The first bicycle was built in 1817. Cycling only became a widespread pastime in the Victorian period, and it was a daytime pastime. Street lighting was rare outside the towns. Country roads were gravel and full of holes, and a rider who went over the handlebars of a high-wheeler had a long way to fall.

An advertisement by the maker Cadot of Lyon, from September 1868, is often named as the earliest dated picture of a lamp on a bicycle. That reading is disputed. Others describe the same advertisement as promoting the machine rather than the lamp. 

Lanterns were in use by the middle of that year. A Marseille paper of 30 June 1868 wrote about M. Favre. He had brought the velocipede to the city, trained a stream of pupils and built most of the machines running there. Anyone who wanted to travel day and night with a lit lantern, the paper said, need only stop in front of the photograph Waléry had on show in the rue Saint-Ferréol. The original could be seen at Favre's depot on the boulevard de la Madeleine.

This is advertising in the form of local news. It says nothing about who made the lantern or what it burned. It is dated, and it is three months earlier than the Cadot advertisement.

Number 6 of Le Vélocipède Illustré, dated 6 May 1869, carries two advertisements for velocipede lanterns in the same column on page four.

The first is from Brémont et Cie of 30, rue du Colisée in Paris, headed "Inventeurs brevetés S.G.D.G." The firm calls itself the only factory making velocipede lanterns that do not go out, and says it has had very great success with them. It names the Véloce Club de Paris and the house of Michaux et Cie among its customers.

The second advertisement is headed "Lanternes pour Vélocipèdes" and names Ch. Macé of the rue Saint-Maur. His lantern was the most successful on the market, and guaranteed not to go out under the heaviest shaking. Macé also sold bronze pedals of various systems, brakes, oilers, saddles and bags.

Both lanterns were patented S.G.D.G., sans garantie du gouvernement. Those letters turn up on French lamps and fittings well into the twentieth century. They mean that a patent was registered, and nothing further. No one examined it.

Neither firm sold on brightness or on range. Both sold on the lamp staying alight. Macé's advertisement also claims an honourable mention at the Paris exhibition of 1867. That would put a velocipede lantern on show two years before any date in the standard works. 

The masthead of the paper's first number, five weeks earlier, already carried a lit lantern at the right end of the handlebars. That engraving is allegorical and says nothing about what any maker sold, but it shows the lamp was taken for granted by April 1869.

Lamps were also sold as a paid extra with a new machine. The two trades ran alongside each other from 1869 onward.

Early bicycle lamps were far too weak to light the road. They marked the rider out, so that other people could see him coming.

The lampion is the clearest example. It came into use around 1875. It was a folding lantern of oiled paper, held between two metal discs by a spring, with a candle in a small tube. You hooked it over the handlebars. The format lasted some thirty years, and French catalogues still listed paper and mica lampions in the 1930s.

Riders wanted to see where they were going. What they got was a flame that blew out at the first bump. An account of a ride in 1869 describes a lamp lit three times and extinguished three times. It then shook loose, fell off and broke on the road. The riders left what was left of it at the first public house.

That is why Brémont and Macé both sold on the same point. The complaint outlasted them by fifty years. Edward Williams of Chicago patented a wind shield in 1896 to keep the flame from being blown over, which is covered under bicycle oil lamps. Sears, Roebuck sold a lamp called the Neverout in 1897, with "Positively Stays Lit" printed round the picture. In 1917 Otto Pletscher was still complaining that an electric lamp went dark the moment you pushed the machine by hand, and that one is under battery and dynamo bicycle lamps.

Legislation followed a similar pattern across Europe. The dates are some years apart in each country.

The Metropolitan and Public Carriage Act of 1869 pushed British cyclists towards carrying a light. A local government act of 1888 and a Scottish act the following year reinforced it. In France the Prefect of Paris required cyclists to carry lighting from 1874. What applied outside the capital stayed unclear until 1896. In that year the government issued model regulations for the departments, and carrying a lantern at night was among them.

Something was in force earlier, at least locally. In December 1868 a paper in Tours printed a letter from a reader, under the heading Les vélocipèdes à la lanterne. The man had been walking through a dark street in the Saint-Étienne quarter between six and seven in the evening. A cyclist riding at speed with no lamp clipped him, and he got away with a fright. He wrote that he would complain to the authorities and demand strict enforcement of the law against this abuse of progress without a lantern. He names no statute and no article, so this may have been a municipal police regulation.

The editors printed his letter and then mocked him. His complaint would get nowhere, they wrote, in an election season when cyclists might be useful to the official candidate.

Seven ways of making light were tried on a bicycle, and all seven were already in use before 1900.

Popularity kept shifting between them. The candle lamp came back four times after it had apparently been displaced. Acetylene was still being sold new in 1916, at a higher price than a dry battery outfit from the same catalogue.

Two lines of lamp ran side by side for the next forty years. The candle lantern is covered under bicycle candle lamps, including the sprung mounting patented in Paris in 1869. The oil lantern, the hub lamp and the makers who dominated the 1880s and 1890s are under bicycle oil lamps. Acetylene arrived in 1896, and battery and dynamo lighting was tried from 1886. For the marks that let you date a surviving lamp, see identifying and dating an antique bicycle lamp.

Primary: Le Vélocipède Illustré, first year, numbers 1 and 6, April and May 1869, consulted at the bibliothèques spécialisées de la Ville de Paris; Le Sémaphore de Marseille, June 1868; L'Union libérale, Tours, December 1868, both consulted through RetroNews.

Secondary: Peter W. Card, Early Cycle Lighting 1868–1948; Tony Hadland and Hans-Erhard Lessing, Bicycle Design: An Illustrated History; Bernard Mahot, Les lanternes, phares et fanaux, for French legislation; A.R.C.O.M.A., Éclairage : vélocipèdes et motocyclettes.