Pierre Michaux had started building bicycles with…

Pierre Michaux had started building bicycles with pedals in the early 1860s.

He, or his son Ernest, may have been the inventor of this machine, by adapting cranks and pedals on the front wheel of a draisine.

Born at Bar le Duc, Michaux had worked as a blacksmith who furnished parts for the carriage trade in Paris during the 1850s and 1860s.

In 1868, he forms a partnership with the Olivier brothers under his own name, Michaux et Cie ("Michaux and company"), which is the first company to construct bicycles with pedals on a large scale, a machine that is called a velocipede, or "Michaudine".

The design is based on the previous model, the only difference being that on the bicycles of the new company the serpentine frame is made of two pieces of cast iron bolted together, instead of wood, which makes it more elegant and enables mass-production.

In 1865 a blacksmith from Lyon named Gabert had designed a variation on the frame that was of a single diagonal piece of wrought iron and was much stronger—by that time Pierre Lallement had emigrated to America, where in 1866 he had filed the only patent for the pedal bicycle.

It had had soon become evident that the serpentine forty-five kilogram cast-iron frames were not sturdy enough, and with competing manufacturers already producing bicycles with the diagonal frame, the Oliviers had insisted that Michaux follow suit.

The partnership will be dissolved in 1869, and Michaux and his company will fade into oblivion as the first bicycle craze comes to an end in France and the USA.

Only in England will the bicycle remain popular, and England will be the site of all of the next major improvements to the machine.

Michaux is often given credit for the idea of attaching pedals to the dandy horse, and thus for the invention of the bicycle—however, bicycle historian David V. Herlihy thinks that it was Lallement who deserves that credit.