---
title: "Which came first, the bicycle or photography?"
description: "the bicycle vs photography: the bicycle came first, by 9 years — 1817 against 1826. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/bicycle-vs-photograph/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, the bicycle or photography?

**Which came first, the bicycle or photography?: the bicycle**

1817 — 9 years before photography

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

## Side by side

|  | the bicycle | photography |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1817 | 1826 |
| Date | 1817-06-12 | — |
| Category | invention | invention |
| What happened | Karl Drais rode his running machine near Mannheim. | Niépce made the oldest surviving photograph from nature. |

## 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.

## Common questions

### Which came first, the bicycle or photography?

the bicycle, by 9 years — 1817 against 1826.

### When did the bicycle start?

1817. Karl Drais rode his running machine near Mannheim.

### When did photography start?

1826. Niépce made the oldest surviving photograph from nature.

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## Sources

- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — Smithsonian Institution (https://naturalhistory.si.edu/)