Look at that Tricycle!

New York Times had an awesome article on how the tricycle was originated. Look below to read the awesome article by Daniel Engber.

In March 1877, James Starley, a sewing-machine maker in Coventry, England, unveiled a strange offshoot of the tricycle. It had one large wheel on the left and two much smaller ones on the right. The rider sat between the wheels, driving with a pair of levers and steering on a crank. A few years later, Starley’s new designs had grown so popular that the queen bought two for herself.

Whereas the history of two-wheeled vehicles starts in 1817, when a German named Karl Drais devised a “running machine” that worked like a Flintstones car, inventors had long been much more forward-thinking when it came to trikes. A watchmaker, Stephan Farfler, built a three-wheeled, hand-powered vehicle in the 17th century, and lever-driven, three-wheeled “pilentums” or “accelerators” were around by 1820. “There were half a dozen kinds of tricycles in Germany and France and England,” says Glen Norcliffe, a geographer and tricycle historian at York University, “but they never really took off. They were prototypes.”

By the 1860s, biking was a mainstream pastime. Huge front wheels made for fast machines, with riders perched unsteadily on top. As the hobby grew more popular, some sought a safer ride — for women and older men. “At first, Starley tried to do this with a sort of sidesaddle penny-farthing, a crablike machine that never worked,” Norcliffe says. “Eventually he decided that he needed another wheel to balance it.” So he produced something more like the old pilentums. Soon Starley had a three-wheeled vehicle that worked with pedals and a chain and rack-and-pinion steering. The boom that he created quickly ended, though. By the turn of the century, both men and women were riding safety bikes, with wheels of equal size and better tires. And the market for bigger, more expensive machines shifted from the trike to the automobile.

The tricycle ended up a child’s toy. It reached its apogee when Louis Marx & Company made the Big Wheel out of molded plastic in 1969. Kids could now sit just off the ground and skid their way around tight corners. In 1974, The Times called the Big Wheel “a fast-moving, three-wheel plastic riding toy that is the tricycle of the throwaway generation.”

Talk about creative! Let us know what you think, leave comments below!