Vehicles that have two wheels and require balancing by the rider date back to the early 19th century. The first means of transport making use of two wheels arranged consecutively, and thus the archetype of the bicycle, was the German draisine dating back to The term bicycle was coined in France in the s, and the descriptive title " penny farthing ", used to describe an " ordinary bicycle ", is a 19th-century term.
There are several early claims regarding the invention of the bicycle, but many remain unverified. A sketch from around AD is attributed to Gian Giacomo Caprotti , a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci , but it was described by Hans-Erhard Lessing in as a purposeful fraud, a description now generally accepted.
Drais invented his Laufmaschine German for "running machine" in , that was called Draisine English or draisienne French by the press. Karl von Drais patented this design in , which was the first commercially successful two-wheeled, steerable, human-propelled machine, commonly called a velocipede , and nicknamed hobby-horse or dandy horse. Hans-Erhard Lessing Drais's biographer found from circumstantial evidence that Drais's interest in finding an alternative to the horse was the starvation and death of horses caused by crop failure in , the Year Without a Summer following the volcanic eruption of Tambora in On his first reported ride from Mannheim on June 12, , he covered 13 km eight miles in less than an hour.
This design was welcomed by mechanically minded men daring to balance, and several thousand copies were built and used, primarily in Western Europe and in North America. Its popularity rapidly faded when, partly due to increasing numbers of accidents, some city authorities began to prohibit its use.
However, in Paris a Chinese visitor named Bin Chun could still observe foot-pushed velocipedes. The concept was picked up by a number of British cartwrights ; the most notable was Denis Johnson of London announcing in late that he would sell an improved model.
