STARLEY - Bicycle - Before 2000

James Starley was born in 1831 in Albourne, Sussex. He left home as a teenager and went to Lewisham, south of London. He worked as an assistant gardener, and in his spare time he enjoyed repairing watches and creating mechanical devices. An employee of Starley, John Penn, bought a sewing machine. Starley repaired it when it broke and improved its mechanism. Penn met Josiah Turner, partner of Newton, Wilson and Company, builders of the machine, and in 1859 Starley joined them in the Holborn factory. Turner and Starley began their own venture as Coventry Sewing Machine Company in Coventry in 1861. Turner’s grandson brought a French velocipede in 1868. The company thus began to build bicycles and Coventry soon became the center of the British bicycle industry. Starley's sons continued to manufacture bicycles after his death in 1881, but his grandson John Kemp Starley did more. John Kemp Starley and Sutton shared the credit for inventing the modern bicycle with the safety bicycle in 1884-1885.