German city marks 200th anniversary of bicycle
MANNHEIM, Germany: A two-day street festival kicked off in Mannheim on Saturday to celebrate 200 years since the ever-popular bicycle was first invented in the south-western German city.
A number of stalls were to provide information as musicians and performance enlivened the scene.
At the historic city’s Water Tower landmark new bicycle models were on display, while there was also a market for used bicycles.
Among the events there was a discussion on the controversial issue of compulsory helmets for cyclists. Another theme was the construction of cycle freeways.
The bicycle is arguably one of the lowest-tech items around, yet ingenious in its the way it teams muscle power with a simple machine.
Credit for the bicycle goes, historians pretty much agree, to a German: Baron Karl von Drais, who set up street artists on June 12, 1817 climbed aboard his two-wheeled “running machine” for a test scoot in his home town of Mannheim, in south-western Germany.
With a wooden frame, two castiron wheels and no pedals, the “Draisine,” as the Germans called it, was patented by the baron in 1818.
The nobleman’s hobby horse was not a commercial success. But, in a manner of speaking, the bicycle was off and running.
Among the events in Mannheim on Saturday were a stunt show put on by cyclists from Belgium. But the highlight is a folding bike race around the Water Tower in which some 200 people are set to take part.
Thomas Kosche, of the city’s Technoseum technical museum, said that today’s Fixie — a single-speed, fixed-gear bike — is astonishingly similar to a bicycle that came onto the market around 1890.