'Humber' Safety Bicycle, 1890

Humber safety bicycle, 1890 (with glazed case)

This Humber Safety Bicycle was built in 1890 by Humber and Company Limited in Coventry.

This bicycle has a safety frame with a chain rear wheel drive and gear system. The frame has fixed front and rear forks, but the saddle has simple spring suspension. The front and rear spoked wheels both used solid rubber tyres.

Humber and Company Limited (later Humber Limited) were on of the earliest pioneers of safety bicycle design in the UK, and are credited with developing many key features of 'safety bicycles' before the term was even coined.

This particular example is a simple Humber safety bicycle. It was purchased and used alongside another identical Humber bicycle by American's William Sachtleben and Thomas Allen Jr, who used them to become the first people to circumnavigate the globe on bicycles.

Their ground-breaking adventure took them over 15,000 mile (29,000 Km) journey beginning in the UK before travelling across France, Italy, Greece before entering into Eastern Turkey where they were forced to cross Mount Ararat using simple equipment. They scaled to 16,854 feet peak in July 1891, becoming the seventh group to ever do so (and the first whilst carrying some bikes from Coventry), and planted the American flag at the summit before continuing their adventure.

They then made their way through Persia via Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, before entering China and cycling through the infamously dangerous Gobi desert to reach Peking (modern-day Beijing).

After taking a boat to San Fransisco, the pair made their final journey across North America via California, Arizona, New Mexica, Texas, Illinois and back to New York.

Their achievement made them American heroes, and their journey has been captured in various books newspaper articles. Notably, Thomas and William recorded their epic journey using a box Kodak camera with which they took over 1200 photographs which are now accessible digitally via the University of California.