1870 ordinary high-wheel vintage max - 1870 ordinary high-wheel vintage bicycle Penny-farthing Facile by De Espona

The high bicycle was the logical extension of the boneshaker design, the front wheel enlarging (limited by the inside leg measurement of the rider), the rear wheel shrinking and the frame being made lighter. The Frenchman Eugene Meyer is now regarded as the father of the High Bicycle by the ICHC in place of James Starley. Meyer invented the wire-spoke tension wheel in 1869 and produced a classic high bicycle design until the 1880s.

Although French and English inventors modified the velocipede into the high-wheel bicycle, the French were still recovering from the Franco-Prussian war, so English entrepreneurs put the high-wheeler on the English market, and the machine became very popular there, Coventry, Oxford, Birmingham and Manchester being the centers of the English bicycle industry. Soon bicycles found their way across the English Channel. By 1875 high-wheel bicycles were becoming popular in France, though ridership expanded slowly. In the United States, Bostonians such as Frank Weston and Albert A. Pope started importing bicycles in 1877 and 1878, and Pope started production of his 'Columbia' high-wheelers in 1878, and gained control of nearly all applicable patents, starting with Lallement's 1866 patent. Pope lowered the royalty (licensing fee) previous patent owners charged, and took his competitors to court over the patents. The courts supported him, and competitors either paid royalties ($10 per bicycle), or he forced them out of business. There seems to have been no patent issue in France, but English bicycles still dominated the French market. By 1884 high-wheelers and tricycles were relatively popular among a small group of upper-middle-class people in all three countries, the largest group being in England. Their use also spread to the rest of the world, chiefly because of the extent of the British Empire.