A Timeless History
James Starley built the Ariel in Coventry in 1871 and the high wheeler ruled the next fifteen years. By 1883 an American town could stage a three-day bicycle tournament and print a poster for it. It was never called a penny-farthing at the time — that name came afterwards, from two British coins of very different sizes, and it was a joke at the machine's expense once the safety bicycle had made it obsolete.
SourceScience Museum Group, cycling collection — collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk · Coventry Transport Museum, Ariel cycle, 1871 — transport-museum.com · Encyclopaedia Britannica — britannica.com, “penny-farthing” · Library of Congress, PGA — Bradley, Springfield Bicycle Club, 1883
Science In Action
Direct drive — no chain, no gears; distance per pedal stroke is simply the front wheel's circumference • A wheel 1.5 m across carries you about 4.7 m per turn — a bigger wheel is a higher gear • The rider sits almost directly above the front axle, so a sudden stop pitches him over the bars • Balance — not the gyroscope: in 2011 a bicycle built without that effect stayed upright anyway
SourceScience Museum Group, cycling collection — collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk · Encyclopaedia Britannica — britannica.com · Kooijman, Meijaard, Papadopoulos, Ruina & Schwab, “A bicycle can be self-stable without gyroscopic or caster effects”, Science 332:339 (2011) — science.org
Arts
The high wheeler was a machine you wore rather than rode — expensive, athletic, and unmistakably a young man's object. Henry Sandham's Bicycling, printed by Louis Prang in Boston in 1887, shows the whole cast: nine young men on high wheels and one woman, on a tricycle. Within five years of the chain-driven safety bicycle arriving, it was gone. Few technologies have been killed so completely and so fast.
SourceScience Museum Group, cycling collection — collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk · Library of Congress, PGA — Prang, “Bicycling” (Hy Sandham, aquarelle print, L. Prang & Co., c. 1887), LC-DIG-pga-04039
Applications Today
Cyclists still measure gearing in gear inches: the diameter of the front wheel a high wheeler would need to travel the same distance per pedal stroke. Every modern gear chart is quietly denominated in a machine nobody has ridden seriously since 1890 — though museums still put one on the road.
SourceEncyclopaedia Britannica — britannica.com, “bicycle” · Science Museum Group, cycling collection — collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk · Library of Congress, Balthazar Korab collection
One turn of the legs, one turn of the wheel. Everything else about it follows from that.
Springfield Bicycle Club — Bicycle Camp-Exhibition & Tournament, Springfield, Mass., U.S.A., Sept. 18, 19, 20, 1883 (poster; crowd along the railroad, high wheelers in the foreground, track and river behind) — Milton Bradley & Co., Springfield, Mass. (lithographer) — 1883 — Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Popular Graphic Arts — PGA - Bradley--Springfield… (D size); LC-USZC4-6422
