History of the bicycle fashion of the day made the "ordinary" bicycle inaccessible. Queen Victoria owned Starley's "Royal Salvo" tricycle, though there is no evidence she actually rode it. Although French and English inventors modified the velocipede into the high-wheel bicycle, the French were still recovering from the Franco-Prussian war, so English entrepreneurs put the high-wheeler on the English market, and the machine became very popular there, Coventry, Oxford, Birmingham and Manchester being the centers of the English bicycle industry (and of the arms or sewing machine industries, which had the necessary metalworking and engineering skills for bicycle manufacturing, as in Paris and St.
Ministry of Transport Machine-Building Industry Ministry of Transport Machine-Building Industry The Ministry of Transport Machine-Building Industry () was one of the government ministries of the Soviet Union. Before 1946 it was known as the People's Commissariat of the Tank Industry of the USSR ("Народный комиссариат танковой промышленности СССР"). The seat was located in Moscow at Ryazanskaya St. ("Рязанская ул.") 8а, then evacuated to Chelyabinsk. The People's Commissariat of the Tank Industry was created 11 September 1941 on the basis of People's Commissariat of Middle Engineering Industry in conjunction with those of large losses of tanks in World War II. Similar commissariats existed at that time