Penny-farthing the trend was short-lived, the penny-farthing became a symbol of the late Victorian era. Its popularity also coincided with the birth of cycling as a sport. Eugène Meyer of Paris, France is now regarded as the father of the high bicycle by the International Cycling History Conference in place of James Starley. Meyer patented a wire-spoke tension wheel with individually adjustable spokes in 1869. They were called "spider" wheels in Britain when introduced there. Meyer produced a classic high bicycle design during the 1880s. James Starley in Coventry added the tangent spokes and the mounting step to his famous bicycle
Reinventing the wheel which embody the reasoning characteristic of the field. "Reinventing the wheel" may be an ironic cliche – it is not clear when the wheel itself was actually invented. The modern "invention" of the wheel might actually be a "re-invention" of an age-old invention. Additionally, many different wheels featuring enhancements on existing wheels (such as the many types of available tires) are regularly developed and marketed. The metaphor emphasizes understanding existing solutions, but not necessarily settling for them. The term has also been used to describe the first non-circular wheel, invented in 2012, that takes the form of a three-dimensional sine