![August [Augustus?] Gondolf on his tricycle](../../media/files/d5ac05bea78dbdac4376b269ff76cea47adac4a4_1392920155.jpg)
1870-1875
Glass photonegative
Young August Gondolf was the son of miner Peter Gondolf, a partner in the Oxon and Gondolf mine, which was situated on the ridge of Hawkins Hill, just outside the ‘Golden Quarter Mile’. His fashionable sailor suit is topped with the hatband of HMS Cadmus, a 21-gun wooden steam corvette of the British Navy.
THE days of the velocipede [tricycle] are numbered—the Yankees have invented a "notion" that loaves it as far behind as the locomotive leaves the bullock-dray. The new machine, like the most improved form of the old one, is a bicycle ; or rather it is a pair of unicycles, differing so widely from any previous appliance for the purpose of locomotion that the American inventor's claim to originality is not likely to be disputed... If Mercury had wings on his heels, we can add wheels to our toes, and by means of them travel faster than ever the great Olympian pick- pocket did, if not with more grace and elegance. It is said that ladies and gentlemen thus mounted on wheels can glide about the streets and along pathways with perfect case and considerable velocity, while their progression appears to observers both graceful and elegant. [The Pedespeed—the latest American "Notion," Australian Town and Country Journal, 23 July 1870, p 17]
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