VELOCIPEDIST
A rider of an early type of bicycle.
It appeared on English roads about 1818: a strange vehicle with two wheels, one behind the other, joined by a horizontal beam on which the rider sat, pushing the contraption along with his feet. This was an early precursor of our modern bicycle, the invention of a German named Karl Drais.
The name for the contraption was varied: Drais called it a Laufmaschine, a running machine; the French described it as a vélocipède, from the Latin words for “swift feet” (a term that survives in the modern French vélo, roughly equivalent to our “bike”). The English borrowed the French term, without the accents, but also called it a draisine after the German inventor. Other names were dandy-horse (because it was taken up by the fashionable young men of the period called dandies) and hobby-horse (abbreviated to hobby), after the ancient toy of a stick with a horse’s head that children would pretend to ride.
The machines seemed innocuous enough, but they caused problems. They weren’t easy to learn to ride, since nobody had any experience of the art of balancing required. The original Drais version had a brake, but the ripped-off French, English and American versions didn’t, which resulted in accidents. Roads, even in towns, were often so rutted that riders took to the pavements (sidewalks), to the terror of pedestrians. The Times reported in June 1819 that “Mrs. Bearham, wife of Mr. Bearham, maltster, of Hunsley, Hants, returning home lately in her cart, the horse took fright at a velocipede and she was thrown out and killed on the spot.”
