CHANEL by By Francois Baudot

Show description

Their wooden wheels, held together with iron hoops, were equal in size, each about 27 inches or 675 millimeters in diameter. One early draisine, now preserved at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, weighed only 45 pounds; it was made of well-seasoned ash wood. However, the ergonomic characteristics of a draisine differed considerably from those of a present-day bicycle. ” The difficulty of balancing ruled out the use of indirect propulsion by means of cranks as in Fahrmaschine 2. To make it easier for the rider to put his feet on the ground, the seat was lower than that of a modern bicycle.

It was, however, a defining step toward surmounting the fear of losing balance or losing contact with the ground. Improvement was rapid thereafter, and cycle development has progressed more or less continually to the present day despite periodic bans by the authorities. The situation before the advent of the cranked two-wheeler is hardly documented at all. We don’t know whether draisines and early velocipedes had been in use in Paris, unhampered by any clampdown, since 1818, or whether they had been reinvented in Paris—perhaps because roller skating had become fashionable, or because the young Prince Imperial Napoleon IV had been given a Sawyer quadricycle in 1862 (Lessing 2007).

Press opinion of this event was divided (Kobayashi 1993, 41). ” French craftsmen modified the design of the draisine in a way that had already been demonstrated by an anonymous mechanic at a Frankfurt fair in 1817 (Lessing 2003a, 295). Drais’s front wheel and fork assembly was a separate bogey, pivoted at the front and supported at V elocipedes and T heir Forerunners  21 its rear by a quadrant. It was turned by a steering bar called a Leitstange. That arrangement, common on carriages, was necessitated by the trail for self-alignment of the front wheel.