Kirkpatrick Macmillan

Kirkpatrick Macmillan was a Scottish blacksmith from Keir in Dumfries and Galloway who is generally credited, though without full documentary certainty, as the inventor of the pedal driven bicycle around 1839. Working from the draisine, an earlier push along machine with no pedals, Macmillan is said to have adapted a treadle mechanism to drive the rear wheel, letting a rider propel the machine without touching the ground. The strongest surviving evidence for his role is indirect, an 1842 Glasgow newspaper account of an unnamed gentleman from Dumfries-shire riding a velocipede who struck a pedestrian in the Gorbals and was fined five shillings, a report later identified by a local historian as describing Macmillan. No machine or drawing that can be firmly attached to him survives, which is why historians still debate the attribution. He was born on 2 September 1812 and died on 26 January 1878 in the same village where he was born. His name has stood for well over a century as the traditional starting point of the pedal bicycle.