BIRTH OF BICYCLE

Northern Advocate, 21 September 1934, Page 2

BIRTH OF BICYCLE

FIRST ON ROAD

KAIMAMAKU MAN A SPECTATOR

Strange it seems in these days of motor and aeroplane transport, that the invention of the push bicycle is within the recollection of many people still living.

Mr William Hay, of Kaimamaku, who today celebrates his 84th birthday, believes that he was one of the first people to see a bicycle in use. “One day, as a lad of six, I saw coming down a road in Dumfrieshire, Scotland,” ho says, “a man riding on what, appeared to be a large cartwheel. The wheels were made of light timber shod with iron at a blacksmith’s.”

Quite mystified, he returned to his home to tell his parents of the strange adventure. “It’s that daft fellow from the Keir mill,” they told him. Keir was a small village about four miles distant, and the smithy there was owned by the' McMillan family. It was one of the younger sons to whom posterity owes the present workingman’s and tourist’s friend —the push bike. “Everyone regarded young McMillan as slightly afflicted,” Mr Hay says, “but then most geniuses are daft in their own generation.”

Ten years after his roadside experience, Mr Hay remembers, all the local wheelwrights were making the old type machine, and to see the big clumsy bicycles being ridden at local fairs was a sight which today would evoke the heartiest laughter.