bicycle spin on air

“When the spirits are low,  when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking”. 

Arthur Conan Doyle

Most historians agree that the first bicycle was built by Baron Karl Drais Von Sauerbrun of Germany in 1817. However, the first sketch of a machine that looked like the modern bicycle belongs to the genius of Leonardo Da Vinci. This first bicycle was found in the “Codice Atlantico” and is dated to 1493. Nowadays, there is a replica model of this design, made by Giovanni Sachi (1983), in the museum Leornadiano Vinci in Italy. For some other historians, the sketch is attributed to one of Da Vinci’s pupils, Gian Giacomo Caprotti. In one or other way, the world needed to wait more than three centuries, in order to see a real bicycle spin on the roads and the fields.

References 
Museum Leornadiano Vinci - Collection of models 
BicycleWikipedia - History of the bicycle 
Larry Hills, The bicycle, Capstone Press, 2005