Monday, April 18, 2011

Crochet a bicycle

It is my first toy that I made without any instructions.
This crochet bicycle copy of Specialized Roubaix Bicycle made as Christmas present to my husband.
It crocheted 100% cotton blue, white, yellow and black and then starch. Hook 1.65mm. Size is approximately 4inches long and 2inches tall.

Vehicles for human transport that have two wheels and require balancing by the rider date back to the early 19th century. The first means of transport making use of two wheels arranged consecutively, and thus the archetype of the bicycle, was the German draisine dating back to 1817. The term bicycle was coined in France in the 1860s.
There are several early but unverified claims for the invention of bicycle-like machines.
The earliest comes from a sketch said to be from 1534 and attributed to Gian Giacomo Caprotti, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci. In 1998 Hans-Erhard Lessing described this as a purposeful fraud. However, the authenticity of the bicycle sketch is still vigorously maintained by followers of Prof. Augusto Marinoni, a lexicographer and philologist, who was entrusted by the Commissione Vinciana of Rome with the transcription of da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus.
Later, and equally unverified, is the contention that Comte the Sivrac developed a célérifère in 1792, demonstrating it at the Palais-Royal in France. The célérifère supposedly had two wheels set on a rigid wooden frame and no steering, directional control being limited to that attainable by leaning.
A rider was said to have sat astride the machine and pushed it along using alternate feet. It is now thought that the two-wheeled célérifère never existed (though there were four-wheelers) and it was instead a misinterpretation by the well-known French journalist Louis Baudry de Saunier in 1891.

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