Thomas McCall (inventor)

Thomas McCall (1834 to 1904) was a Scottish cartwright and early bicycle pioneer who lived in Kilmarnock. Born in Penpont in Dumfriesshire, he worked as a joiner and came to Kilmarnock at about the age of thirty. In 1869 he built two versions of a two wheeled velocipede driven by levers and rods acting on a crank on the rear wheel, a design published in the English Mechanic that year and advertised in the Kilmarnock Standard. It was a reaction to the French velocipedes of the mid 1860s, which had pedal cranks on the front wheel. When a campaign in the 1880s credited the first true bicycle to Kirkpatrick MacMillan and dated McCall's designs to 1839, McCall built replicas in the 1890s that were exhibited as MacMillan's. A sample of his bicycle is in the London Science Museum.