Amid the first great American bicycle craze, inventors filed a wave of patents in early 1869 improving the velocipede, the pedal-driven forerunner of the modern bicycle. These crude 'boneshakers,' with wooden or iron-banded wheels and no suspension, nonetheless launched a transatlantic fad for velocipede rinks and racing that prefigured the bicycle boom of the 1890s.
The velocipede craze that hit American cities in 1868 and 1869 was short-lived but intense. Riding academies and indoor rinks sprang up in New York, Boston, and other cities, charging admission for lessons on the ungainly machines, whose iron-rimmed wooden wheels and total lack of suspension earned them the enduring nickname 'boneshakers.'
Inventors rushed to patent improvements — better steering mechanisms, seat springs, gearing systems — hoping to cash in on the fad. Most of these refinements went nowhere commercially, and the craze itself collapsed almost as quickly as it began, done in by the machines' expense, difficulty, and sheer discomfort.
Yet the boneshaker era mattered: it introduced the basic pedal-crank-front-wheel configuration that later inventors would refine into the high-wheeled 'penny-farthing' of the 1870s and eventually the chain-driven safety bicycle of the 1880s, which triggered the far larger and more transformative bicycle boom of the 1890s.