Tinkering in his Coventry United Kingdom workshop James Starley a 41-year-old machinist had no experience building bicycles But he had a hunch With only a few improvements he thought he could make bikes stronger faster and more comfortable First Starley experimented with a tubular steel frame Then he made seat springs shorter and stiffer and he created a rear brake that operated by turning the handlebar grips But his biggest innovation concerned the front wheel Spokes on bicycles at the time were stiff and heavy Starley came up with the idea to stretch wire spokes from the wheel’s rim to the hub and then tighten them Spokes under tension are better at absorbing road shock than rigid spokes are and they are much lighter Starley knew his all-metal Ariel bicycle which he patented with his partner William Hillman in 1870 was a big improvement from earlier high wheelers But he needed a way to show bicycle enthusiasts what the Ariel could do In 1871 Starley and Hillman rode their Ariel bicycles from London to Coventry in one day a 100-mile 161 km trip on primitive roads Both men were so exhausted that they stayed in bed for the next three days but the publicity stunt worked They gained as one of their first customers James Moore a famous racing cyclist The Ariel became popular and sold well Even so Starley had a feeling he could make more improvements and he continued working on spoke technology In 1874 he introduced the tangent-spoke wheel The load-bearing principle was the same as for his previous tension wheel But in this new Ariel he connected the spokes from the rim to the hub 8
at an angle rather than in a straight line Tangent spokes were very strong and could better withstand the forces of pedaling and braking than straight spokes could The result was a wheel that was even lighter and better riding than it was before Starley’s innovation was such a success that nearly every bike built since 1874 has used this technology Tangent spokes have even been used on motorcycle car and airplane wheels Because of his innovations and the fact his Ariel bike marked the beginning of Britain’s bicycle manufacturing industry Starley earned the title father of the bicycle industry Bike historian Andrew Ritchie says Starley was probably the most energetic and inventive genius in the history of bicycle technology 2 Trains Planes and Dishwashers It is hard to imagine the present-day world without the wheel Wheels are integral to The tangent-spoke wheel Starley invented distributed the weight of the rider around the whole wheel unlike its wooden predecessors 9
THE ROOT OF IT ALL The word wheel comes from the root word wegh which means to convey particularly by a wheeled vehicle in the ancient language from which it is believed all Indo-European languages derived 3 In Old English the word became hweol Because the root word for wheel can be found in almost every offshoot of the original Proto-Indo-European language this means wheels and wheeled vehicles were around when the language was last used approximately 6,000 years ago transportation cars trucks trains planes motorcycles wagons farm equipment skateboards and of course bicycles would not function without them But wheels are not only used for transportation Practically every machine uses a spinning disc of some sort Wheels can be found in everything from computer disc drives to clocks electric toothbrushes and dishwashers Although wheels are widely used now they were invented relatively late in human history People were already forming societies herding domesticated animals and farming during the Bronze Age when the wheel first appeared The first wheels were not even used for transportation Archaeological evidence indicates the very first wheels may have been attached to children’s toys Probably the earliest functional use of the wheel was for making pottery The timesaving product-improving pottery wheel would serve as inspiration for countless wheeled machines that came after it Some ancient civilizations such as the North American Indians Mexican Aztecs and Peruvian Incas reached high levels of civilization without the wheel 10
From the Human Mind Many human inventions are inspired by nature The hook-and-loop fastener used on everything from sneakers to spacesuits was created after Swiss inventor Georges de Mestral noticed how plant burrs attached to his dog’s fur during walks in the woods Certainly the airplane was inspired by people’s observation of birds in flight In the case of wheels however there were no known examples of wheels in nature at the time they first came into use Wheels were truly an invention that sprang from the human mind WHEELED BACTERIA Some single-celled bacteria have an interesting way of getting around a flagellum An organic rotating engine drives the long whiplike flagellum The engine powered by protein is anchored to the cell wall and drives the flagellum rotating it at up to 100 times per second The flagellum allows the bacteria cell to move and change direction So in whose mind was the wheel conceived Unlike Thomas Edison’s light bulb or Gottlieb Daimler’s gas-powered automobile the name of the wheel’s inventor or possibly many inventors in different parts of the world is not known Although the skills needed to build wheels existed in both Europe and the Near East the first evidence of a wheeled vehicle is a pictograph of a wheeled sled made in approximately 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia part of modern-day Iraq Pottery remnants from this era found in southern Poland also contain representations of a 11
