Earliest unverifiable history
There are several early but unverifiable claims for the
invention of bicycle-like machines.The earliest comes from an illustration
found in a church window in Stoke Poges, installed in the 16th century,
showing a naked angel on a bicycle-like device, and from a
sketch said to be from 1493 and attributed to Gian Giacomo Caprotti, a
pupil of Leonardo da Vinci. Hans-Erhard Lessing recently claimed that this
last assertion is a purposeful fraud. However, the authenticity of the bicycle
sketch is still vigorously maintained by followers of Prof. Augusto Marinoni, a
lexicographer and philologist, who was entrusted by the Commissione Vinciana of
Rome with the transcription of da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus. Later, and equally
unverifiable, is the contention that Comte de Sivrac developed
a célérifère in 1791, demonstrating it at
the Palais-Royal in France. The célérifère supposedly had
two wheels set on a rigid wooden frame and no steering, directional control
being limited to that attainable by leaning. A rider was said to have to
sat astride the machine and pushed it along using alternate feet. We now know a
two-wheeled célérifère never existed (though there were
four-wheelers) and it was a misinterpretation by the well known French
journalist Louis Baudry de Saunier in 1891
