Thomas McCall

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section is missing citations and/or footnotes.

This article or section may use words or ideas of other works in its text without citing sources. Using citations to support claims outside the realm of elementary knowledge helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. Please improve the article or discuss this issue on the talk page. Help on using footnotes is available. This article has been tagged since December 2006.

McCall's first (top) and improved velocipede of 1869 - later predated to 1839 and attributed to MacMillan

Thomas McCall (1834-1904) was a Scottish cartwright.

He built, in 1869, two versions of a two-wheeled velocipede with levers and rods tossing a crank on the rear wheel, as published in the English Mechanic of the same year. This was a reaction to the French velocipedes, of the mid 1860s, with their front-wheel pedal cranks. In fact, this rear-wheel idea occupied five more inventors in that year.

When in the 1880s a rich corn-trader named James Johnston started a campaign to attribute the "first true" bicycle to his uncle Kirkpatrick MacMillan, he attributed the McCall designs to MacMillan and dated them as 1839. Why, at the behest of Johnston, McCall built replicas of his machines in the 1890s to be exhibited as MacMillan's can only be explained by the fact that he needed the money.^{[citation needed]}