“Bicycle” in German: das Fahrrad and das Velo

The bicycle is one of those everyday things we take for granted. Almost everyone as a child learns to ride a bike (trainer wheels with mom or dad as coach). I grew up riding various Schwinn bicycles (more on that below) around my former hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina before I turned 16 and got a driving license.

American Greg LeMond in the yellow jersey of race leader at the start of the final stage of the 1990 Tour de France in Brétigny-sur-Orge. PHOTO: Chris Time (Wikimedia Commons)

Europeans tend to use bicycles more in daily life, and at an older age than most North Americans. It’s not unusual to see Germans or French people in their 70s riding a bike to go shopping. But a very famous road racing cyclist with a French surname grew up near my current hometown of Reno, Nevada, learning to ride in Washoe Valley and on the nearby hilly roads of the Sierra Nevada. He even attended the Reno high school where I later taught German, often riding his bike between school and home, detouring via the Mount Rose highway and Lake Tahoe, a distance of at least 45-50 miles. Now retired, Greg LeMond (b. 1961) became the first non-European to win the Tour de France in 1986. Following a hunting accident and two surgeries, LeMond made a stunning comeback by winning the 1989 Tour. He won the Tour de France again in 1990, for a total of three times. LeMond was a pioneer in the use carbon fiber bicycle frames, and later founded LeMond Bicycles. He would later suffer for his strong anti-doping stand, particularly for his criticism of fellow American racer Lance Armstrong. He was later vindicated when the Armstrong doping scandal blew up. LeMond now lives in Tennessee with his wife and their three children.

So the bicycle is a worldwide phenomenon that we all rarely give a second thought, except in my case, when almost getting run over by Radfahrer/innen while walking in Berlin. Whether you call it a bicycle, ein Fahrrad (Germany/Austria), or ein Velo (in Swiss German, from “velocipede,” literally “fast foot”), the pedal-powered (or hand-cranked) two-wheeled mode of transportation has a large impact on our daily lives. Alie has also written about her own British bike experiences in her early days in Germany. But what is the bicycle’s origin story? Who invented the darned thing?

A draisine, the first bicycle prototype, on display at the Kurpfälzisches Museum in Heidelberg. This model dates from about 1820. Learn more below. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

Another German Invention: The Automobile

The motor car and the bicycle were both responses to the need for a better horse. The first automobile in 1885 was a three-wheeled motorized carriage, later a four-wheeled carriage, known as the “horseless carriage.” The first practical bicycle prototype was also inspired by a need to replace the horse with a better way of getting around over shorter distances that was faster than a person walking.

Most people know that the automobile was invented in Germany in the mid-1880s – independently by two men who lived within 60 miles of each other. Karl Benz (1844-1929), Gottfried Daimler (1834-1900), and the Daimler-Benz company (now Daimler AG) they founded in 1926 are pretty well known. But very few people are familiar with Karl von Drais (1785-1851), the German aristocrat who invented the first bicycle in 1817. Actually it was a bicycle prototype that Drais called a “running machine” (Laufmaschine) because it did not yet have pedals, and was powered by foot. Later known as the draisine or velocipede, the inventor later said he got the idea from ice skating.

A rendering of Drais’ wooden velocipede invention. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

Drais’ two-wheel wooden device was very similar to the bicycles we use today, but it did not have any pedals, gears, or even handle bars. There was a wooden shaft used for steering (see photo). The first 7-kilometer (4.3 mi) test run on his new machine was made on 12 June 1817 from Drais’ home in Mannheim to an inn in what is now the Rheinau district of the city. The roundtrip over hilly terrain took him about one hour at an average speed of 15 km/h (9.3 mph).

Considering that traditional horse-drawn wagons and coaches all had four wheels, Drais’s two-wheel invention was groundbreaking and quite clever. Unfortunately for him, he would not make a lot of money from his clever idea, and in the end he ended up a broken man.

Although Drais was able to obtain something similar to a patent from Grand Duke Carl of Baden, it was not long before copies of his device were being made all over Europe. By the 1820s Drais was no longer able to make money selling his invention. After returning from a five-year expedition to Brazil in 1827, Drais attempted several more inventions, including the first typewriter with a keyboard (eine Schnellschreibmaschine), but he was never able to turn any of his inventions into a source of income.

After his father’s death in 1830, Drais found himself in financial difficulty. His attempt to get back his old post as a forester failed. He later made the mistake of intentionally giving up his title for political reasons, making enemies of people who might have helped him. Karl Drais died in semi-poverty on 10 December 1851 in Karlsruhe, the city where he had been born. The house in which he lived last was not far from where a young Karl Benz was raised.

Bicycle Advances

As with many inventions, the bicycle can’t be credited to any one inventor. Following Drais’s wooden velocipede, which fell out of favor because of the lack of paved roads and rutted dirt roads that made it difficult to navigate with his 50-pound device, other inventors contributed to what today is known as a bicycle.

1853 – Fischer
The first refinements are not all completely confirmed by historical records, but in 1853 another German by the name of Philipp Moritz Fischer of Schweinfurt added pedals to the front wheel of the draisine, allowing locomotion without placing one’s feet on the ground. Fischer had used a draisine to travel between home and school for many years before adding his improvement. An original model of Fischer’s Tretkurbelfahrrad is on display in a Schweinfurt museum. However, Fischer’s pedal-powered version never gained widespread acceptance in Germany or elsewhere.

The New York company Pickering and Davis invented this pedal bicycle for ladies in 1869. PHOTO: Copy of an engraving from The velocipede: its history, varieties, and practice by J.T. Goddard, p. 85. (Wikimedia Commons)

1860s – Michaux’s and Lallement’s “boneshaker”
The velocipede’s renaissance began in Paris during the late 1860s when a French metalworker attached pedals to the front wheel around 1864. Although the French were not the first to do that, they did make their revised contraption popular in France, England, and the United States. Bicycle historians disagree about the actual identity of the Frenchman who first added pedals, but Pierre Michaux (and his brother Ernest) and Pierre Lallement are the main candidates. But their work was still based on Karl von Drais’ original draisine. Despite the pedals, the crank craze soon faded again due to the velocipede’s rigid frame and iron-banded wheels that resulted in a bone-jarring ride and the “boneshaker” nickname in England and the USA. Any real advance in the popularity of the velocipede would have to wait for rubber tires, ball bearings, and above all better road surfaces.

1870s – The high-wheel (Hochrad) bike
It is easy to forget that for many years, the most popular bicycle in the world was a high-wheeler with a giant front wheel and a much smaller rear wheel (photo below). As time went by, the front wheel grew in size in an effort to increase speed and stability. These high-wheelers (“penny-farthings” in England), with front wheel heights of up to five feet, became the norm for a while, and were popular with racers. Credit for this stage of bicycle development usually goes to another Frenchman. Eugène Meyer is now regarded as the father of the high bicycle, rather than the Englishman James Starley (who built his Ariel high-wheeler in 1870). Meyer also invented the wire-spoke tension wheel in 1869 and produced a classic high bicycle design into the 1880s.

A rider uses the rear mounting peg to help him mount a high-wheeler replica in Prague’s Zbraslav Square, in an exhibition by the Veteran Bicycle Club Zbraslav in 2011. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

But the Hochrad proved too difficult and dangerous for average riders. After serious “header” accidents, the high-wheeler fell out of favor, to be replaced by the “safety bike” – what we now call simply a bicycle, with two equal-sized wheels. It was, ironically, John Kemp Starley, James’s nephew, who produced the Rover, the first successful model of a safety bike, in 1884. By 1886 Starley’s metal tube Rover III looked like most modern bicycles. It also featured a chain-driven rear wheel, handle bars, front brake pads, and other things we take for granted today. When John Boyd Dunlop patented the pneumatic rubber tire with air valve in 1888, the bike as we know it was pretty much in existence at that point. It was the death knell for the high-wheeler. By 1893 high-wheelers were no longer produced, although they continued to be used for racing into the 1920s.

“Schwinn-Built”: Ignaz Schwinn Goes to America

When I was a boy growing up in Charlotte in the 1950s, every kid wanted a Schwinn bicycle. I didn’t know it at the time, but even Elvis had a Schwinn. I also didn’t know anything about the Schwinn company in Chicago. I just knew I wanted a Schwinn-built bicycle. They were cool.

Ignaz Schwinn (1860-1948) was born on 1 April 1860 in Hardheim, a small town in what was then the Grand Duchy of Baden, in the southwest German Empire. Ignaz was the second of seven children. His father died when he was eleven. Ignaz was sent to vocational school where he apprenticed as a machinist. Ignaz was fascinated by the high-wheeled bikes of the day, and he began to travel around working on bikes and bike parts. Eventually he got a job in the machine shop of Heinrich Kleyer. Soon Ignaz became a designer and plant manager at Kleyer, which was soon manufacturing some of the first safety bicycles in Germany, early versions of the normal bikes we see today. By 1889, he was tasked with planning and supervising a new factory for Kleyer.

Ignaz Schwinn. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

But Ignaz Schwinn wanted to be more independent and do his own thing. He decided he could best do that in the United States. In 1891 31-year-old Ignaz arrived in Chicago. By 1895 he had established Arnold, Schwinn & Company to produce bicycles. Adolf Arnold was Schwinn’s financial backer (hence the top billing) and Schwinn ran the business. In 1908 Schwinn bought out his partner and enlarged the factory to meet the increasing demand for Schwinn bicycles and later (Excelsior) motorcycles.

By the end of World War I, Frank W. Schwinn, Ignaz’s son, had joined the family business, mostly working in the motorcycle division. Like most businesses at the time, the company hit a rough patch following the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing Depression. The motorcycle business shut down in 1930 in order to concentrate on bicycles. Ignaz retired after 1931, and Frank took over. His motorcycle experience influenced his designs for new bicycles. The company also saw a need to improve their bike tires. The combination of a fatter, wire-beaded, double-tube balloon tire and a smaller 26-inch wheel size, along with redesigned sturdier frames would later result in the “mountain bike” of the 1970s.

Although Schwinn had one of the best-known brand names in the US, like other well-known companies (Sears, Roebuck; Chrysler Motors, etc.) it was a victim of changing supply and labor economics. In January 1993 this notice appeared in the New York Times: “After 97 years of family ownership, the Schwinn Bicycle Company plans to ask a Federal bankruptcy judge here on Tuesday for permission to sell most of its assets, including its name, to the Zell-Chilmark Fund, an investment partnership that specializes in acquiring financially strapped businesses, and Scott U.S.A., a company in Sun Valley, Idaho, that makes ski equipment and bicycles.”

The Schwinn family ended up with $2.5 million. Edward R. Schwinn Jr., the company’s chief executive and great-grandson of the founder, Ignaz Schwinn, lost that post. The bankruptcy led to a 1994 lawsuit, with 14 members of the Schwinn family disputing the sale. The current Schwinn company is no longer really connected to the Schwinn family. Sadly, Schwinn is now just a brand within Dorel Sports, a division of Dorel Industries Inc.

I hope you enjoyed this brief tour through bicycle history, along with its German connections. In closing, a bit of bicycle trivia:

• • In 2018 Netflix teamed up with Schwinn to create Mike’s bike for the “Stranger Things” series. Only 500 units were made and they sold out via phone order in two weeks.
  • Two popular German joke (corny, dated) nicknames for a bicycle are Drahtesel (“wire donkey”) and Stahlross (“steel steed”).
  • Schwinn also manufactured a few automobiles in the early 1900s. Many pioneer automobile builders were first bicycle manufacturers, including Charles Duryea, Alexander Winton, and Albert A. Pope. Also, Wilbur and Orville Wright were bicycle makers before turning their attention to aerodynamics. Glenn Curtiss, another aviation pioneer, also started out as a bicycle manufacturer.

– HF