This marks the beginning of so important an epoch that the circumstances attending it are worthy a detailed account. They were felt, so long ago as 1874, to be deserving of such a record, for in the first number of an athletic magazine, _Ixion_, published in that year, "J. M., jun.," who, of course, was none other than Mayall himself, began to tell the wondrous tale. He set out to narrate it at such length that, as an editorial note tells us, the concluding portion was reserved for the second number. But _Ixion_ never reached a second number, and so Mayall's own account of his historic ride was never completed.
He began, as all good chroniclers should, at the very beginning, telling how, in the early part of 1869, he was at Spencer's Gymnasium in Old Street, St. Luke's. There he saw a packing-case being followed by a Mr. Turner, whom he had seen at the Paris Exhibition of 1868, and witnessed the unpacking of it. From it came a something new and strange, "a piece of apparatus consisting mainly of two wheels, similar to one I had seen, not long before, in Paris." It was the first velocipede to reach England.
It is a curious point that, although Mayall rode a "velocipede," and although these machines were generally so-called for a year or two after their introduction, the word "bicycle" is claimed to have been first used in the _Times_ in the early part of 1868; and certainly we find in the _Daily News_ of September 7th in that year an allusion, in grotesque spelling, to "bysicles and trisicles which we saw at the Champs Elysées and the Bois de Boulogne this summer."
But to return to the "velocipede" which had found its way to England at the beginning of 1869.
The two-wheeled mystery was helped out of its wrappings and shavings, the Gymnasium was cleared, and Mr. Turner, taking off his coat, grasped the handles of the machine, and with a short run, to Mayall's intense surprise, vaulted on to it. Putting his feet on what were then called the "treadles," Turner, to the astonishment of the beholders, made the circuit of the room, sitting on this bar above a pair of wheels in line that ought to have collapsed so soon as the momentum ceased; but, instead of falling down, Turner turned the front wheel at an angle to the other, and thus maintained at once a halt and a balance.