structural:scholar_edition
Bicycles

The modern bicycle was designed by the English engineer Harry John Lawson in 1876, although it was John Kemp Starley who produced the first commercially successful safety bicycle a few years later. Its popularity soon grew, causing the bike boom of the 1890s.

Road networks improved greatly in the period, using the Macadam method pioneered by Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam, and hard surfaced roads were built around the time of the bicycle craze of the 1890s. Modern tarmac was patented by British civil engineer Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1901.