ABSTRACT
In 2017, the bicycle celebrated two hundred years since its inception, in the form of a ‘draisine’, the first practically used, yet very rudimentary two-wheeled, steerable, human-propelled machine, invented in 1817 by the German baron Karl Dreis. Yet, despite its well-established history, only briefly did the bicycle represent the main form of locomotion in cities across the world. Its golden age, which coincided with cycling making the transition from a bourgeois pastime to a working-class activity, merely stretched from the late 1800s up until the early 1960s. And while the non-Western world, China and India might still have enjoyed high levels of cycling until the turn of last century, the reign of the bicycle was certainly short-lived.
