To begin at the beginning, or at least at the beginning of an era that we still live in… the Rover Safety Bicycle, widely regarded as the first modern safety bike, has pretty much all the identifiable features that we still recognise in a bike today, yet is now over 140 years old. The handlebars directly controlling a front wheel via a fork, a saddle sat partway over the rear wheel, equally-sized spoked wheels, pedals and cranks sat between the two wheels and driving the rear wheel, and a chain drive sitting on the right hand side of the frame. It is only missing a seat tube, pneumatic tyres, a freewheel and rim braking to make it fully recognisable with its modern counterparts. The silhouette is remarkably similar, however, and markedly different from even earlier designs like the velocipede and penny-farthing.

Rover Safety Bicycle 1885 Front
Rover safety bicycle of 1885. (First embodiment of the modern arrangement.) (Saddle re-made by Brooks in 1961). From a colour transparency in the Science Museum Photographic Archive. (Image Credit: Science Museum)

This Mark ii version, from 1885, was the creation of John Kemp Starley, and it brought together the ideas from the previous 15 years of bicycle development and presented them in a coherent, useful and safe product.

Starley wished to “…place the rider at the proper distance from the ground”. This was in stark contrast to the riders of ‘ordinaries’, or penny-farthings as they were nicknamed, who sat high up over the front wheel. They were in danger of having a ‘header’ if thrown off forwards over the bars. Remember helmets were still a long way off…

The original Mark i model from 1884 featured a larger front wheel than rear wheel and indirect steering, where the forks are turned using a rod, which is in turn attached to a handlebar mechanism. Quite cumbersome by comparison to the direct system used in the Mark ii.

Rod Brakes
Rod Brakes (Image Credit: Jay Tyan)

Also note the lack of brake levers on the bars. As the wheel featured a fixed wheel cog, braking was done by the legs. This technique is still practiced by track and ‘fixie’ riders. The introduction of a front rod brake came in over the next few years, and was commonplace by the 1890s.

A rod brake system uses a series of solid rods to pull the brake blocks onto the rim. Ernest Bowden invented the Bowden cable in 1896 in an effort to replace these rigid rods. It is the same Bowden cables that we use today for gears, rim brakes and dropper posts! Although bikes using hydraulic brakes and electronic gears have no need of these trusty old cables any more, many bikes continue to use them.

In addition, the fixed wheel didn’t allow for any coasting or freewheeling. This was standard for bicycles of that era. Despite having been patented in 1869 by William Van Anden, the single wheel freewheel didn’t catch on initially, but started to find favour in the later half of the 1880s. It did require an efficient braking system as the legs could no longer slow the bike down.

The American solution was the coaster brake, where the rider backpedals to activate the brake, whereas the British opted for rim brakes. Not everyone was a fan of the freewheel, though – the irascible Henri Desgrange (creator of the Tour de France) wrote in 1912 that he thought riders were only applying pressure to the pedals for half of stage eleven, and coasting for the other half. This was on a 379 kilometre stage, mostly ridden on the dirt roads of the time! Mind you, he only grudgingly allowed derailleurs to be first used in 1937, saying that they were for touring riders only…

Solid Tyre from 1894
Solid Tyre from 1894 (Image Credit: Online Bicycle Museum)

The wheels on this bike used solid rubber tyres, as pneumatic tyres were not yet commonplace. Although patented in 1845 by Robert Thomson, his pneumatic tyre proved to be too ahead of its time, and didn’t take off commercially. It took John Dunlop to independently discover the same technique in 1887, and apply it to race-winning bikes. By 1892, pneumatic tyres were so widely used that bike manufacturers had to retool to accommodate the width of the new tyres. These tyres were not only significantly more comfortable to ride on, but faster too.

Another interesting feature on this era of bikes is the use of a 1″ (one inch) pitch chain. The pitch is the distance measured between the pin centres. Although the 1/2″ chain was invented in 1880 by Hans Renold, it didn’t become popular until the early 1900s, and from there it increasingly became the standard that we still use today.

Although not particularly light by modern standards, and weighing approximately 16.8kg, the Rover used hollow, drawn steel tubing. This provided a lighter weight than the wrought iron commonly used in earlier velocipedes. It wasn’t until 1935, for example, when Reynolds introduced its iconic 531 tubing, which offered a superior strength-to-weight ratio compared to these earlier materials.

An early ad for the Rover Safety (Wikimedia Commons).jpg
An early ad for the Rover Safety (Wikimedia Commons).jpg (Image Credit: Farrelly Atkinson)

John Kemp Starley died in 1901 at the age of 45, but he had seen the enormous success of the safety bike as well as the first British bicycle boom, often known as the ‘Bicycle Mania’. This boom occurred between approximately 1895 and 1897, with a following bust occurring due to an over-saturation of the market. Sound familiar? 

The social impact of ‘safety’ cycling shouldn’t be underestimated either, as it allowed women in particular to experience more freedom in mobility. This in turn led to the ‘rational dress’ fashions, which ditched the constraints of corsets and allowed women more freedom of movement. So, it’s often argued the Rover Safety Bicycle was a transformational product for both personal transportation and for the changes that occurred in society at that time.

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