James Starley

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

James Starley
Inventor
Known forDevelopment of the bicycle

James Starley (21 April 1830 – 17 June 1881)

differential gear, the perfection of the bicycle chain
drive, and the penny-farthing.

Childhood

Starley was born in 1830 at Albourne, West Sussex,[2] the son of Daniel Starley, a farmer. He began working on the farm at nine, showing early talent as an inventor by making a rat trap from an umbrella rip and a branch of a willow tree.[2] He ran away from home as a teenager and went to Lewisham, in south London.[3] There he worked as an under-gardener, in his spare time mending watches[3] and creating devices such as a mechanism to allow a duck to get through a hole in a fence, closing a door behind it if a rat tried to follow.[2]

Adult life

Starley's employer, John Penn, bought a rare and expensive

bone-shaker to the factory in 1868. The company started making bicycles and Coventry soon became the centre of the British bicycle industry.[3]

wire-spoked wheels, much lighter than wooden-spoke ones. Tangent spokes were patented in 1874. Lever-driven and chain-driven tricycles
, often in strange configurations, were also devised for women and couples.

Starley, then aging, found it difficult to ride a tricycle

differential gear,[3] an important mechanical design concept incorporated, e.g., in the back axle of every rear-wheel drive car. It was a Saturday. At 6am on the Monday the prototype was being made and at 8am Starley was stepping on to the London train to register patent No. 3388,1877."[2][4]

Personal life

Starley married Jane Todd when he was in his early 20s. Their son,

car
company.

Starley's sons continued manufacturing cycles after his death in 1881 but his nephew John Kemp Starley made more of a mark. It was John Kemp Starley and Sutton who devised the recognisably modern Rover safety bicycle with 26-inch wheels (still a standard size), chain drive, and a diamond-shaped frame (no seat-tube as yet) in 1884, showing it in 1885. The penny-farthing or ordinary cycle was not safe, with a "header" accident an ever-present danger. Others had experimented with chain-driven "safety cycles" but the Rover made its mark to the extent that "Rover" (spelled with a W rather than a V) means "bike" in countries such as Poland.

In due course, motor-driven bicycles became motor-cycles and were followed by motor cars. John Kemp Starley experimented with an electric tri-car around 1888 but the petrol-driven Rover 8hp car was sold in 1904, two years after his death.

Coventry University's former James Starley building, seen in 2015

Coventry University named a 1950s building after Starley;[5] as of December 2019, it was undergoing demolition as part of a redevelopment program.[6] What was originally D Block of Coventry Polytechnic was renamed after Starley by Coventry University. Once it was demolished it was replaced by Starley Garden.

References

  1. ^ James Starley findagrave.com
  2. ^ a b c d e The Bicycle, UK, 4 November 1953, p8
  3. ^ a b c d Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Starley, James" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 25 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 798.
  4. ^ James Starley by Horace William Bartleet
  5. ^ "Buildings". Coventry University.
  6. ^ Hartley, Laura (24 May 2018). "Transformation of university building isn't here to stay". Coventry Telegraph. Retrieved 20 December 2019.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to James Starley.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=James_Starley&oldid=1219786449"