Wie Karl Drais das Fahrrad erfand

In 1817 Karl Drais, a trained forestry teacher and then still a baron, drove out of Mannheim on a carriage never seen before. In the previous year there had been a total crop failure - with famine, lack of food and the death of horses. What was not known at the time was that the volcanic eruption of Tambora in 1815 east of Bali had covered the globe with an aerosol layer that had caused such a climatic catastrophe by cooling. Drais wanted to replace the threatened riding horses with his running machine, the original bicycle on two wheels. To mark the 200th anniversary of the bicycle, Drais biographer Hans-Erhard Lessing presents his amazing insights into the amazing career of this mobility idea throughout the Occident, before driving bans and the advent of the railway put an end to progress. With transcribed original texts and coloured copper engravings.