The forebear of the modern bicycle is thought to have been invented in Germany in 1817. The Draisine was made by Baron Karl von Drais, a civil servant to the Grand Duke of Baden.
However, partisans in Japan argue that the world's first bicycle was actually the brainchild of a Japanese feudal lord. Kuheiji Hiraishi who built a "bike" in 1732, in what is now Shiga Prefecture, which is adjacent to Kyoto.
According to Kenjiro Kawakami, a professor of industrial archeology at Tokyo's Tama University of the Arts, "...a bicycle with pedals existed in Japan by the 1730s..."
A "boat-style ground vehicle" made by a farmer in Saitama Prefecture already existed in the 1730s. One of Hiraishi's retainers, who was living at the clan's residence in Edo (Tokyo), saw and told his lord about it.
Hiraishi, himself an astronomer and accomplished scientist, redesigned and built his own boat-style ground vehicle in 1732.
The moving vehicle had a boat-shaped wooden body, one front wheel and two rear wheels. The pedals were connected to a disk akin to a flywheel with an iron rod like a crankshaft.
According to Professor Kawakami, it could run at about 14 kilometers (9 miles) per hour.
© CycleKyoto.com
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Kuheiji Hiraishi
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