Editing Recumbent bicycle (section)

==History==
Recumbent bicycle designs date back to the middle of the 19th century. Several designs were patented around 1900, but these early designs were unsuccessful.

===Early recumbents===
[[File:Liegeraeder 1920er Velorama.jpg|thumb|300px|Recumbents from the 1920s in the [[Velorama]]]]
Recumbent designs of both prone and supine varieties can be traced back to the earliest days of the bicycle. Before the shape of the bicycle settled down following [[John Kemp Starley|Starley]]'s [[safety bicycle]], there was a good deal of experimentation with various arrangements, and this included designs which might be considered recumbent. Although these dated back to the 1860s the first recorded illustration of a recumbent considered as a separate class of bicycle is considered to be in the magazine ''[[Fliegende Blätter]]'' of 10 September 1893. This year also saw what is considered the first genuine recumbent, the Fautenil Vélociped. Patent applications for a number of recumbent designs exist in the late years of the 19th century, and there were discussions in the cycling press of the relative merits of different layouts. The Challand designs of 1897 and the American Brown of 1901 are both recognisable as forerunners of today's recumbents.

===The Mochet 'Vélo-Velocar' and 'Vélorizontal'===
[[File:1945MochetVelocar.jpg|thumb|1945 Mochet Velocar]]

A four-wheeled, two-seater, pedal-propelled car called the '[[Velocar]]' was built in the 1930s by [[France|French]] inventor and light car builder [[Charles Mochet]]. Velocars sold well to French buyers who could not afford a motor car, possibly because of a poor [[economy]] during the [[Great Depression]]. The four-wheeled Velocars were fast but didn't corner well at high speed. Mochet then experimented with a three-wheel design and finally a mould-breaking two-wheel design based on the Vélocar technology.

The early models of Mochet's 'La bicyclette de l'Avenir' (The bicycle of the Future), the 'Vélo-Vélocar', or 'V-V' as the factory referred to them, used a 40mm steel-tube, single-beam frame and 450 x 55 wheels with handlebars over the rider and steering torque transmitted by [[bevel gear]]s. Various types of Mochet-designed derailleur gears were fitted, with a single gear for the track models. Gears were mid-mounted using primary and secondary chains. The back-rest was adjustable on more sporting models.

To demonstrate the speed of his recumbent bicycle, Mochet had the design ratified by the UCI and UVF and enlisted cyclist [[Francis Faure]], a Category 2 racer, to ride it in races. Faure was highly successful, defeating many of Europe's top cyclists both on the track and in road races, and setting new world records at short distances. Another cyclist, Paul Morand, won the Paris-Limoges race in 1933 on one of Mochet's recumbents.

On 7 July 1933, at a Paris [[velodrome]], Faure rode a modified Vélo-Velocar {{convert|45.055|km|mi|abbr=on}} in one hour, beating an almost 20-year-old [[hour record]] held by [[Oscar Egg]], and attracting a great deal of attention.

When the [[Union Cycliste Internationale]] (UCI) met in February 1934, manufacturers of 'upright' bicycles lobbied to have Faure's one-hour record declared invalid. On 1 April 1934, the UCI published a new definition of a racing bicycle that specified how high the bottom bracket could be above the ground, how far it could be in front of the seat and how close it could be to the front wheel. The new definition effectively banned recumbents from UCI events for a combination of tradition, safety, and economic reasons.<ref name="nelson">{{cite web |title=The History of the Recumbent Bicycle: Winning Forbidden |url=http://www.helsinki.fi/~tlinden/winforb.html |access-date=28 August 2008}}</ref>

Charles Mochet died a short time after the ban was enacted, still protesting against the UCI decision, and the firm continued to make recumbents under his widow and, later, Georges Mochet until at least 1941 for a limited number of customers. Their final versions were a single-chain design named the 'Vélorizontal', the final model using a 'Cyclo' four-speed gear.
[[File:Francis Faure dans son Vélocar caréné, en 1938 (record du monde de l'heure masculin IHPVA, 50,537 kilomètres).jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.0|Francis Faure in his record-setting Velocar in 1938]]

After the UCI decision, Faure continued to race, and consistently beat upright bicycles with the Velocar. In 1938, Faure and Mochet's son, Georges, began adding fairings to the Velocar in hopes of bettering the world record of one hour for a bicycle with aerodynamic components. On 5 March 1938, Faure rode a faired Velocar 50.537 kilometers in an hour and became the first cyclist to travel more than 50 kilometers in an hour without the aid of a [[derny|pace vehicle]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://bikeroute.com/NationalBicycleGreenwayNews/2013/06/30/best-history-of-the-recumbent-why-its-faster-how-it-came-to-be-banned/|title=Best History of the Recumbent – Why it's Faster & How it Came to be Banned|date=June 30, 2013|publisher=National Bicycle Greenway|access-date=June 2, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190915173947/https://bikeroute.com/NationalBicycleGreenwayNews/2013/06/30/best-history-of-the-recumbent-why-its-faster-how-it-came-to-be-banned/|archive-date=September 15, 2019|url-status=live}}</ref>

The UCI ban on recumbent bicycles and other aerodynamic improvements virtually stopped development of recumbents for four decades and remains in force.{{Citation needed|date=January 2011}} Although recumbent designs continued to crop up over the years they were mainly the work of lone enthusiasts and numbers remained insignificant until the 1970s.{{Citation needed|date=June 2009}} Georges Mochet died in 2008.

===1970s resurgence and the IHPVA===
While developments had been made in this fallow period by Paul Rinkowski and others, the modern recumbent movement was given a boost in 1969 when the ''Ground Hugger'' by Robert Riley was featured in [[Popular Mechanics]].<ref name=LightHist>{{cite web|title=History of the Modern Recumbent|url=https://www.lightningbikes.com/riders/martin-krieg/recumbent-history/index.html|publisher=Lightning Bikes|access-date=25 January 2017}}</ref> There was also the work of [[Chester Kyle]] and particularly [[David Gordon Wilson]] of [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology|MIT]], two Americans who opposed the UCI restrictions and continued to work on fairings and recumbents. In 1974, they also nucleated the International Human Power speed Championship in [[Long Beach, California]], from which the [[IHPVA]] grew. Kyle and his students had been experimenting with fairings for upright bicycles, also banned by the UCI.  In 1975 the brothers John and Randy Schlitter started producing recumbents at their company, [[Rans Designs|Rans]], and became the first U.S. company to do so.<ref name=LightHist />

In 1978, the "Vélérique" is the very first commercialized recumbent bicycle (fully faired), by the Belgian Erik Abergen.

The Avatar 2000, a LWB bike very much like the current Easy Racers products, arrived in 1979. It was featured in the [[Brainstorm (1983 film)|1983 film Brainstorm]],<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://ryanownersclub.com/scrapbook/avatar/brainstorm/|title=Ryan Owners Club - Avatar 200 - Brainstorm}}</ref> ridden by Christopher Walken, and in the popular cycling reference ''Richard's Bicycle Book'' by [[Richard Ballantine]]. From 1983 to 1991 Steven Roberts toured the U.S. in a modified Avatar, pulling a trailer with solar panels and a laptop, gaining press coverage and writing the book ''Computing Across America''.<ref name=LightHist /> A faired Avatar 2000 was the first two-wheeler to beat the European Vector three-wheeler in the streamliner races. For about ten years afterward, speed records were exchanged between Easy Racers with Freddy Markham in the cockpit and the Lightning Team. So America's strength became the flying 200 meter sprint in the streamliner division. The oil crises of the 1970s sparked a resurgence in cycling coincident with the arrival of these "new" designs.{{Citation needed|date=June 2009}}

A parallel but somewhat separate scene grew up in Europe, with the first European human power championships being held in 1983. The European scene was more dominated by competition than was the US, with the result that European bikes are more likely to be low SWB machines, while LWB are much more popular in the US (although there have been some notable European LWB bikes, such as the Peer Gynt).{{Citation needed|date=June 2009}}

=== In the 1980s ===

In 1984, Linear Recumbents of Iowa began producing bicycles. In 2002, Linear Manufacturing's assets were bought by Bicycle Man LLC and moved to New York. Since then owner Peter Stull has been working with senior engineering students at [[Alfred University]], local engineers and machinists utilizing available technology including computer FEA testing to improve their recumbent bikes.
[[File:Bike-E 9Av 57st jeh.JPG|thumb|Bike-E]]
[[File:Hpv-race.jpg|thumb|300px|Two short-wheelbase recumbents in an amateur HPV race]]

In the UK in the 1980s, the most publicised recumbent cycle in the UK was the delta configuration, sometime electrically powered [[Sinclair C5]]. Although sold as an "electric car", the C5 could be characterised as a recumbent tricycle with electrical assistance.

A study by Bussolari and Nadel (1989) led them to pick a recumbent riding position for the [[MIT Daedalus|Daedalus]] flight even though the English Channel crossing was accomplished in the [[Gossamer Albatross]] with an upright position. Drela in 1998 confirmed "that there was no significant difference in power output between recumbent and conventional bicycling."<ref name="wilson"/>

=== In the 2000s ===
Three of the largest recumbent manufacturers in the US went out of business after the 1990s, including BikeE (August 2002), ATP-Vision (early 2004) and Burley Design Cooperative (September 2006).