Page 6 History

Short history of the Pedersen bike

Pedersen, born in October,1855, near Copenhagen , was a prolific inventor whose first major success was a machine for separating cream for butter.

Around 1893 he moved to Britain and that same year he patented the bicycle design. The first model in 1893 was made of wood and weighed just 19 pounds .Four years later , wood was abandoned for metal tubing .

The Dursley - Pedersen , as it was called for the town in
Gloucestershire England.

Despite its strange appearance , the Dursley - Pedersen was no slow coach.According to The Ingenious Mr. Pedersen , written by the British historian David E.Evans , cyclist Harry Goss Green broke the London to Brighton and back unpaced road record riding a Dursley - Pedersen on Nov.14,1898. He went on to break five other records two years later

Between 1896 and 1922 some 30,000 Dursley - Pedersen were produced in Britain , but by then more traditional bicycles were simpler to build , and ultimately cheaper.

The Dursley - Pedersen went out of production and the unconventional inventor returned to Denmark where he died in 1929.

The story is not finally over though. In 1995, following a campaign and collection for funds, Mikael Pedersen's remains were exhumed from their unmarked grave in Denmark and re-interred in Dursley cemetery. Over 300 people attended, including family descendants, local dignitaries and enthusiasts of the unique cycle which still has its followers, even in 2006.

Lit.: The Ingenious Mr.Pedersen.

David E Evans / Alan Sutton Publishing ISBN 0 7509 00
( the book is out of print, only the German translation is availabe)

The in Denmark famous novelist Gustav Wied, posing with his Pedersen around 1906. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the only Pedersen bicycle in Denmark at the time.
Mikael Pedersen gave charakter to one of the figures in “ Livsens ondskab “ in which Gustav Wied gives a humoristic caricature of the better middle class in there common hometown Roskilde.
The leading charakter in the very same novel was sculptured over Otto Mellerup, the brother of Anders Mellerup, who went to England with Mikael