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By the 1900s decade we begin seeing bikes with many modern featurenaking them mucheasier to ride and safer. The were called safety bikes. .
The Diamond Frame: The two herearevposing with traditional men's diamond-frame safety bicycles. This design utilizes two adjoining triangles of metal tubing. It remains the foundational architecture for standard modern bicycles today.
Equal-Sized Wheels: Unlike earlier high-wheel models, safety bicycles leveled the ride by using front and rear wheels of roughly equal diameter (usually around 28 to 30 inches).
Pneumatic Tires: The thick, rounded appearance of the tires suggests they are early cushion or air-filled pneumatic tires. This invention absorbed shocks far better than solid rubber, making outdoor cycling highly popular for leisure.
Rear Wheel Chain Drive: These bikes rely on a sprocket and chain assembly connected to the rear wheel. This allowed the bike to move much faster with less pedaling effort compared to direct-drive alternatives.
All these features made them more suiytavke for children.
This ability of children to have bikes began to change after the turn-of-the 20th century, especially in America. The major development was the steadily rising income of American workers. American workers were the highest paid workers in the world. Which is why workers in Europe flocked to America in their millions. It was the opportunity created by market capitalism that attracted them. It wasn't the idea of capitalism, it was the high-paying jobs that capitalism created that attracted them, along with political and religious freedom and the absence of a military draft. Free land also attracted them, but even as the Frontier was closing, they still came because of the jobs that were on offer. The high wages meant that more and more families could afford bikes, at first primarily for adults. By the turn of-the 20th century there were bicycle shops all over America. And then Henry Ford introduced the Model-T Ford, an automobile that the average American worker, but not European worker could afford (1907)
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