The high-wheeler was considered unsafe because of the difficulty of mounting and dismount-ing, especially in town traffic, and because of the ease with which the rider could be thrown over the handlebars. There were two main ways of “designing out” these problems. One was to build “rational ordinaries.” (The seat of a “rational ordinary” was lower and was farther be-hind the front wheel’s axle.) The other was to add a third wheel.
From the very beginning of bicycling, most people feared balancing on two wheels and preferred the stability of three wheels. From 1817 on, tricycles and bicycles developed symbi-otically. In 1870 and then again around 1880, it appeared to the cycling press that the tricycle, rather than the bicycle, might be the vehicle of the future.
Before 1860, quadricycles were even more popular than tricycles (see chapter 1), but both designs suffered the drawback that two driven wheels on one axle resulted in scrubbing
of the tires during cornering and any time one rode on rough surface. One solution was to have one wheel free on the axle and the other one driving, although that reduced traction and could make the steering jumpy. Some makers (for example, Sawyer) preferred to keep the two wheels fixed and let the metal tires slip on a loose road surface.
Three-wheeled Parisian velocipedes took center stage in 1870 when a race from Paris to Saint-Germain was restricted to three-wheeled and four-wheeled machines. One competitor, William Jackson, an Englishman living in Paris, was praised for a tricycle that “shone in the sun like a steel jewel” as “everyone admired its easy, elegant progress” (Le Vélocipède Illustré, July 7, 1870). A Jackson machine, very advanced for its time, is in the Velorama collection in Nijmegen. This lightweight three-wheeler, furnished with Meyer wire wheels, looks scarcely inferior to the Monarch tricycle, launched in Birmingham by William Thomas Eades more than 12 years later (Clayton 1999). The only difference is that the Monarch had double ratchet drive, whereas Jackson’s was driven by only one wheel.
The hiatus in French production after August of 1870, caused by the Franco-Prussian War, destabilized the balance between tricycles and bicycles. Tricycle fever, so evident in the pages of Le Vélocipède Illustré, failed to cross the Channel when the center of the trade moved to Coventry. In Britain, only a few tricycles were being made, all with wooden wheels. Tricycles with steel-spoke wheels and tube frames got a rather late start in the British Isles, in 1876, with the front-steering Dublin tricycle and the side-steering Coventry tricycle. The Dublin was patented only 14 days ahead of the Coventry.
Front-steering rear-drive machines
With two front wheels steering, the inner wheel travels a shorter distance than the outer, fol-lowing a tighter radius. Ideally, therefore, the inner wheel has to be pointed more sharply into the turn. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, identified the problem and the solution in the 1760s; it was also identified and effectively resolved through the use of stub axles by Georg Lankensperger, a Munich carriage maker (Bavarian privilege of 1816). Rudolph Ackermann of London—a former German saddler turned coach designer—obtained a patent with Lankens-perger (British patent 1,412 of 1818) specifying that a theoretical line taken through each front wheel’s axle should intersect near the inner rear wheel’s center (Lankensperger 1818). However,
“A-steering” (the A standing for Ackermann) wasn’t generally adopted on iron-tired carriages (Eckermann 1998), or on early iron-tired quadricycles or tricycles. A tricycle with a single front steering wheel and one loose wheel on the driving axle was a reasonable compromise.
William Bindon Blood, a velocipedist who was a professor of engineering at Queen’s College in Galway, designed a “Dublin tricycle” with a central rear driving wheel. Its steering achieved
Ackermann angles with the front wheels within forks rather than on stub axles (British patent 4,250 of 1876). This system wasn’t identical to Ackermann’s patent of 1818, but followed the same original thought. Henry Sturmey described it in detail:
It is very simple and consists of a rod running straight back from each fork some 12in to 18in, and then united by a third rod bent to a curve at each end. These rods con-nect the forks of the two wheels, and when one is turned by means of a rack and pin-ion, or a direct handle, the other is also turned, and not only so, but the angle of each is such, that both describe arcs of different sized circles, according as they are in or outside in turning, thus avoiding any jumps, scrape, or tyre tearing. (Sturmey 1881)
Now, for the first time, A-steering became a standard feature of some tricycles. Linley &
Biggs used it with stub axles on the Whippet Double Steerer of 1888. The Olympia, a double-steering tandem tricycle made by Marriott & Cooper, was said to be one of the most success-ful of modern tricycles; it also featured A-steering with stub axles (Sharp 1896). In the United States, the Pope Manufacturing Company produced a single-seater with stub-axle A-steering, the Surprise Columbia Tricycle; it had double steering and allowed the operator to reduce its track from 34 inches to 30 inches while riding, apparently to make it easier to negotiate narrow tracks. A great variety of “compressible” tricycles of various types were manufactured in the UK, the aim in these cases being to enable the machines to pass through a standard doorway (Hadland and Pinkerton 1996, 3–7). Another stub-axle application was the patented Rudge Quadricycle single of 1889. The claim was that “one has to overcome rolling resistance only in two tracks instead of three.” Rudge’s Quadricycle for Three Riders, built on the same plan, achieved a record speed of 26 miles per hour. Thus, the A-steering plan was already in use and well known before it was widely adopted by makers of automobiles.
Side-steering and rear-steering machines
Coventry was the center of the British cycle industry, as has already been noted, and it was there that James Starley produced the most successful series-produced tricycles. His break-through design, the lever-drive Coventry of 1876 (later known as the Coventry Lever Tricycle), was patented under the names of his son James and his nephew John Kemp Starley (British patent 4,478 of 1876). Reportedly it was derived from the Ariel. Its original tiller steering was soon altered to a single spade-style handle that turned both small wheels by means of a rack and a pinion.
A chain-driven version introduced in late 1879 or early 1880 was called the Coventry Rotary Tricycle. Although originally sold by Starley Brothers, the Starley tricycles were later marketed by the Tangent & Coventry Tricycle Company, which was acquired by Rudge in 1880 (Roberts 1991, 41).
Starley’s Coventry Lever and Rotary tricycles borrowed some technological features from the ordinary, including wire-spoke wheels and hollow tubing. A Coventry Lever or a Coventry Figure 3.13 Above left: Lankensperger’s stub axle and Ackermann’s patent drawing (Eckermann 1998). Above right: Blood’s Dublin tricycle of 1876. (Science Museum Creative Commons.) Below left: Pope’s Surprise Columbia Tricycle of 1889 (manufacturers’ catalog). Below right: the Rudge Quadricycle of 1889 (manufacturers’ catalog).
Rotary tricycle had one large wheel on the left side and a pair of smaller, steered wheels on the right of the rider’s seat, one fore and one aft. In 1877, Starley made a two-seater version, with the riders seated side by side and a second large wheel to the right of the right-hand rider. That four-wheel “sociable” was marketed as the Salvo Quadricycle. Its particular significance was that what was variously known as a balance, double-driving, or differential gear was used to enable both of the driving wheels to be driven from a single power input when turning corners.
Previous attempts had involved either each rider driving a separate wheel (which required almost unattainable coordination) or driving a single wheel (which resulted in poorer traction, different handling in left and right turns, and a tendency to pull to one side).
The idea of a differential gear wasn’t new. Centuries earlier, in China, there was a military chariot with an indicator that always pointed the same way; presumably it was useful in dusty combat situations and in the absence of easily visible landmarks. At its heart was a differential mechanism. Old Meccano enthusiasts may recall building a “Pharaoh’s Chariot” that worked on the same principle. The first inventor to patent a differential gear appears to have been Onésiphore Pecqueur (French patent 6,840 of 1828). An Englishman named Richard Roberts soon patented one too.
Differential gears can take various forms, but here is an explanation of how a simple dif-ferential gear works: The two driven wheels are on separate drive axles that meet in a differ-ential gear casing. Within that casing, the inboard end of each wheel’s shaft has a bevel gear on it; we will call them the left-wheel bevel and the right-wheel bevel. Each of the two bevels meshes at a 90º angle with a drive bevel, which is held in a rotating frame within, or integral with, the differential casing, and is driven by the power source (e.g., a chain). When the vehicle is traveling in a straight line, the bevel gear in the drive frame will pull both of the bevel gears around equally. If the vehicle turns right, the right-hand drive wheel is retarded by being on the inside of the turning circle and the left wheel is accelerated by being on the outside of the circle. The drive bevel automatically allows the rotation and the torque to be shared propor-tionally, according to the sharpness of the turn. If one wheel is stationary, and the vehicle is
“turning on the spot,” that wheel’s bevel will be static. The drive bevel, reacting against it, will automatically distribute all the rotation and torque to the other wheel. (For smooth running, it was customary to use more than one drive bevel.)
Figure 3.14 Above: an 1884 Humber Cripper tricycle (R. John Way). Below: an 1877 Coventry Lever Tricycle (Alan Osbahr).
A simpler system used on some tricycles with two-wheel drive had the two driven wheels fitted with freewheels and mounted on the same driven axle. This made it possible to drive both wheels when the tricycle was going straight ahead. In a turn, no drive was delivered to the wheel that was on the inside of the turn, as it was rotating more slowly than the drive axle.
This system was less satisfactory than using a differential, as only one wheel was driven in a turn. It was, however, better than driving only one wheel, which delivered poor performance when the driven wheel was on the inside of a turn.
James Starley seems to have evolved his own “balance gear” (British patent 3,388 of 1877) from scratch. Its significance derives from the subsequent universal adoption of differ-entials in almost all automobiles and trucks. Starley went on to produce a successful range of technically advanced Salvo tricycles with front steering, chain drive, and the “balance gear.”
By the late 1880s, when the safety bicycle had begun to persuade the more timid riders to return to two wheels, about 80 percent of tricycles being produced were of the direct-steering type, a design pioneered by the unpatented Humber Cripper (figure 3.14). The name was derived from Robert Cripps, who won many races on machines of that design. Whereas early tricycles had had rack-and-pinion steering, the Cripper had an inclined steering head and a direct connection between the front forks and the rearward-curving handlebars. After 1887, all three wheels were about 28 to 30 inches in diameter. This convergence in design allowed dealers to keep their inventories smaller, though by that time the whole tricycle market was shrinking and dealers were having to stock a growing array of safety bicycles.
The Otto bicycle and the Welch Dicycle
Among the velocipedes having only two tracks, like the Coventry tricycle, a two-wheeled de-sign with the wheels side by side appeared in 1879. The idea of supporting a running man by two side wheels, instead of two wheels in line, arose as early as 1819, as Howell’s Pedestrian Chariot from Bristol and Siviers’s Patent Pedestrian Carriage attest (Street 2011). The idea surfaced again in 1869 with J. J. White’s US patent 88,930. And in 1879, Eduard Carl Friedrich Otto, a brother of Nikolaus Otto of gasoline-engine fame (Boys 1884), resurrected it once more (British patent 1,274).
In Otto’s design, a crankshaft drove the two wheels independently by means of two rubber-ized Italian hemp belts (later superseded by steel bands). Steering was by means of spade han-dles that compressed a spring tensioner and thus slackened one belt or the other and slowed the wheel that was connected to that belt. Braking the wheel by means of a finger grip within the spade handle would cause the machine to turn more smartly around the blocked wheel, if necessary within a five-foot circle. The art of balancing without overturning had to be learned.
Figure 3.15 Left: The 1884 Starley & Sutton Rover tricycle (National Cycle Library). Right: Starley’s differential or
“balance gear” (R. John Way).
Tilting backward was prevented by a small-wheeled tail skid; falling forward was controlled by accelerating or, as a last resort, putting one’s feet down. Otto persuaded the Birmingham Small Arms Company to manufacture the machines for him after demonstrating one on the table of the boardroom, and Birmingham Small Arms (BSA) built 953 machines of the highest quality.
In 1886, the Coventry Machinists’ Company offered the Kingston Club Dicycle, a compet-ing chain-driven design by Kcompet-ingston Welch. (A dicycle has two wheels on the same axis, rather than one in front of the other.) Because it infringed Otto’s patents, it was withdrawn. Otto then switched his machine to central chain drive, using a differential to take care of steering. Now called the Otto Dicycle, it faced competition from the new safety bicycles, which cost half as much. The Otto Safety Bicycle Company soon failed. The 1887 Stanley Show saw the final appearance of the Dicycle, now equipped with corrugated wavy spokes and “tyres wired in by Otto’s patent process, which has been largely taken up by the trade, including Singer, who applies it to all his machines” (Sturmey 1887).
Figure 3.16 Left and center: two-track bicycles of 1879 and 1886. Right: the Otto Safety Bicycle Company’s spoke pattern (brochure and patent drawings).
The Lady’s Otto figured prominently in a lecture given by Charles Vernon Boys at the Royal Institution (Boys 1884); it was also mentioned in a fashion magazine:
The Lady’s Otto.—The same in all technical details, save that 50-inch wheels are used, and the whole is made lighter; dress guards, etc., are also provided. The Otto is the very beau idéal of a lady’s cycle, safe, handy, and speedy—I was about to write fast, but the word might be mis-interpreted, as cycling on the Otto is a delightful ex-ercise for the fair sex, less showy even than the most demure looking tricycle, whilst no more of the boot tops are shown than in walking. (The Bazaar, February 15, 1882)
Tricycle typology
In October of 1880 the Tricycle Union was formed as a breakaway from the Bicycle Union. A magazine titled The Tricyclist was launched in 1882. As development of the ordinary bicycle neared its end, tricycles were rapidly changing and advancing with every season. Once again it seemed as though the tricycle might become the personal mobility vehicle of the future. At the 1883 Stanley Show, tricycle models outnumbered bicycles. “The wonderful improvements in the construction of tricycles and the enormously increased demand for them,” the cycling writer Harry Hewitt Griffin commented (1884), “has quite cast bicycles into the shade, both in manufacturing and popularity.”
Archibald Sharp, a patent lawyer and a lecturer on engineering design, later published a classification table to characterize the highly diversified range of machines. (See figure 3.20.) He differentiated front steerers, side steerers, and rear steerers, then front-drive and rear-drive machines, with an additional category for the side-drive Coventry. Moreover, he differentiated between geared and ungeared machines—that is, between those that were chain driven and those that were pedaled directly or propelled by means of levers. “Single drivers” and “double drivers” referred to the number of wheels driven.
The Salvo was the first tricycle to be equipped with chain drive. Thereafter tricycles no longer demanded large wheels but could simply be geared up (Starley 1898).
M. Doubleday and Thomas Humber patented a tricycle driven and steered by the two front wheels, with the rider seated on a trailing backbone as on a high-wheeler (British patent 3,126 of 1878). Although The Humber was prone to “headers” (as high-wheelers also were), it proved very fast, and it became a favorite with racers. In the 1890s, the Cripper configuration, with three 28-inch wheels, became the standard tricycle of all safety manufacturers, and was motorized by Count de Dion as the Voiturette. Ingenious fold-away steering columns eased
access to the saddles of front-steerers, especially for women; other types were steered by a spade handle placed to the side of the rider.
The majority of early tricycles began as single-drive rear-steerers with one of the large wheels loose on the driving axle. They were soon improved by making both front wheels drive, allowing for the overrunning of one wheel or the other by a clutch using rollers and cams (an anticipation of the later freewheel). T. Butler of Wokingham provided his three-wheel Omnicy-cle (British patent 1,909 of 1879), later produced by Singer, with three speeds for hill climbing.
Its driving levers were fitted with leather straps that passed over segments fixed to the axle and worked by ratchet action. The metal tops of these segments could be altered to form arcs of three different circles, the smallest giving the lowest gear. Sturmey (1881) saw it as “really well made, being constructed throughout by machinery on the interchangeable system.”
The Dual tricycle, built by a watchmaker named William Jeans in the English town of Christchurch in 1882, had two speeds. By means of gearwheels, either the left or the right wheel was driven while the other was freewheeling (Street 1979).
Though tricycles were seen from the start as safer than bicycles, horrendous accidents did occur. Some braking control was achieved, as in the bicycle, by backpedaling against a fixed drive. Spoon brakes, pressing onto the tires of the large wheels and operated by a brake lever, were succeeded by mechanisms that acted on the differential casing or the bottom bracket and could be applied without releasing one’s grip on the handlebar.
The Rudge Tandem Tricycle No. 1 of 1889 had a band brake on the crankshaft and a handlebar-mounted “brake holder” for parking.
Commercial uses of tricycles should not be overlooked. Singer reportedly offered twenty different models of trade cycles in 1886, and Rover offered the Despatch, a variant of the Coventry Chair that was meant to carry goods. A tricycle was stable and could be designed to carry a considerable load. The Commissionaire Carrier Roadster of 1886 held a 19 × 19 × 14-inch box. Warwick later made carrier tricycles for many years.
One cargo cycle, Edward Burstow’s Centre Cycle (British patent 4,707 of 1880), was de-signed to combine the best characteristics of the bicycle and the tricycle. It had one 52-inch wheel and four 18-inch wheels (one at each corner) held in a framework that allowed them to lift or tilt. A batch of Centre Cycles was built in 1882 by Martin Rücker, a colorful character who
One cargo cycle, Edward Burstow’s Centre Cycle (British patent 4,707 of 1880), was de-signed to combine the best characteristics of the bicycle and the tricycle. It had one 52-inch wheel and four 18-inch wheels (one at each corner) held in a framework that allowed them to lift or tilt. A batch of Centre Cycles was built in 1882 by Martin Rücker, a colorful character who