The Maserati Birdcage of bicycles

Inspired by a bridge, a Danish inventor set out to build the world’s best bicycle – in his adopted Gloucestershire

OF THE HUNDREDS of weirdly framed bicycles that preceded the adoption of the diamond frame, none was more peculiar than that which rolled out from the Gloucestershire market town of Dursley at the dawn of the 20th Century.

The bicycle was designed by a Dane, Mikael Pedersen, who was born in 1855 in the small village of Fløng, close to Copenhagen. A talented inventor, Pedersen made his name by perfecting a centrifugal device for separating cream, and it was the success of this machine that lured him to Dursley in 1893.

A local manufacturer of agricultural equipment, RA Lister & Co, had acquired the UK distribution rights and Pedersen moved to Dursley with his family to work for Listers and share in the considerable profits from his invention, becoming a well-respected member of the local community.

In the 1890s the bicycle craze was sweeping Britain and much of Europe, and well-to-do athletic young men and women in their thousands were pedalling for fun, Mikael Pedersen among them. As he later related, he was cycling ‘up to 5000 miles a season’, and the combination of poor roads and hard leather was presumably giving his bum a beating, which set his inventor’s mind to designing a more comfortable saddle.

His idea was to create a hammock for the buttocks. His solution comprised a fine fanshaped mesh woven from string, spreading from a pointed nose to a curved metal bar at its rear. Small springs attached to the bar provided the rear suspension and an adjustable leather strap attached to the nose stretched forwards to a distant anchor point. And that was Pedersen’s next problem: having designed the perfect seat, he didn’t have a bicycle frame that provided the appropriate anchor points. So he rethought the frame, too.

Inspired by the scientifically triangulated and stressed Whipple-Murphy lightweight bridge, Pedersen devised a wilfully complex arrangement of small-diameter tubes that, with its chest-high multi-tube forks and wire tensioned cantilevered seat pillar, was unlike any other frame of the day. In effect a spaceframe, it was truly a Maserati Birdcage for the bicycle world.

Pedersen suspended his ‘hammock’ between the frame’s twin-towers and the result was, as promised, road-shock free, gentle on the soft parts and, despite its ungainly looks, surprisingly stable. In the lowhandlebarred version, however, the pointed apex of the front fork was in terrifying proximity to the rider’s jugular! A British patent was granted in 1894 and two years later the Pedersen Cycle Frame Company was formed. Unfortunately for Mikael, his first financial backer was Ernest Terah Hooley, a colourful entrepreneur, financial fraudster, serial bankrupt and sometime jailbird, dubbed by the press as ‘The Splendid Bankrupt’.

This first venture coincided with one of Hooley’s splendid bankruptcies and funding collapsed. The Listers then stepped in and a new company, the Dursley-Pedersen Cycle Co, was formed in 1899.

Pedersen’s machine coincided with the arrival of the diamond-frame bicycle, which almost overnight would become the dominant style, and it is thought that as few as 8000 machines left Dursley before production ceased in 1917.

Pedersen had become a wealthy man but by all accounts was a hopeless businessman. By the end of WW1 his business and personal life had fallen apart, his wife had left him and he vanished from view, only by chance to be spotted wandering destitute in London by a friend in 1920.

The friend arranged for him to return to Denmark, where his circumstances did not improve and he ended his days in a nursing home. He died in obscurity in 1929 and was buried in a pauper’s grave.

A final twist in the Pedersen saga came in 1995 when a group of British cycling enthusiasts persuaded the Danish authorities to allow his remains to be disinterred and reburied in Dursley. Nearly 200 DursleyPedersen owners, accompanied by the Danish Ambassador, gathered at the ceremony to celebrate his life and achievements. Curiously, his remains were returned, and buried, in a port wine box.

‘IN EFFECT A SPACEFRAME, IT WAS TRULY A MASERATI BIRDCAGE FOR THE BICYCLE WORLD’