IELTS Reading Practice 1

Two Wheels: How the Bicycle Took Shape

AIn the summer of 1817, a German civil servant named Karl Drais set out from the city of Mannheim on a strange wooden machine. It had two wheels in a line, a seat and a bar for steering, but no pedals. The rider pushed against the ground with his feet, rather like a child on a modern balance bike. Drais is said to have covered around 13 kilometres in less than an hour, considerably faster than he could have walked. His invention, which he called the Laufmaschine or "running machine", is generally regarded as the first ancestor of the bicycle.

BWhy did Drais build it? Some historians link the machine to the "year without a summer" of 1816, when a volcanic eruption in Indonesia cooled the climate across Europe. Harvests failed, and the cost of feeding horses rose sharply, so a vehicle that needed no animal to pull it would have been attractive. Others are cautious about this explanation, pointing out that inventors had been experimenting with human-powered vehicles for some time. Whatever the reason, the running machine became a brief fashion among wealthy young men in Germany, France and Britain, where it was nicknamed the "dandy horse". Riders soon began colliding with pedestrians, however, and several cities restricted its use on pavements.

CFor several decades, little changed. Then, in the 1860s, workshops in France began fitting pedals directly to the front wheel. These machines, known as velocipedes, allowed riders to keep their feet off the ground for the first time. They were heavy, with iron-rimmed wooden wheels, and on cobbled streets the ride was so uncomfortable that the English gave them the name "boneshakers".

DBecause the pedals turned the front wheel directly, one turn of the pedals moved the machine only as far as the wheel's circumference. The obvious way to go faster was to make the front wheel larger. By the 1870s, this logic had produced the high-wheeler, later called the penny-farthing, whose front wheel could be well over a metre in diameter. It was fast and, on a good road, remarkably efficient. But the rider sat high above the front wheel, and a stone or a sudden stop could throw him forward over the handlebars, an accident so frequent that riders had a name for it: a "header". Cycling became a sport for athletic young men rather than a means of everyday transport.

EThe solution came from England in the 1880s. In 1885, John Kemp Starley of Coventry introduced the Rover, a machine with two wheels of similar size and a chain that drove the rear wheel. Gearing allowed a small wheel to travel as far as a large one with each turn of the pedals, so the rider could sit low and put his feet on the ground when stopping. The design was soon copied everywhere, and it was sold as the "safety bicycle", a name chosen to set it apart from the dangerous high-wheeler. Its basic shape is still recognisable in most bicycles today.

FComfort followed safety. In 1888, John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish vet working in Belfast, developed an air-filled tyre, reportedly to give his young son a smoother ride on his tricycle. Pneumatic tyres absorbed the shocks of rough roads and made riding noticeably faster, and within a few years they had replaced solid rubber on most new bicycles.

GThe effects of the safety bicycle reached far beyond transport. In the 1890s, a cycling boom swept across Europe and North America. For the first time, many working people had a cheap way to travel beyond their own neighbourhood. Women in particular gained a new independence: the need to ride comfortably encouraged simpler, lighter clothing, and campaigners for women's rights welcomed the bicycle as a symbol of freedom. Cycling clubs also pressed governments to improve road surfaces, years before the motor car made good roads a national priority.