velocipede

Bike-adjacent inventions that roll atop train tracks have been known by many different names — handcar, draisine, kalamazoo and velocipede are just a few — since they first cropped up around the 1860s.

And between two wooden luggage carts from the late 1800s sits a railway velocipede, a three-wheeled handcar that was operated by pedals.

The Unblinking Guide shrugged and put the velocipede into motion.

James Starley stars in the exhibit as the inventor who took a primitive French contraption — the velocipede — and refined it to create the bicycle.

The young mechanic had been in the United States for a few months, and had brought with him from France a machine of his own devising - a pedal-cranked, two wheeled construction he called a "velocipede".