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| Shot in Brooklyn yesterday at the 'Tweed Run', a pair of Ariel 'Ordinary' bicycles, ca. 1880; the Ladies' Model is especially rare, with a side-saddle! |
James Starley, considered the
Father of the British bicycle industry, felt he could improve on
Pierre Michaux's 'velocipede', the first commercially viable pedal-powered bicycle, which was essentially a 'Boneshaker' with eccentric pedals attached to the front wheel. Michaux's frame of serpentine-bent steel tended to break on the horrid roads of the day, although it was good enough for one clever fellow,
Louis-Guillame Perraux, to attached a small, single-piston steam engine to his Michaux velocipede, and invent the motorcycle in 1867.
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| The Perraux steam cycle of 1867, using the Michaux pedal cycle. This machine was exhibited in 'The Art of the Motorcycle' exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum; it now sits in a storage box, deep inside the Musée Sceaux in Paris, where it cannot be seen... |
Starley's improved bicycle design of 1871 had a large front wheel, still with the pedal crank at its axle, and a serpentine frame with a much smaller rear wheel, which he called the
'Ordinary', but is better known as the '
Penny-Farthing', named after the relative large-small size of these two British coins. Starley and his business partner,
William Hillman (better known for the cars which bear his name), named their company 'Ariel', after Shakespeare's airborne sprite in his play
'The Tempest'. The first Ariel bicycle cost £8, although for an extra £4, one could purchase an internal gear hub which halved the pedal speed relative to the wheel rotation - the first British speed gear fitted to a bicycle.
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| The Ariel tricycle of 1898, using a deDion 239cc engine |
By 1898, with chuffing petrol-engine monsters pacing bicycles on tracks and scaring horses on streets, Ariel added a motorized tricycle to their bicycle lineup, using the ubiquitous 239cc single-cylinder
deDion engine, with an 'automatic'. (suction-drawn) inlet valve above a mechanically operated exhaust valve. Those first engines produced only 1hp, but a revised motor of 289cc the following year doubled that, to 2hp! The national speed limit in Britain had been raised in 1896, from 4mph to 8mph, so the Ariel had scofflaw potential. The engines improved rapidly with experience across the whole nascent motoring/motorcycling industry, and Ariel introduced an optional quadricycle attachment in in 1900,
‘taking form of a small open carriage, which can either be supplied with the Tricycle at the time of purchase or at any future period’, according to the Ariel sales brochure. The Ariel Quad is very much a four-wheel motorcycle, being their tricycle with a two-wheel bench seat bolted in place of the trike's front wheel.
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| An original-condition 1900 Ariel Quadricycle, which sits hidden in a warehouse of London's Science Museum |
At the turn of the 19th Century, the London Ariel sales agency sat at 101 New Bond Street, which now happens to be the HQ for
Bonhams auctions. In 1901 an Ariel 345cc Quadricycle, frame no. 85, engine no. 607, was purchased by Captain A Loftus Bryan of Borrmount Manor, Ennisscorthy, County Wexford, who owned the machine from 1900-1967! It has since had two further owners, and is among the rare survivors of these true Pioneer motorized vehicles.
By poetic coincidence, the machine will return to its 'home' at 101 New Bond Street, to be sold in the
Bonhams 'London to Brighton' sale on November 1st– in the very same spot it was sold 112 years ago.
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