Sauerbronn biography of michael

Karl von Drais was a prolific German inventor known for the earliest form of bicycle (then called the Laufmaschine), earning him the moniker “father of the bicycle.” During the Biedermeier period in Central Europe, Karl von Drais also invented the earliest typewriter, hay chest, the first meat grinder, and a device that recorded piano music on paper. Aside from being an inventor, he was also a forestry official.

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Key Facts & Information

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

• Karl von Drais was born Karl Friedrich Christian Ludwig Freiherr Drais von Sauerbronn on April 29, 1785, in Karlsruhe, the capital of Baden, Germany.
• Both his father and mother were highly influential civil servants.
• His father was Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Ludwig, Baron von Drais, who worked as a senior civil servant.
• Ernestine Christine Margaretha, born Baroness von Kaltenthal, was his mother, who died in 1799 when Karl was 14 years old.
• Karl Friedrich, the Grand Duke of Baden, was his godfather who was instrumental in getting him into a forestry career later and support for his inventions in life.
• As a young boy, Karl developed an interest in science and mathematics.
• These early interests led him to study forestry at a private school owned by his uncle in Pforzheim, Germany.
• He went on to study at the University of Heidelberg, where he specialized in Mathematics, Physics, and

German inventor

Karl Freiherr von Drais (full name: Karl Friedrich Christian Ludwig Freiherr Drais von Sauerbronn; 29 April 1785 – 10 December 1851) was a noble German forest official and significant inventor in the Biedermeier period. He was born and died in Karlsruhe. He is seen as "the father of the bicycle".

Bicycle

Drais was a prolific inventor, who invented the Laufmaschine ("running machine"), also later called the velocipede, draisine (English) or draisienne (French), also nicknamed the hobby horse or dandy horse. This was his most popular and widely recognized invention. It incorporated the two-wheeler principle that is basic to the bicycle and motorcycle and was the beginning of mechanized personal transport. This was the earliest form of a bicycle, without pedals.

His first reported ride from Mannheim to the "Schwetzinger Relaishaus" (a coaching inn, located in "Rheinau", today a district of Mannheim) took place on 12 June 1817 using Baden's best road. Karl rode his bike; it was a distance of about 7 kilometres (4.3 mi). The round trip took him a little more than an hour but may be seen as the big bang for horseless transport. However, after marketing the velocipede, it became apparent that roads were so rutted by carriages that it was hard to balance on the machine for long, so velocipede riders took to the pavements (sidewalks) and moved far too quickly, endangering pedestrians. Consequently, authorities in Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and even Calcutta banned its use, which ended its vogue for decades.

As a way of pushing its products in Australia in the early 1950s, Olympia gave this portable to Sydney radio star Jack Davey - on the proviso he was photographed using it! Davey is seen here with his typewriter at radio station 2GB on May 2, 1955. The New Zealand-born shock jock of his day is trying to calm down after having had a then 16-year-old John Howard, later the "Back to the Future" Prime Minister of Australia, on his popular quiz show. Davey (1907-1959) died the same day as Errol Flynn, with whom Davey had shared a Vaucluse flat in the early 1930s. 

Stott's (in Brisbane) had been one notable exception as a well-established Australian office supplies company willing to handle Olympias.  

In the early 1950s, the Australian market was dominated by Glasgow-made Remingtons and Imperials from Leicester. Until Olivetti made its Olympian breakthrough in 1956, the only Continental European company to do well here was Hermes, from neutral Switzerland. Some Blue Birds (German Torpedo 18s) were imported in 1955 by the English cricketing Bedser twins and sold through Anthony Horderns in Sydney. British-distributed Olivers (of the Euro Portable Family) and H.G.Palmer-rebranded Smith-Coronas also sold in Australia, but Royals and Underwoods were largely unsighted.

This article is about the history of the bicycle itself. For information about the history of riding bicycles, see history of cycling.

Vehicles that have two wheels and require balancing by the rider date back to the early 19th century. The first means of transport making use of two wheels arranged consecutively, and thus the archetype of the bicycle, was the German draisine dating back to 1817. The term bicycle was coined in France in the 1860s, and the descriptive title "penny farthing", used to describe an "ordinary bicycle", is a 19th-century term.

Earliest unverified bicycle

There are several early claims regarding the invention of the bicycle, but many remain unverified.

A sketch from around 1500 AD is attributed to Gian Giacomo Caprotti, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, but it was described by Hans-Erhard Lessing in 1998 as a purposeful fraud, a description now generally accepted. However, the authenticity of the bicycle sketch is still vigorously maintained by followers of Augusto Marinoni, a lexicographer and philologist, who was entrusted by the Commissione Vinciana of Rome with the transcription of Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus.

Later, and equally unverified, is the contention that a certain "Comte de Sivrac" developed a célérifère in 1792, demonstrating it at the Palais-Royal in France. The célérifère supposedly had two wheels set on a rigid wooden frame and no steering, directional control being limited to that attainable by leaning. A rider was said to have sat astride the machine and pushed it along using alternate feet. It is now thought that the two-wheeled célérifère never existed (though there were four-wheelers) and it was instead a misinterpretation by the well-known French journalist Louis Baudry de Saunier in 1891.

In Japan, a pedal-powered tricycle called '陸舟奔車 (Rikushu-honsha)' was described in