Which came first, the bicycle or photography?

the bicycle came first, by 9 years. Karl Drais rode his running machine near Mannheim.

Side by side

the bicycle

The first two-wheeler you could balance and steer was Drais's laufmaschine of 1817, which had no pedals — you pushed with your feet. Pedals arrived in the 1860s, the chain-driven safety bicycle with equal wheels in 1885, and the pneumatic tyre in 1888. The bicycle is younger than the steam locomotive, younger than photography's first experiments, and roughly contemporary with the stethoscope.

photography

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras, made around 1826 or 1827 on a pewter plate coated in bitumen, required an exposure of at least eight hours. Daguerre's process of 1839 cut that to minutes and made photography practical. Photography therefore predates the telephone by half a century and the fax machine by seventeen years.