Your Daily Facts about the Bicycle
The first human powered land vehicle was constructed by Giovanni Fontana in 1418.
The term “bicycle” first entered into popular usage in France in the 1860s.
There are about a billion bicycles in the world, twice as many as motorcars. Almost 400 million bicycles are in China. Every year some 50 million bicycles – and 20 million cars – are produced.
Although Leonardo da Vinci drew some rough sketches of a contraption that looked like a bicycle, the Frenchman De Sivrac built the first bicycle-type vehicle in 1690. It was referred to as a hobbyhorse. However, it did not have pedals. Those were added in 1840 by a Scottish blacksmith, Kirkpatrick Macmillan, who is credited with inventing the real bicycle.
On a penny-farthing bicycle, one pedal gave the wheel one turn. A lot of pedaling was needed to get around! With the advent of gears, bicycles could move as fast as cars.
Air-filled tires were used on bicycles before they were used on cars.
The bicycle as we know it today – with two wheels of the same size – looks almost exactly the same as one from 1900.
Half of all the parts of a typical bicycle are in the chain.
The world speed record on a bicycle is held by John Howard, Olympic Cyclist and Ironman triathlon winner from the US. In 1985 he reached 245,08 km/h (152.2 mph), cycling in the slipstream of a specially designed car.
Bicycles currently displace over 238 million gallons of gasoline per year, by replacing car trips with bicycle trips.
When Worldwatch Institute compared energy used per passenger-mile (calories), they found that a bicycle needed only 35 calories, whereas a car expended a whopping 1,860. Bus and trains fell about midway between, and walking still took 3 times as many calories as riding a bike the same distance.