IELTS Reading онлайн: текст с вопросами и баллом

From hobby horse to safety bicycle

A In the summer of 1817, a German civil servant named Karl Drais rode a strange wooden machine along a road near the city of Mannheim. It had two wheels in a line, a seat and a bar for steering, but no pedals: the rider pushed it along by striding against the ground. Drais called his invention the Laufmaschine, or 'running machine', and on that first journey he reportedly covered around 13 kilometres in about an hour, noticeably faster than walking. Some historians have linked the invention to a series of poor harvests at the time, which had made horses expensive to feed, although Drais himself never stated this as his reason.

B The running machine enjoyed a brief period of fashion. In Britain and France, copies known as 'hobby horses' or 'dandy horses' became a toy of wealthy young men. However, the craze faded within a few years. The machines were heavy and uncomfortable on rough roads, and riders who used pavements to avoid the mud annoyed pedestrians so much that several cities, including London, banned them from footpaths.

C For almost half a century, the idea of a two-wheeled machine was largely forgotten. It returned in the 1860s in France, where makers attached pedals directly to the front wheel. This machine, the velocipede, allowed riders to lift their feet off the ground at last, but it earned the nickname 'boneshaker'. Its frame was made of iron and its wheels of wood with iron rims, and every stone in the road travelled straight up through the rider's body.

D Because the pedals were fixed to the front wheel, one turn of the pedals meant one turn of the wheel. The only way to go faster was therefore to make the wheel bigger. By the 1870s this logic had produced the 'high-wheeler', later called the penny-farthing in Britain after the largest and smallest coins of the day. Its front wheel could be up to one and a half metres in diameter, and the rider sat almost directly above it. The design was fast and, thanks to solid rubber tyres and wire spokes, far smoother than the boneshaker. It was also dangerous. If the front wheel struck an obstacle, the rider was likely to be thrown forwards over the handlebars, an accident so common that it had its own name: 'taking a header'. As a result, the high-wheeler was ridden mainly by athletic young men, and it did little to make cycling a popular activity.

E The breakthrough came in 1885, when the English engineer John Kemp Starley produced the Rover. Its two wheels were of similar size, and the rider sat between them, driving the back wheel with pedals and a chain. The chain meant that speed no longer depended on wheel size, because gearing could turn one rotation of the pedals into more than one rotation of the wheel. The rider's feet could reach the ground, and a fall was far less serious. Because it was so much safer, this design became known as the 'safety bicycle', and its basic layout, with two similar wheels, a chain to the back wheel and the rider in between, is still used by almost every bicycle today.

F One problem remained: comfort. Solid tyres made even the safety bicycle a jarring ride. In 1888 John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish vet living in Belfast, developed a practical air-filled tyre, reportedly to make his son's tricycle more comfortable. Within a few years, pneumatic tyres had become standard, and bicycles were both safe and comfortable for the first time.

G The effects of the new machine went far beyond transport. In the 1890s bicycles became one of the most popular consumer products in Europe and North America, and for many ordinary workers they offered a cheap way to travel further than they could walk. They were particularly important for women. The bicycle gave women a new degree of independence, and it encouraged a change towards more practical clothing, since long skirts could easily become caught in the chain. The American campaigner Susan B. Anthony said in 1896 that the bicycle had done more to free women than anything else in the world.