| Kirkpatrick Macmillan |
Article Index for Kirkpatrick |
Website Links For Kirkpatrick |
Information AboutKirkpatrick Macmillan |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT KIRKPATRICK MACMILLAN | |
| 1812 births | |
| 1878 deaths | |
| people from dumfries and galloway | |
| scottish inventors | |
| blacksmiths | |
|
Johnston's articles stated that he completed construction of a pedal driven bicycle of wood in 1839 , and that it had iron-rimmed wooden wheels, a steerable 30 inch (760 mm) wheel in the front and a 40 inch (1016 mm) wheel in the rear which was connected to pedals via connecting rods. The entire machine weighed 57 lb (26 kg). Johnston connected him with a Glasgow Newspaper clip of 1842 that a gentleman was fined 5 Shilling s for speeding (8 mph or 13 km/h) and knocking down a girl who ran into the road. Johnston always suppressed that part of the clip that told: "it moved on wheels(!) turned by the hand(!) by means of a crank." Thus the report of this accident does not specify that the vehicle had 2 wheels -- a fact which would have been noteworthy at the time. Moreover Alastair Dodds observes that it seems most unlikely that an artisan would ever be described as a gentleman in former times. While MacMillan certainly existed and rode some velocipede, he certainly didn't ride the velocipedes published by Thomas McCall twenty years later in 1869 . All rear-wheel driven velocipedes were a reaction to the Michaux Velocipede . The copies on exhibit e.g. at the Science Museum , London , England are all McCall's velocipedes, also the one at The Glasgow Museum Of Transport that has the purported original. According to bicycle historian David Herlihy, there is no contemporary documentary evidence that a pedal-crank design was applied to a 2-wheeled vehicle; in addition, letters from customers in Scotland to the Michaux company in 1868 state that all of the Human-powered Vehicle s there are Tricycles and Quadricycles . All of this casts severe doubts on the authenticity of the claims made for Macmillan's priority in bicycle design. Besides Herlihy's book there is a short introdutction in David Gordon Wilson's Bicycling Science, 3rd edition. A plaque on the family smithy Courthill reads "He builded better than he knew." - a good pun indeed. This hoopla in 1990 was one reason for the foundation of the International Cycling-History Conference (ICHC) that assembled in the Glasgow Museum of Transport for the first time in 1990, while a "Macmillan ride" took place in nearby Keir. CRITICAL LITERATURE
DEVOUT EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|