Which came first, the bicycle or television?

the bicycle came first, by 108 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.

television

John Logie Baird transmitted a recognisable moving image of a ventriloquist's dummy in October 1925 using a mechanical spinning-disc system. Philo Farnsworth demonstrated fully electronic television in 1927, and it was that approach, not Baird's, that every subsequent television used. Regular public broadcasting began in 1936, which means television is younger than the talking film and older than the ballpoint pen.