The modern balance bike borrows from the dandy horse. The dandy horse has been adapted as a starter bicycle for children, and is variously called a balance bike or run bike.
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Buster Keaton rides a dandy-horse in his 1923 film Our Hospitality, which is set in the 1830s. Keaton's technical crew were unable to obtain a vintage dandy horse, so they built one to match existing drawings and prints. Keaton later donated the machine to the Smithsonian Institution, which had lacked an authentic example. George Arliss, as the title character of the 1929 film Disraeli, rides a dandy-horse through a London park until he collides with a pedestrian.
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Wooden dandy horse (around 1820), a patent-infringing copy of the first two- wheeler Original Laufmaschine of 1817 made to measure. The dandy horse, a derogatory term for what was first called a Laufmaschine (in German), then a vélocipède or draisienne (in French and then English), and then a pedestrian curricle or hobby-horse,Bicycle at Britannica.com is a human-powered vehicle that, being the first means of transport to make use of the two-wheeler principle, is regarded as the forerunner of the bicycle. A dandy horse is powered by the rider's feet on the ground instead of the pedals of later bicycles.
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Herlihy presented evidence at the fourth International Cycling History Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, Oct. 11-16, 1993, that Pierre Lallement deserves credit for putting pedals on the dandy horse.
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Wooden balance bicycle A balance bicycle or run bike or no pedal bike or dandy horse is a training bicycle that helps children learn balance and steering. It has no foot pedals, no drivetrain, no chain, no gears, no gear shifters, no derailleurs, and no freewheel.
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An example is Nicéphore Niépce's 1818 model with an adjustable saddle for his 'velocipede' built by Lagrange.Nicéphore Niépce Museum, Other Inventions - The velocipede However, in the 1860s in France, the vélocipède bicycle was created by attaching rotary cranks and pedals to the front-wheel hub of a dandy-horse.
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Two-person rail-cycle draisine with four wheels A draisine () is a light auxiliary rail vehicle, driven by service personnel, equipped to transport crew and material necessary for the maintenance of railway infrastructure. The eponymous term is derived from the German inventor Baron Karl Drais, who invented his Laufmaschine (German for "running machine") in 1817, which was called Draisine in German (vélocipède or draisienne in French) by the press. It is the first reliable claim for a practically used precursor to the bicycle, basically the first commercially successful two-wheeled, steerable, human-propelled machine, nicknamed hobby-horse or dandy horse. Drais' dandy horse, called Draisine in German, whose name was inherited by the rail vehicle Later, the name draisine came to be applied only to the invention used on rails and was extended to similar vehicles, even when not human-powered.
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This occurs in the opening scene of the film, set in the 1830s, when Disraeli was still a writer and a famous dandy. In the 1997 film Amistad, a citizen is briefly seen riding a dandy-horse through a forest trail when the escaped slaves first land on American soil. A bi-annual magazine called "dandyhorse", based in Toronto, Canada, promotes art, fashion and cycling culture.
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Only in England did the bicycle remain popular, and England was the site of all of the next major improvements to the machine. Michaux is often given credit for the idea of attaching pedals to the dandy horse, and thus for the invention of the bicycle—however, bicycle historian David V. Herlihy thinks that it was Lallement who deserves that credit. Michaux died in France.
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Drais was a prolific inventor, who invented the Laufmaschine ("running machine"), also later called the velocipede, draisine (English) or draisienne (French), also nicknamed the hobby horse or dandy horse. This was his most popular and widely recognized invention. It incorporated the two-wheeler principle that is basic to the bicycle and motorcycle and was the beginning of mechanized personal transport. This was the earliest form of a bicycle, without pedals.
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At the fourth conference, in Boston, Massachusetts, Oct. 11-16, 1993, David V. Herlihy presented evidence that Pierre Lallement deserves credit for putting pedals on the dandy horse instead of Pierre Michaux. At the eighth conference in Glasgow, the German professor Hans-Erhard Lessing reported that the famous drawing of a bicycle attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was a hoax.Hans-Erhard Lessing: The Leonardo da Vinci Bicycle Hoax.
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Niépce The dandy horse, or draisienne, invented by Karl Drais and the first vehicle with two wheels arranged in tandem, was controlled by a bar connected to the front steering mechanism and held by the riders' two hands. The first handlebars were solid bars of steel or wood, depending on the manufacturer. Curved, moustache-shaped, drop handlebars became popular in the 1920s and were invented by Percy Stenton of Ardwick, Manchester. Whatton bars were developed in attempt to improve the safety of penny-farthings.
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Draisine. The history of the study of bike dynamics is nearly as old as the bicycle itself. It includes contributions from famous scientists such as Rankine, Appell, and Whipple. In the early 19th century Karl von Drais, credited with inventing the two-wheeled vehicle variously called the laufmaschine, velocipede, draisine, and dandy horse, showed that a rider could balance his device by steering the front wheel. In 1869, Rankine published an article in The Engineer repeating von Drais's assertion that balance is maintained by steering in the direction of a lean.
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Keaton had art director Fred Grabourne build fully functional replicas of trains with attention to every detail of their authenticity. However Keaton chose not to use the early US DeWitt Clinton engine and instead had Grabourne build a replica of Stephenson's Rocket because he thought it looked funnier. He also employed a dandy horse which, by the 1830s, would have been out of fashion. The traveling shots of the locomotive are clear precursors to later work on The General (1926) and were shot in the same Oregon locations.
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Wooden draisine (around 1820), the earliest two-wheeler Drais's 1817 design made to measure The first verifiable claim for a practically used bicycle belongs to German Baron Karl von Drais, a civil servant to the Grand Duke of Baden in Germany. Drais invented his Laufmaschine (German for "running machine") in 1817, that was called Draisine (English) or draisienne (French) by the press. Karl von Drais patented this design in 1818, which was the first commercially successful two-wheeled, steerable, human-propelled machine, commonly called a velocipede, and nicknamed hobby-horse or dandy horse. It was initially manufactured in Germany and France.
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Lallement was born on October 25, 1843 in Pont- à-Mousson near Nancy, France. In 1862 while Lallement was employed building baby carriages in Nancy he saw someone riding a dandy horse, a forerunner of the bicycle that required the rider to propel the vehicle by walking. Lallement modified what he had seen by adding a transmission comprising a rotary crank mechanism and pedals attached to the front-wheel hub, thus creating the first true bicycle. He moved to Paris in 1863 and apparently interacted with the Olivier brothers who saw commercial potential in his invention.
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David V. Herlihy presented evidence at the fourth International Cycling History Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, Oct. 11-16, 1993, that Lallement deserves credit for putting pedals on the dandy horse. A three-and-a-half-mile section of Boston's bike network that snakes through Southwest Corridor Park from Forest Hills to Back Bay is named the Pierre Lallement Bike Path.Boston Globe: Eric Moskowitz, "Bike path upgrade draws compliments for state," July 18, 2010, accessed July 18, 2010Massachusetts Department of Transportation: "Pierre Lallement Bike Path (3.5 miles)" , accessed July 18, 2010 It passes not far from the house where Lallement died in 1891.
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Chalon in the 19th century is best known as the birthplace of photography. Its most famous resident, Nicéphore Niépce also has a lycée (secondary school) named after him. There is a museum which contains some early photography relics, located on the Quai des Messageries in the town, containing more than two million photographs and many old artefacts such as cameras and other equipment for old and modern photography. Also on display are Niépce's 1807 Pyréolophore which is probably the world's first internal combustion engine, plus his 1818 implementation of a dandy horse, for which he coined the word vélocipède.
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Johnson created an improved version of the German Karl Drais's Draisine, the archetypal bicycle. Johnson's "pedestrian curricle" was patented in London in December 1818, becoming Britain's first bicycle. It featured an elegantly curved wooden frame, allowing the use of larger wooden wheels. Several parts were made of metal, which allowed the vehicle to be lighter than the continental version. Although Johnson referred to his machine as a ‘pedestrian curricle’, it was formally referred to as a ‘velocipede’, and popularly as a ‘Hobby-horse’, ‘Dandy-horse’, ‘Pedestrian's accelerator’, ‘Swift walker’ and by a variety of other names.
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The most common type of velocipede today is the bicycle. The term was probably first coined by Karl von Drais in French as vélocipède for the French translation of his advertising leaflet for his version of the Laufmaschine, also now called a 'dandy horse', which he had developed in 1817. It is ultimately derived from the Latin velox, veloc- 'swift' + pes, ped- 'foot'.Oxford Dictionary of English, 'velocipede' The term 'velocipede' is today mainly used as a collective term for the different forerunners of the monowheel, the unicycle, the bicycle, the dicycle, the tricycle and the quadracycle developed between 1817 and 1880.
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The construction of the boneshaker was similar to the dandy horse: wooden wheels with iron tires and a framework of wrought iron. As the name implies it was extremely uncomfortable, but the discomfort was somewhat ameliorated by a long flat spring that supported the saddle and absorbed many of the shocks from rough road surfaces. The boneshaker also had a brakea metal lever that pressed a wooden pad against the rear wheel. The front wheel axle ran in lubricated bronze bearings, and some had small lubrication tanks that would wick oil from soaked lamb's wool into the bearings to help them run smoothly.
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The dandy-horse was a two-wheeled vehicle, with both wheels in-line, propelled by the rider pushing along the ground with the feet as in regular walking or running. The front wheel and handlebar assembly was hinged to allow steering. Drais was inspired, at least in part, by the need to develop a form of transit that did not rely on the horse. After the eruption of Mount Tambora and the Year Without a Summer (1816), which followed close on the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars, widespread crop failures and food shortages resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of horses, which either starved to death or were killed to provide meat and hides.
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To most the invention of the bicycle was by the German Baron Karl von Drais, who rode his 1816 machine while collecting taxes from his tenants. He patented his "draisine" (or "draisienne"), a "pushbike" powered by the action of the rider's feet pushing against the ground. Reports of early forebears of the bicycle were velocipedes, and included many human-powered vehicles. One, the scooter-like dandy horse or celerifere of the French Comte de Sivrac, dating to 1790, was long cited as the earliest bicycle, however, most historians now believe these unsteerable hobby-horses probably never existed, but were made up by Louis Baudry de Saunier, a 19th-century French bicycle historian.
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This was the world's first balance bicycle and quickly became popular in both the United Kingdom and France, where it was sometimes called a draisine (German and English), draisienne (French), a vélocipède (French), a swiftwalker, a dandy horse (as it was very popular among dandies) or a Hobby horse. It was made entirely of wood and metal and despite the condition of the roads at the time was sometimes ridden for long distances. It was almost 40 years until "velocipede" came into common usage as a generic term, with the launch of the first pedal-equipped bicycle, developed by Pierre Michaux, Pierre Lallement and the Olivier brothers in the 1860s. The Michaux company was the first to mass-produce the velocipede, from 1857 to 1871.
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Lallement left France in July 1865 for the United States, settling in Ansonia, Connecticut, where he built and demonstrated an improved version of his bicycle. With James Carroll of New Haven as his financer, he filed the earliest and only American patent application for the pedal-bicycle in April 1866, and the patent was awarded on November 20, 1866.Patent search tool: "search: 59915", accessed July 18, 2010 His patent drawing shows a machine bearing a great resemblance to the style of dandy-horse built by Denis Johnson of London, with its serpentine frame, the only differences being, first, the addition of the pedals and cranks, and, second, a thin strip of iron above the frame acting as a spring upon which he mounted the saddle to provide a more comfortable ride. Failing to interest an American manufacturer in producing his machine, Lallement returned to Paris in 1868, just as the Michaux bicycles were creating the first bicycle craze in France, an enthusiasm which spread to the rest of Europe and to America.
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