It’s 1839. A man swings one leg over a saddle on a long wooden frame; one extremely large wheel is behind him and a smaller wheel straight ahead. He pushes off the ground with his feet and then places them in front of him on two wooden pedals either side of the frame, pushing them back and forth, driving the machine forward. The man is Kirkpatrick Macmillan and he has just taken the first ever ride on his new invention: the pedal bicycle.
Born in the Dumfriesshire village of Kier on 2nd September 1812, Macmillan was the son of a blacksmith and followed his father’s footsteps into the trade. At the time, foot-propelled vehicles called hobby-horses or swiftwalkers, powered by the rider’s feet pushing off the ground, had been around for a couple of decades, but Macmillan realised he could improve the machine. He built his own version and added a treadle linkage mechanism – essentially push and pull pedals. In 1842, it was reported that Macmillan cycled his creation more than 60
