For $13,000, You Too Can Own A 19th Century French Monocycle

A maverick Spanish inventor is selling a one-wheel velocipede that fully encloses the rider on eBay, based upon a French monocycle invented in 1873.

Boing Boing describes it as steampunk, but they have an unfortunate tendency of throwing the word “steampunk” in front of anything that is eccentrically vintage and brass etched. Granted, steampunk’s a cool word, but let’s not degrade it to refer to things that are neither steam powered, retrofuturistic or particularly punkish.

That said, it’s an undeniably cool vehicle. Amazed at the bike paths of Berlin, I recently bought my first bicycle in almost twenty years. If only I’d held off for a few days and had 13,000 dollars to spare: I would have certainly bought this monocycle to locomote around Kreuzberg instead.

Also, lest we forget, this same vehicle, mounted with an automatic machine gune, was once predicted to be the vehicle that would win us the Next Great War.

1873 Monocycle Replica [eBay] : Boing Boing : Detroit Dave