Old Fashioned Penny Farthing Big Wheel Bicycle 19th Century Hipster Sport Novelty Wallpaper bycapricorn•sun

bicycle popular in the late 1800s.

The Penny Farthing bicycle obtained its name from the penny and farthing coins of the time. The bike was made entirely of metal instead of wood and the tires were rubber. The high center of gravity often caused the rider to topple forward whenever it hit any small obstacle. A period of rapid growth, the Gilded Age was also a period of gross materialism and blatant political corruption in U.S. history during the 1870s that gave rise to important novels of social and political criticism. The period takes its name from the earliest of these, The Gilded Age (1873), written by Mark Twain in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner. The Penny Farthing Bicycle, although an impractical design, is a symbol of innocence in a time of excesses.