From Robert Pittis Scott: Cycling Art, Energy, and Locomotion: A Series of Remarks on the Development of Bicycles, Tricycles, and Man-Motor Carriages (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1889).
In Part I of his book, Scott peered into the future, and narrowly missed laying claim to it, with his predictions about the Safety bicycle, which sported a rear-mounted chain drive, ball-bearing hubs, a steel frame, and equal size wheels — many of the features now common across cruisers and ten-speeds. Though the initial hundred pages of his book take the high-wheeled Ordinary or “penny-farthing” as standard, Scott was one of the first Americans to sense the potential of a rear-driven design.
Part II’s whimsical and illustrated tour through the previous century of “man-motor locomotion” pairs technical drawings and brief texts from patent applications with satiric running heads and humorous single sentence reviews of a wild peloton of wheeled contraptions. See some examples in this post and more at Public Domain Review
I could swear I saw a velocipede on the Astoria Riverwalk yesterday. I gotta get me one of those.
I see you in the one-wheeled vehicle. The guy with the cigar.