Draisine

In 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted, ejecting so much ash into the atmosphere that 1816 became the Year Without a Summer. Crops failed across Europe. Horses starved. Oat prices skyrocketed. Karl von Drais, a civil servant and inventor in Mannheim, Germany, began working on a vehicle that did not need to eat. By June 12, 1817, he had built the Laufmaschine — a wooden frame with two inline wheels, a steering mechanism, and a padded saddle. The rider straddled it and pushed off the ground with alternating feet.

Drais demonstrated the machine by riding from Mannheim to the Schwetzinger relay station, a distance of about 13 kilometers, in under an hour. The press called it a Draisine, after its inventor. The idea spread rapidly: hobbyhorses and dandy horses appeared in Paris, London, and New York within two years. Denis Johnson built an improved version in London in 1819. Young men raced them in parks. Cities banned them from sidewalks.

The craze lasted about two years and collapsed. Without pedals, the Draisine was exhausting to ride on anything but flat, smooth roads — which barely existed. The word survived in a different application: railroad workers adopted draisine for the small hand-powered or motor-powered vehicles they used to inspect track. In French and German, a draisine is still a railroad maintenance vehicle.

Drais himself died in poverty in 1851. His invention was forgotten until historians of cycling rediscovered him in the twentieth century. He is now recognized as the inventor of the first steerable two-wheeled vehicle — the direct ancestor of the bicycle. The volcanic eruption that killed horses created the conditions for a horseless vehicle. Tambora's ash cloud led, through hunger and ingenuity, to a baron on two wheels in Mannheim.