Wheels and wheeling; an indispensable handbook for cyclists, with over two hundred illustrations . the ball-and-socket principle, so that an accident that bends eitherthe levers or the cranks will not cause the machine toturn hard in consequence. The Xtra, the Facile, the American Star, and theAmerican Safety constitute, in a manner, a class bythemselves, though each has its own perfectly dis-tinctive features. They all depart from the type ofordinary bicycle, which prevailed when they wereinvented, and in seeking to secure increased safety and HISTORY OF THE BICYCLE. 71 greater ease of propul
Wheels and wheeling; an indispensable handbook for cyclists, with over two hundred illustrations . the ball-and-socket principle, so that an accident that bends eitherthe levers or the cranks will not cause the machine toturn hard in consequence. The Xtra, the Facile, the American Star, and theAmerican Safety constitute, in a manner, a class bythemselves, though each has its own perfectly dis-tinctive features. They all depart from the type ofordinary bicycle, which prevailed when they wereinvented, and in seeking to secure increased safety and HISTORY OF THE BICYCLE. 71 greater ease of propulsion, all adopted a lever its day, each was known as a Safety; but since1885 that term has come to be restricted so entirely tothe equal wheeled, rear driving, single chain Safety,that it is seldom used in connection with other introduction to the cycling public of these newtypes, and the success which each one achieved,opened the way, in a measure, for still more radicaldepartures, and still more strenuous efforts to producean ideal Safety. But the inventors had not waited. American Safety Bicycle—1885. until this time to make their initital efforts. Thoughthese machines may be regarded as constituting a linkbetween the ordinary and the modern Safety, theinventors had been at work for some time, and whiletheir efforts were not conspicuously successful until1884, it is necessary to go back as far as 1876 inorder to find what seems to be the real beginning ofthe Safety. It was about 1876 that H. T. Lawson, an English-man, invented a rear driving Safety which was manu- 72 WHEELS AND WHEELING. factured by Singer & Co. for a short time. It had alarge rear wheel driven by levers, and a very smallsteering wheel, with a vertical fork and cross handlesat the top of it. The rider sat nearly over the steeringwheel, where he was within reach of the handle bar,with the driving wheel behind him. Altogether, itmust have been a clumsy and slow affair, and one notlikely t
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