spirited drawings by Rowlandson and the Cruickshanks are now regarded as prized relics by cyclists of historical tastes. One of these drawings, which we reproduce, gives a good, although exaggerated, idea of the action of a rider of a dandy-horse at full speed. A Continental inventor, one Gompertz, came out with an improvement upon the ordinary hobby-horse, providing an auxiliary driving-power for the front wheel. A cogged wheel was fixed to the side of the front hub, and a sextant-shaped rack gearing with this and moved by a lever which was also used as a steering-handle, served to drive the wheel forward.
Julien's machine.
The hobby-horse mania seems to have died out almost as suddenly as it came into being, and a period of blankness in cycle invention followed. A French patent of 1830, granted to a M. Julien, relates to an invention not very easy to comprehend. In the drawing it will be observed that the gentle soul in the chimney-pot hat works a sort of "everlasting staircase" (this being a slang term for the treadmill), by that means turning an immense wheel in front. A thing herein difficult to understand (although it really may be a hidden beauty) is the balancing and steering of this elegant instrument, the inventor having carefully refrained from finding anything, mischief or otherwise, for his victim's idle hands to do. Another difficulty is suggested by the back wheel. We quite appreciate M. Julien's good intentions in providing a couple of spikes to prevent the whole arrangement running backward when proceeding uphill, but he seems to have forgotten that some retarding effect to forward motion might be involved therein. Perhaps he found the thing so tremendously speedy that something of a check was necessary; or the contrivance may have been intended to plough with.
Bramley and Parker's machine.
Later in the same year Messrs. Bramley and Parker, in England, went in for something comprehensive and elaborate. They have, at any rate, the honour of inventing the first tandem tricycle. In their drawing they omit the nearer hind wheel, whereby we have the advantage of a clear view of Mr. Parker (or is it Mr. Bramley?) working his best in a sort of swimming attitude. The more favoured partner (whose hat is really too large) steers by an arrangement obviously suggested by the rudder wheel of a ship, and drives by an arrangement more humbly derived from the travelling knifegrinder. The hinder gentleman obviously has not come out to admire the landscape, and it is to be hoped that his hat may never fall among all that mechanism, for its own sake.
Cochrane's machine.
In 1831 Mr. Alexander Cochrane invented the first recorded road machine in which the rowing motion was used. Several inventors since this time have devoted their ingenuity to adapting this motion to cycles, without any particular success. Why it is considered desirable to go out of the way to use an action obviously foreign to and unsuitable for the road, is one of those things which perhaps will never be explained. Cochrane's notion, however, was
