History of the Bicycle

Wikipedia has a very interesting article on the history of the bicycle from the very earliest precursors to modern times:

In Germany Karl von Drais, a civil servant to the Grand Duke of Baden, who had studied mathematics, physics, and architecture at the university of Heidelberg invented his Laufmaschine (running machine) of 1817 that was called draisine by the press and then velocipede. He did it in response to starvation and dying horses after a crop failure the year before ("eighteen hundred and froze to death," a snow summer due to the volcanic eruption of Tambora).

The requirement of balancing was nearly insurmountable for the average population, with only a few young men being ice skaters at that time. Therefore the velocipede was pushed by the feet against the ground and no attempt was undertaken by Drais nor by mechanics elsewhere to take the feet off safe ground and to put them on pedals . . . On his first reported spin from Mannheim on June 12, 1817, he covered 8 miles (13 km) in less than an hour. The wooden draisine weighed 48 pounds (22 kg) or less, had brass bushings within the wheels, a rear-wheel brake and 6 inches (152 mm) trail of the front-wheel for a self-centering castor effect.