Romance did not leave Coventry with the passing of mediÆval days. It merely changed its aspect; doffed the “armour bright” the romancists love to tell of, and went clad instead in russet; put away helm and pike and broadsword, and sat the livelong day at the loom; changed indeed the Romance of Warfare for that of Industry, so that it was possible for old travellers to remark “the noise of the looms assails the passengers’ ears in every direction.” Coming in later years upon its discarded old warlike panoply of steel, Coventry has fashioned it anew, in the form of bicycles, for the needs of a peaceful age.

Tennyson, in Godiva, writing—

seems to foreshadow the bicycle, but the early period at which that poem was produced forbids any such allusion. We must needs, therefore, look upon those lines as prophetic, especially since, regarded in any other way, the phrase “the flying of a wheel” appears meaningless. But, even in the light of a prophetic inspiration, is not the cut at the “new men” who “cry down the past” an ill description of the typical cyclist, who uses his flying wheel as a means of communing with Nature and antiquity?

Coventry became earnestly industrial when jousts ceased; and its industries, in their rise and fall, have had their own romance. There were, of course, Coventry makers of woollens; pinners and needlers; girdlers, loriners, and many other tradespeople in the days of chivalry; but it was only in modern times that the industries of silk-weaving and dyeing, ribbon-making and watch-making arose, to give a fugitive prosperity to the place before the cycle industry came to confer upon it a greater boon. Those trades have gone elsewhere; but ask even the most ignorant for what Coventry is famous nowadays, and you get for answer “cycle manufacturing.” Yet before 1869 that industry was unborn, and the trade of Coventry at the lowest ebb. Silk-weaving and ribbon-making had then been dealt a deadly blow by the removal of the duty from foreign goods of that nature, and French ribbons and silks of new designs, and at low prices, poured in. Coventry weavers and dyers were ruined. At the same time, cheap Swiss watches had cut out the local watch-making trade, so that work grew scarce and starvation presently began to stalk the streets. That was a dark hour in Coventry’s modern chapter of romance, an hour brightened by the efforts of one man in particular—James Marriott—to establish a new industry. Those were the first days of a new invention—the sewing machine—and Marriott thought he saw means of setting afoot a great manufacture of that labour-saving device. He contributed £500 to the formation of a business, and was joined by others, and together they established the Coventry Sewing Machine Company, an enterprise that failed to realise the hopes centred in it. But in that failure, unknown to those gallant pioneers, lay the seed of success. Their plant was lying idle, and might have been dispersed but for a happy providence: the appearance in France of the velocipede.

The velocipede was by no means the first attempt of the kind to aid locomotion on highways. Indeed, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson there may be found a reference, under date of 1769, to a “new-invented machine” that went without horses. A man sat in it and turned a handle, which worked a spring, which drove the machine forward. The criticism Johnson levelled against this device was one that will probably appeal powerfully to all cyclists who have stored up in their memories horrid experiences of hill-climbing and head-winds. “What is gained,” said the learned Doctor, “is the man has the choice whether he will move himself alone, or himself and the machine too.” Nothing came of that invention, and it was not until 1810 that the “Hobby Horse,” as it afterwards became known, was devised in Paris by a M. Niepce. He named it a “Celeripede.” This machine, improved by a Baron von Drais, of Mannheim, does not appear to have found its way to England until the autumn of 1818, when a coach-maker of Long Acre, one Dennis Johnson by name, introduced it as a “Pedestrian Curricle.” From 1819 to 1830 this machine—the popularly-named “Hobby Horse”—enjoyed a certain favour, although on country roads it could but seldom have been seen, for no one could ride it twenty miles and remain in an able-bodied condition. Its mere weight was appalling, constructed as it was of two heavy wooden wheels shod with iron, and held together by a stout bar of timber. For saddle, the rider had a cushion, and leant his chest against another cushion, supported by ironwork. Bestriding this fearsome contrivance, the adventurous rider’s feet easily reached the ground. As the Hobby Horse had no cranks or pedals, the method of propulsion was that of running in this straddling position until a sufficient impetus had been gained, when the lumbering machine would carry its owner a short distance on the flat. It was, of course, impossible to ride up even the slightest rise; but, considering the momentum likely to be accumulated by a mass of iron and wood, scaling considerably over a hundredweight, the pace down hill must have been furious enough.

By 1830 the Hobby Horse had disappeared, and it was not until 1839–40 that the first machine with cranks was invented by a Scots blacksmith, Kirkpatrick Macmillan, who produced a rear-driving dwarf bicycle that foreshadowed the type now popular. Several machines of this kind were made and sold by Macmillan, but they did not attain a lasting vogue; and it was not until a French mechanic—one Pierre Lallemont—in 1865 or 1866 designed the front-driving velocipede in the workshops of Michaux & Cie, of Paris, that the second era of cycling began. It was this machine that Michaux exhibited at the Paris Exhibition of 1867. It was seen either then or the following year in Paris by Mr. R. B. Turner, agent in that city for the Coventry Sewing Machine Company. He, together with Charles Spencer and John Mayall, junior, became a pioneer of cycling in this country. In the pages of the Brighton Road, details of their first long-distance ride, February 17th, 1869, may be found.

But Turner not only became an enthusiastic cyclist: he drew the attention of his firm to what at once proved „to be a profitable manufacture, supplementing, and eventually taking the place of, the declining sewing-machine business. The style of the firm was altered to the “Coventry Machinists Company,” and “bone-shakers,” as Velocipedes were speedily nicknamed, began to be turned out in considerable numbers. The “boneshaker” was well named. It had a solid iron frame, and wooden wheels with iron tyres, and was only a degree less weighty than the Hobby Horse itself, of ponderous memory. Its front wheel was the larger, and was the driving-wheel, fitted with “treadles,” as pedals were then named. The machine turned the scale at 93 lb.

Thus, in 1869, the pastime of cycling and the industry of cycle manufacture found a beginning on these shores. In that year the actual word “bicycle” was first introduced, to eventually render “Velocipede” obsolete. When the first syllable of “bicycle” and “bicycling” was dropped is a more difficult matter to determine. The present use grew gradually, as one by one the different bicycling and tricycling clubs sloughed off those cumbrous prefatory distinctions, as unnecessary and unwieldy; but certainly the modern use was known by 1879, when the ’Cyclist was established, with the half-apologetic ’ that may even yet be seen on its engraved title-page. Two years earlier, when the Bicycling News was founded, the elision of the distinguishing syllable was evidently not foreseen.

In the years following the introduction of the “boneshaker,” this new industry prospered and increased in an eminently solid way. Bone-shaking was not a pastime for the many, and it was not until the old “ordinary,” as it is still called, was introduced that the youth of that period went bicycling in any great numbers. The “ordinary,” or high bicycle, long since become extraordinary by supersession in favour of the dwarf “safety,” was gradually evolved through the middle Seventies to 1880. It was probably an early example of this build that so terribly frightened the rustic in Punch, who, going home in the dark, was scared by an “awful summat” he declared to be “a man a-ridin’ on nawthin’.”

It was a graceful, albeit exceedingly dangerous type, and from its height of fifty-eight inches a rider surveyed the world as he went at a lordly altitude. The reverse of that commanding eminence was found when he was thrown: a happening that recurred with remarkable frequency and a nerve-shaking unexpectedness. Little in the shape of ruts or stones was required to upset the “ordinary,” and few long rides were ever made without a “spill.” To be shot off suddenly in mid-air was in fact so to be looked for, that riders studied how to fall, and practised the art so well that, although involuntary flights were many, serious injuries were few. The height of this art or science was to fall clear of the machine—an object attained, down hill, by riding with the legs over the handlebars, when, in the event of an accident, one fell a greater or shorter distance, according to the speed or the force of the shock.

The “ordinary” was at its height, in measurement and popularity, in 1880, a year that also marked the palmiest period of cycling clubs. The cyclist of that era made a brave show. Arrayed in a tight-fitting uniform, that in its frogged patrol-jacket and gauntlet gloves aped military costume, and in its tight breeches made the sudden strain of a fall the utter dissolution of those garments, his was a wonderful figure as he wended his uncertain way, gazing from his point of vantage over the countryside.

But as his first youth waned, and his agility with it, rendering the exercise of vaulting into the saddle increasingly more of an enterprise, the cyclist yearned for a less giddy height than that of the “ordinary,” and his growing infirmities, more than any other consideration, eventually brought about the modern geared-up, rear-driving, dwarf bicycle the “safety”; but Time, the cynic, that has robbed the term “ordinary” of its meaning, has brought about many more fatal cycling accidents in these “safety” days than occurred in the era of the high bicycle.