James Starley

This Albourne boy beginning work on a farm in this small place a hundred years ago was something more than a farmer's boy; be was something akin to the founder of a great industry or of a great town.

Coventry has given him a monument, for he died there after giving most of his life to an industry which was to expand itself until Coventry became the centre of the cycle industry and then of the motor-car world. As a boy James Starley tramped to London, working first as a gardener at Lewisham and then with a firm of sewing-machine makers.

 

Having improved his master's machines, he made one of his own, and betook himself to Coventry, where his invention was manufactured by a firm for which he acted as managing foreman.

For this firm he carried out a succession of improvements in the bicycle. He did not invent the bicycle (the idea was old before Starley was born), but he made a machine which could be ridden with comfort and speed. The old "ordinary" evolved under his skilful hands. He gave the machine a small hind wheel and the step by which the rider mounted; he devised methods of steering undreamed of before, and created the modern type of wheels.

 

Leaving his old firm, Starley formed a little company of his own, and for this he invented the tricycle. His was the first real tricycle. The machine, enormously popular before the invention of the safety bicycle, has been superseded by the two-wheeled machine, but part of its mechanism, the balance or differential gear, exists as a vital principle of the motor-car. The invention was Starley's.

The back axle of the motorcar, like that of his tricycle, turns with the wheels. The differential gear allows one road-wheel to revolve more rapidly than its fellow when the car is turning a corner or meeting inequalities of the road.

 

Starley's steering systems for the tricycle, too, paved the way for the motor-car engineer. The motor-car is the offspring of the tricycle and the gas-engine, and Starley, on the side of the mechanism, is one of its ancestors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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