Planes and Bikes - a full cycle

Aeroplanes and bicycles have an unlikely affinity. It took bicycle builders to understand stability and build the first successful aeroplane. And now Sling Aircraft is using their plane building skills to make better bicycles.

OVER A CUP OF COFFEE with the editor of Bicycling Magazine I hear that Sling Aircraft’s Tagatis can cost almost R100,000 apiece. I had naively thought bikes are supposed to be the simplest and most basic form of mechanical transport. So why would a modern plane builder want to make bicycles?

The development history of bicycles is in itself interesting. Perhaps surprisingly, they are a modern invention and have been around less than 150 years – just a few years longer than cars.

Bicycle museum curator Mike Bruton says that the first commercially successful bicycle, and the beginning of the evolution of the modern bike, was the French velocipede, invented in 1863 by Pierre and Ernest Michaux in Paris. This bike, also called the boneshaker because of the bumpy ride from metal-rimmed wooden wheels, had pedals fixed to the front wheel hub.

The velocipede was a big hit and the staff in the Michaux factory swelled from two to over 300 in five years.

The problem was the rider could not pedal fast enough as the pedals were attached directly the wheel. One way to improve the gearing was to increase the diameter of the front wheel. This led to the development of the now absurd‘penny farthing’ with its enormous front wheel.

Mike Bruton writes that the modern bicycle only emerged in 1885 when J K Starley invented the ‘Rover safety bicycle’, that had two equal-sized wheels withthe rider seated on a saddle between them, which gave the bike a lower centre of gravity compared to the wobbly penny farthing. The key was the large front sprocket wheel connected to a smaller sprocket on the rear wheel by a chain and a free wheel hub.