The picture shows one of the original bicycles used on Margaret Randall and Gerald Chesterfield's ill-fated west-east trans-Sahara expedition of 1876. They opted to use the "ordinary bicycle" as it was then known, rather than the "safety bicycle" (the two wheels of which are identical in size). The same-size wheel version was not introduced until paradigm shifts in bicycle design in the eighteen eighties, prior to which the notion of two identical size wheels providing greater stability than one huge and another tiny wheel was unthinkable.

The Randall-Chesterfield expedition, which set out from a random point on the west coast of Africa (near what is now Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania), aimed to reach Port Said in Egypt in under a year. A brisk pace was therefore envisaged. However, Randall and Chesterfield brought their venture to an abrupt and untimely end, just a few yards from its starting point on the Atlantic shoreline.

Historians usually put the expedition's failure down to the problems experienced by the cyclists in the sandy conditions. In her diaries however, Randall, anxious to prove the superiority of western technology over all forms of local camel and donkey transport, tells a different story:

"The intense heat of the Sahara during the day made Chesterfield and I opt to ride in the biting cold of the desert night. We thus sought protection from the icy temperatures by donning the sleeping sacks that Royal Geographical Society member Sir Reginald Sleeping had designed especially for the venture. Such was the restriction of movement produced by the sacks that pedalling proved impossible".