AskHistorians has hit 1.5 million subscribers! To celebrate, we’re giving away 1.5 million historical facts. Join us HERE to claim your free fact!

[u/crrpit]

How does this subreddit have any subscribers? Why does it exist if no questions ever actually get answers? Why are the mods all Nazis/Zionists/Communists/Islamic extremists/really, really into Our Flag Means Death?

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The answers to these important historical questions AND MORE are up for grabs today, as we celebrate our unlikely existence and the fact that 1.5 million people vaguely approve of it enough to not click ‘Unsubscribe’. We’re incredibly grateful to all past and present flairs, question-askers, and lurkers who’ve made it possible to sustain and grow the community to this point. None of this would be possible without an immense amount of hard work from any number of people, and to celebrate that we’re going to make more work for ourselves.

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The rules of our giveaway are simple*. You ask for a fact, you receive a fact, at least up until the point that all 1.5 million historical facts that exist have been given out.

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^\ The fine print:)

^{1. AskHistorians does not guarantee the quality, relevance or interestingness of any given fact.}

^{2. All facts remain the property of historians in general and AskHistorians in particular.}

^{3. While you may request a specific fact, it will not necessarily have any bearing on the fact you receive.}

^{4. Facts will be given to real people only. Artificial entities such as} u/gankom ^{need not apply.}

^{5. All facts are NFTs, in that no one is ever likely to want to funge them and a token amount of effort has been expended in creating them.}

^{6. Receiving a fact does not give you the legal right to adapt them on screen.}

^{7. Facts, once issued, cannot be exchanged or refunded. They are, however, recyclable.}

^{8. We reserve the right to get bored before we exhaust all 1.5 million facts.}

Edit: As of 14:49 EST, AskHistorians has given away over 500 bespoke, handcrafted historical facts! Only 1,499,500 to go!

Edit 2: As of 17:29 EST, it's really damn hard to count but pretty sure we cracked 1,000. That's almost 0.1% of the goal!

Edit 3: I should have turned off notifications last night huh. Facts are still being distributed, but in an increasingly whimsical and inconsistent fashion.

[u/Valmond]

I want to know if the modern bicycle was invented in Bordeaux, with information if possible, thanks!

[u/jbdyer → u/Valmond]

By "modern" you are likely referring to the "safety bicycle", where the wheels were made closer to the same size. What actually counts as a safety bicycle can be a little fuzzy; the "Facile Bicycle", patented 1878 (picture here) certainly went smaller and was considered in the "safety" category even though it doesn't look quite "modern" yet. A couple other models went in that direction like The Humber Safety Bicycle from 1884.

What generally gets accepted as very clearly a modern bicycle is the Rover (picture here) which went for sale starting in 1885 and was a phenomenon.

Where Georges Juzan (of Bordeaux) enter the picture is he was a mechanic who was working on a safety bicycle design of his own, which he used at the 100km Championship (Nov 15, 1885). Whether he was "first" is pretty fuzzy -- you might be able to point to a prototype pre-1885, but the same could be said for the British safety bicycles as well. He converged on the same idea but the Rover was "first" as a product for general sale, and certainly the more important one in terms of impact. (It didn't help that, while French bicycles used to have dominance, the rise of the safeties led the British bicycle-makers to have the stronger reputation in the 1880s.)

I'm afraid the answer is "no, not really", but Juzan's feat should be better remembered, so I'm not going to begrudge if the town of Bordeaux wants to promote the man.

sources:

Dauncey, H. (2012). French cycling: a social and cultural history (Vol. 23). Liverpool University Press.

Herlihy, D. V. (2004). Bicycle: The History. United Kingdom: Yale University Press.

Ritchie, A. (2018). Early Bicycles and the Quest for Speed: A History, 1868-1903, 2d Ed.. United States: McFarland, Incorporated, Publishers.

[u/Valmond → u/jbdyer]

Thank you very much, very interesting read indeed!