![]() ![]() ![]() Crashes sometimes resulted in severe head and neck injuries. Penny-farthing bicycles were known for causing headers-pitching riders head-first off the bike if the wheel struck a rock or rut in the road. “In their heyday, a lot of people died riding these,” Richard Thoday, the 2015 UK National Penny Farthing Champion, told the Telegraph. However, bikers perched about five feet high and almost over the front axle on a machine without any brakes made this early form of bike racing extremely dangerous. The penny-farthing marked the beginning of cycling sports. The name penny-farthing comes from the British penny and farthing coins, which, when placed next to each other, are of a similar size ratio to the front and back wheels. Mechanics found that bikes could reach higher speeds the larger they made the front wheel, which resulted in the outrageously large front wheel of the penny-farthing. Inspired by the wooden-wheeled “boneshaker” velocipede, the penny-farthing was built by James Starley, known as the father of the bicycle industry, around the 1870s. Bowtle peddling furiously, his penny-farthing gliding along the track and passing his competitors in the one-mile race at the Challenge Cup in Herne Hill, London. ![]() The video above, captured in 1928, shows biker C.J. In the late 1800s, racing cyclists looped around tracks on top of two-wheeled penny-farthings-the first machine to ever be called a bicycle. ![]()
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