basic design has changed surprisingly little. Frames are now made of lighter materials and many bicycles have electric motors, but someone who rode a safety bicycle in the 1890s would have no difficulty recognising one today.