Tuesday, September 30, 2014

A Penny-farthing for your Thoughts...

Do we all know what a penny-farthing is?  Well, I knew what my card design looked like, but not what it was called.  You know, the funny bicycles with the large front wheel and the small back wheel.

I love this nut, she cracks me up!  I've started with a Copic marker color base of E30 and then dotted her with E31 as well as giving her a shadow on the bottom left side.

 
Here's a close-up of the Shopping Nut and you can get her here!

Directly from Wikipedia: The penny-farthing, also known as the high wheel, high wheeler or ordinary, is a type of bicycle with a large front wheel and a much smaller rear wheel. It was popular after the boneshaker until the development of the safety bicycle in the 1880s. It was the first machine to be called a "bicycle".
Although the name "penny-farthing" is now the most common, it was probably not used until the machines were nearly outdated; the first recorded print reference is from 1891 in Bicycling News.   It comes from the British pennyand farthing coins, one much larger than the other, so that the side view resembles a penny leading a farthing.  For most of their reign, they were simply known as "bicycles". In the late 1890s, the name "ordinary" began to be used, to distinguish them from the emerging safety bicycles, and this term or hi-wheel (and variants) is preferred by many modern enthusiasts.
About 1870, English inventor James Starley, described as the father of the bicycle industry, and others began producing bicycles based on the French boneshaker but with front wheels of increasing size, because larger front wheels, up to 1.5 m (60 in) in diameter, enabled higher speeds on bicycles limited to direct drive.  In 1878, Albert Pope began manufacturing the Columbia bicycle outside of Boston, starting their two-decade heyday in America.
Although 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.

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