Rover safety bicycle
The bicycle with two wheels of equal size and a chain to the rear wheel – the basic form of almost every bicycle since.
The high-wheeler, with pedals on a large front wheel, was fast but dangerous. In 1885 John Kemp Starley in Coventry showed the Rover, which had wheels of equal size and a chain to the rear wheel and was therefore called a safety bicycle.
When John Boyd Dunlop patented the pneumatic tyre a few years later, the bicycle became comfortable. In the 1890s cycling became a popular movement, and the bicycle gave women a new freedom of movement.
Materials: Steel tube, cast iron, solid rubber tyres
Manufacture: Made by Starley & Sutton in Coventry; the frame tubes were brazed into lugs.
Two wheels of roughly the same size.
Chain drive to the rear wheel instead of pedals on the front wheel.
Solid rubber tyres before 1890; pneumatic tyres afterwards.