STARLEY, JAMES (1830-1881)

This article appears in Volume V25, Page 798 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: SOU-STE

STARLEY, JAMES (1830-1881) , British inventor, the son of a farmer, was baptized at Albourne, Sussex, on the 13th of June 183o. At eighteen he ran away from

home

and started on foot for London, but on the way obtained

work

WORK

as a gardener at Lewisham, Kent, where he lived for a number of. years. He had always been. an ingenious mechanic, inventing trifling novelties and repairing watches and clocks in the neighbourhood, and when sewing machines began to be much used they attracted his

practical

PRACTICAL

attention, and aroused his inventive genius. Leaving his garden he went up to Landon and became working mechanic for a firm of sewing-machine makers. Here he was in his

element

ELEMENT (Lat. elementum)

, and in several particulars improved his principal's machines, and invented a new one with an arm attachment that permitted circular as well, as straightforward

work

WORK

. With a fellow workman he moved in 1857 to Coventry, and started the manufacture of the " European" and other sewing machines from his patents. This was the beginning of the Coventry Machinists' Company, the

pioneer

PIONEER

of all the

great

GREAT

bicycle and tricycle works which afterwards made that city the centre of the industry. Former acquaintances of Starley at Lewisham and elsewhere migrated to Coventry to become skilled

mechanics

MECHANICS

for this company. In 1868 they began the manufacture, after a Paris model and at first for French use, of bicycles, several of the earliest suggested improvements being Starley's. A number of firms were soon devoting themselves exclusively to the manufacture of bicycles, and for one of these Starleywhose

financial

FINANCIAL

successes were always for othersdesigned the Coventry tricycle. As it was harder to propel than the bicycle he invented the

balance

BALANCE (derived through the Fr. from the Late Lat. bilantia, an apparatus for weighing, from bi, two, and lanx, a dish or scale)

gear, and applied it in the Salvo, whichis the type of the present tricycle .(q.v.). Starley died on the 17th of June 1881, and a public

monument

MONUMENT (Lat. monumentum or monumentum; from monere, to advise, bring to mind, remind; the German equivalent is Denkmal)

has been erected to his memory in Coventry. His nephew, J. K. Starley, patented the tangent wh-_el in 1874.

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