In March 1877, James Starley, a sewing-machine maker in Coventry, England, unveiled a strange offshoot of the tricycle. It had one large wheel on the left and two much smaller ones on the right. The rider sat between the wheels, driving with a pair of levers and steering on a crank. A few years later, Starley’s new designs had grown so popular that the queen bought two for herself.

Whereas the history of two-wheeled vehicles starts in 1817, when a German named Karl Drais devised a “running machine” that worked like a Flintstones car, inventors had long been much more forward-thinking when it came to trikes. A watchmaker, Stephan Farfler, built a three-wheeled, hand-powered vehicle in the 17th century, and lever-driven, three-wheeled “pilentums” or “accelerators” were around by 1820. “There were half a dozen kinds of tricycles in Germany and France and England,” says Glen Norcliffe, a geographer and tricycle historian at York University, “but they never really took off. They were prototypes.”

Image Three-Wheeler: A later version of James Starley’s Coventry Rotary tricycle, as manufactured by the Rudge-WhitworthCompany. Princess (later Queen) Alexandra, wife of Edward VII, rode a similar model, fitted with pneumatic tires. Credit... From University of Toronto

By the 1860s, biking was a mainstream pastime. Huge front wheels made for fast machines, with riders perched unsteadily on top. As the hobby grew more popular, some sought a safer ride — for women and older men. “At first, Starley tried to do this with a sort of sidesaddle penny-farthing, a crablike machine that never worked,” Norcliffe says. “Eventually he decided that he needed another wheel to balance it.” So he produced something more like the old pilentums. Soon Starley had a three-wheeled vehicle that worked with pedals and a chain and rack-and-pinion steering. The boom that he created quickly ended, though. By the turn of the century, both men and women were riding safety bikes, with wheels of equal size and better tires. And the market for bigger, more expensive machines shifted from the trike to the automobile.