Macmillan Was Deft, Not Daft, As His Historic Glasgow Bike Ride Proved

On a sunny June afternoon in 1842 a strange rumor reached the Gorbals district of Glasgow. A creature mounted on a pair of wheels—the Devil himself, some were saying—was traveling along the road that led to the city from the south side. The word had been spread by breathless passengers dismounting from the Carlisle coach. The apparition was going at a considerable speed and had come many miles already, from the county of Dumfriesshire. As it had passed through roadside villages, terrified mothers snatched their children indoors, and plowmen set off across the fields, muttering hasty prayers.

The denizens of the Gorbals were not so alarmed. They poured out of their dark, overcrowded tenements, joined by hundreds of Irish immigrants from the Belfast boat that had just docked at the Broomielaw pier.

"It's around yon corner," a shout went up, and in a few seconds the infernal machine was in sight. The crowd surged across the street. Swerving, the devilish driver mounted the pavement. A small child ran into his path and fell to the ground. She picked herself up, in no way injured, but screaming in terror.

Swiftly, the Gorbals constabulary were on the scene. Shouldering their way through the mob, they arrested a broadly built, handsome and very embarrassed young man who assured them that he was only the village blacksmith, like his father and grandfather before him, from Courthill near Dumfries. His machine, which he referred to as a velocipede, was his own property, his own handiwork, made in the smithy where he was employed, on the Drumlanrig estate of the Duke of Buccleuch.

Kirkpatrick Macmillan, or "Daft Pate" Macmillan, as his neighbors had been calling him since he started work on his strange contraption, was, in fact, the inventor of the world's first pedal bicycle. Never before had man been able to move on two wheels without putting one foot on the ground, and this young man had just covered 70 miles of rough, pot-holed roads on a machine weighing 60 pounds. Kirkpatrick had come to Glasgow to show his invention to his three brothers, who unlike himself had all been a credit to their village schoolmaster and now held respectable jobs in the city.

Daft Pate was horrified to find himself involved with the law. To his intense relief, however, it was only the velocipede that spent the night locked up in jail. He was allowed bail and stayed with his eldest brother, assistant headmaster at the Glasgow high school, until his appearance at the Barony Court in the Gorbals in the morning.

The magistrates were hard put to formulate the wording of their unique charge. Eventually the offense was recorded as: "Riding along the pavement on a velocipede to the obstruction of the passage and the danger of the lieges; and in so doing, having thrown over a child."

The fine was five shillings and the publicity the court case received in the Glasgow newspapers the next day was the only acclaim the inventor of the bicycle was to know in his lifetime.

At the end of the hearing the magistrates asked the accused if they could inspect the machine. Proudly Daft Pate explained how the pedaling system worked: to the rear axle he had fitted cranks which were connected by rods to the pedals suspended under the upturned handlebars. He showed them the iron-rimmed wheels and a very fine carving of a horse's head decorating the front of the machine.

The crowd observing Macmillan as he cycled away from the court laughed and cheered him out of Glasgow. At the city boundary he met a stagecoach, and in an exuberant mood he raced it all the way to Kilmarnock, 20 miles farther on. He had left the astonished passengers far behind by the time he reached the village of Old Cumnock in Ayrshire, where he stayed the night with a friend, for his bicycle had no lamp.