Posted on Friday 24 October 2003

The world's first bicycle was developed by a Japanese feudal lord in 1732, a model recently created on the basis of a Edo-Period drawing has suggested.

Toshio Kajiwara, 60, a former bicycle company technical adviser, analyzed the drawing of a "newly-developed, boat-style ground vehicle," and Kenjiro Kawakami, professor of industrial archeology at Tama University of Arts, created a 1/5 scale model.

"Our discovery that a bicycle with pedals existed in Japan in the 1730s has drastically changed the history of bicycles," Kajiwara said.

It has been widely believed that the first bicycle was invented in France in 1861.

	A 30-centimeter-long scale model of a bicycle designed in 1732.

"The pedal structure of the 'newly-developed, boat-style ground vehicle' is identical to that of bicycles. However, it did not spread throughout Japan probably because most of the roads in the country were bumpy at the time," Kawakami, president of the Japan Industrial Archeology Society, said. The drawing is in a document compiled by Kuheiji Hiraishi (1696 to 1771), the lord of the Hikone feudal clan in Shiga Prefecture. It is preserved at the Hikone Municipal Library.

The document says that a so-called "boat-style ground vehicle" developed by a farmer living in the Kodama district of Bushu (currently the Saitama Prefecture city of Honjo) became popular in Edo (Tokyo).

It shows that the vehicle could climb up slopes. One of Hiraishi's retainers living at the clan's Edo residence reported the vehicle to the lord who was also a scientist.

Since the vehicle's mechanism was unclear, Hiraishi designed his own boat-style ground vehicle and built it in 1732, the document says.

The vehicle comprises of a boat-shaped wooden body, a single front wheel and two rear wheels. The pedals are connected to a disk that resembles a flywheel with an iron rod similar to a crankshaft.

The document claims that it ran at about 14 kilometers per hour.

[Mainichi Shimbun]