BOSTON, MASS. : Who invented the bicycle? As with almost any invention, attributing it to a single person is problematic, requiring Talmudic distinctions on matters like when it took its current form, what degree of refinement is required, and how anecdotal the supporting evidence can be. In some cases the trail is hopelessly obscured, and one might as well ask who wrote “Three Blind Mice,” who made up the latest disaster joke, or who first thought of putting crushed M&M’s in ice cream.

Such niceties did not trouble the French government back in 1894, when it hailed Pierre and Ernest Michaux, a father-and-son team of Parisian mechanics, as the inventors of the bicycle. This glorification of native sons is not unusual in the country where chauvinism was born. Yet according to David V. Herlihy, a Boston bicycle historian, the first pedal bicycle was built by a Frenchman, but not Michaux. Instead the credit belongs to Pierre Lallement, who committed the grievous sin (to Gallic souls) of taking his invention to the United States.

In an 1882 lawsuit Lallement testified, in faltering English, that as a Parisian mechanic in the early 186Os he saw a man riding a draisine, or hobby-horse—a pedal-less two-wheeled contraption that a rider sat on and propelled by walking. The draisine had long since fallen out of fashion, and Lallement could see why: There was no place for a rider to rest his legs, which quickly got tired as a result. Lallement decided to attach pedals to the front wheel. He finished his first prototype in the summer of 1863, and though it was rather creaky, he did manage to ride it up and down a Paris boulevard, to the amazement and derision of pedestrians. His second version, in 1865, was mechanically sounder but no more popular with the public; a discouraged Lallement took it apart and brought portions to America, where he settled in Ansonia, Connecticut.

That fall he rode his rebuilt model four and a half miles from Ansonia to Birmingham and back. Unfortunately it rained, and he suffered history’s first recorded bicycle wipeout when he collided with an understandably puzzled team of horses (the brake had not yet been developed). Upon receiving a patent the following year—the first bicycle patent in any country—Lallement looked forward to raking in the royalties. But in a story all too characteristic of inventors through the ages, his patent brought him a lot of grief and very little cash. During a brief boom in the late 186Os, bicycle makers infringed it freely. A Brooklyn entrepreneur named Calvin Witty bought Lallement’s rights in 1869 and spent most of the patent’s remaining term fighting to establish its legitimacy.

In the course of the relentless litigation, Witty’s opponents dredged up all sorts of bogus precedents, including unconfirmed rumors of one M. Verrecke, a French acrobat, who supposedly used a bicycle in theatrical performances in 1863. Determined lawyers and investigators searched far and wide for any scrap of evidence that might discredit Lallement. In the end they were unsuccessful: no prior example of a bicycle could be found. And in all the years of suits and countersuits and exhibits and depositions, the name of Michaux never came up.

The Michaux legend seems to have begun in the early 189Os, after Lallement and Michaux pére et fils had all died. Another Michaux son, Henry, was seeking to reestablish the family business, and he knew that credit for inventing the bicycle would greatly enhance its name. He enlisted the help of L. Baudry de Saunier, a journalist, who conveniently rewrote his history of bicycling to give the Michaux a more prominent role. (Herlihy has meticulously researched how the story of their accomplishments kept changing through the years, to make a better case for their priority and to counter new objections.) A newspaper campaign was launched, and in 1894 a monument declaring Pierre and Ernest Michaux to be inventeurs et propagateurs du vélocipède à pédale was dedicated in Bar-le-Duc, where Pierre was born. To this day they are celebrated as fathers of the bicycle, while Lallement, whose death in Boston in 1891 went virtually unnoticed, has remained in oblivion.

Herlihy is working to change that. Boston’s newest bicycle path has been named after Lallement; the Lallement Memorial Committee, P.O. Box 15077, Boston MA 02215, is lobbying the Postal Service to issue a stamp and has nominated the Frenchman for the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

The issue may never be fully resolved. Some Michaux supporters say that Lallement once worked in the Michaux shop and could have stolen the idea. There is no firm evidence of his employment there, but it seems likely that there was some relationship between the two mechanics. And it’s clear that regardless of who invented what when, the Michaux firm was the first commercially successful bicycle manufacturer, starting around 1867. While no one is expecting France to abandon its local heroes in favor of an expatriate, the memorial committee is working to fulfill the 1883 prophecy of Charles E. Pratt, an early bicycle booster, that Lallement will “be remembered as long as the bipedaliferous wheel continues to revolve.”

MADISON, IND. : Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, American towns have taken their identities from the things they produce. Detroit is the Motor City, of course; at the height of the horse-and-buggy era Westfield, Massachusetts, was proud to be known as the Whip City; and Sheboygan, Wisconsin, once extolled its many assets with the sobriquet City of Cheese, Chairs, Children, and Churches. Madison, Indiana, has no such nickname, but at one time it could have claimed the arcane title of Saddletree Capital of the World.

At its peak in the early 188Os, Madison had a dozen factories whose employees, mostly of German descent, turned out 156,000 saddletrees a year —more than the rest of the country combined. (A saddletree is the frame or skeleton to which leather is attached to make a saddle.) One of those factories was the Ben Schroeder Saddle Tree Company, established at its current location in 1878. By the time it went out of business in 1972, upon the death of Schroeder’s last descendant, it was the sole survivor of what had once been Madison’s most important industry.

The automobile, of course, did much to reduce the market, but there were other factors. Schroeder saddletrees were made of wood, while modern manufacturers prefer cheaper injection-molded plastic. Handmade wooden saddletrees, which are still produced in a few custom shops, require a lot of labor, but they allow much more design freedom. The Schroeder company made three hundred different types of trees; a modern mass producer, by contrast, might offer half a dozen.

A few years after the closing, a team from the Historic American Engineering Record surveyed the derelict factory and produced a detailed set of plans. The site, including a residence and some related structures, was donated to Historic Madison, Inc. (HMI), a group dedicated to preserving the many buildings that remain from Madison’s nineteenth-century heyday. HMI started looking for funds to preserve the factory. After more than a decade the group finally secured a grant and hired John Staicer, who had worked at the Hanford Mills Museum in East Meredith, New York, to direct the project.

When excavation began, in July 1991, the shop’s condition was pretty much what you’d expect from a building that had stood abandoned for almost twenty years. The elements had done their usual disintegrative work; woodland creatures had set up housekeeping inside, decorating their nests with valuable historical documents; leaves and other debris were everywhere. Staicer’s crew got out shovels and notebooks and went to work.

What they found was a trove of artifacts from the era of the craftsman: hand tools, blocks of wood and strips of metal, workers’ aprons, all where they were on the factory’s last day. Equally important, Staicer’s people found business records dating as far back as the 187Os. These documents include purchase orders, insurance contracts, and even correspondence with other manufacturers to establish a price-fixing scheme.

In addition to saddletrees, the shop through the years turned out clothespins, furniture, and other wooden items, as well as work gloves. To make this wide range of products, the factory accumulated some seventy machines, which tax Staicer’s ingenuity as he tries to figure out what they were used for. Some are quite familiar—lathes, planers, band saws—while others may have been custom-built. Eventually Staicer hopes to get at least some of them up and running.

The question remains of where to put it all. Restoring the factory site itself would seem the obvious choice, but the buildings have deteriorated so much that it might be too expensive. HMI owns an old tobacco warehouse in town that could hold a museum of Madison’s industrial history. Once a site is chosen, Staicer and HMI will face the usual archaeological problem of deciding what is junk and what is an artifact—whether, for example, it’s necessary to keep every one of the ton or so of nails that have been recovered.

Yet as familiar as these questions of location and content are, the Schroeder Saddle Tree Project is different from most preservation efforts. Experts abound on blacksmithing and steel production and textile manufacture, but little is known about saddletrees, despite their importance a century ago. Staicer and his staff are having to learn about the industry as they go, which makes their task both difficult and exciting. Just as a saddle is shaped around a tree, so too will historians construct a greater understanding of a town’s, and an industry’s, past upon the framework of the Schroeder factory.