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.
History of the battery 1860s, a Frenchman named Callaud invented a variant of the Daniell cell called the gravity cell. This simpler version dispensed with the porous barrier. This reduced the internal resistance of the system and, thus, the battery yielded a stronger current. It quickly became the battery of choice for the American and British telegraph networks, and was used until the 1950s. The gravity cell consisted of a glass jar, in which a copper cathode sat on the bottom and a zinc anode was suspended beneath the rim. Copper sulfate crystals would be scattered around the cathode and then the jar would