Bicycles, Sociable Tricycles, and the Automobile’s Nativity

1885 Benz Motorwagen

Bicycles, Tricycles, and the Automobile’s Nativity

Leip[ziger Illustrierte Zeitung, October 7, 1882

In my The Automobile and American Life, I spend considerable time exploring the  between the bicycle and the coming of automotive technology and automobility. Recently I have been examining Carl Benz’ life and work in more detail, and ran across Griffith Borgeson’s excellent essay on in a 1986 Automobile Quarterly Magazine (Volume 24, No. 1).

 The link between bicycle technology, those engaged in the industry, and social habits has been explained time and time again. But to connect the Social Tricycle (two-person) and the first Benz trike machine escaped me until now. I did not know that the two trikes built by James Starley and William Hillman (later of auto fame)  and gifted to Queen Victoria were important stimuli to the forthcoming bicycle craze in Britain. I did not know specifically the various bike innovations: the tangent-spoked wire wheel (1874); the development of differential gearing connected to the two drive wheels; the manufacture of thin-walled steel tubing in 1877; the invention of ball bearings; the chain and sprocket drive (1879); and the bush-roller chain (1880) were precursors to a system of technology that crystallized in Benz’ 1885-1886 machine. I had covered all of this superficially before, but not with any authoritative detail.

Tandem form tricycles were quite popular, but now largely forgotten in favor of the bicycleswe think of from our own experiences.

1883 Victoria Rotary




Note the parallel to the Benz Motorwagen!

As Borgeson concluded (p.19):

"Benz has merely to adapt the ball-bearing, chain drive, differential equipped Centaur-type of sociable trike to his purposes. The engineering of the basic vehicle and already been done. Bonneville obviously was not aware of the connection between Benz, through his partners, and Kleyer. It was probably Benz himself who stated that he obtained his wire wheels from Kleyer, a datum which is ubiquitous in the German literature. But Bonneville does happen to mention that Kleyer manufactured sociable tricycles. Shops that were competent to bending otherwise work with new-fangled steel tubing were rare in the world at that time. It may well be that Kleyer provided the entire vehicle, ready to receive the Benz engine and to adapt its belt drive to tis conventional chain and sprocket final drive, with differential gearing."

More coming on Benz and Mercedes-Benz soon.