Perhaps the first?

[Nabeaquam]

 

[Frankenorange]

There may well have been others before this one.

Around this same period(definitely in our super summer of '76) i had a friend , who was a good few years older, who was fitting multiple gearing systems and motoX bars to random frames for mucking about in the woods. What was commonly called a tracker, but he added road gears.
I remember him straight legging curved forks by heating them up and running out to the road to use a grate, for a drain, to gradually ease the bend out! . Bonkers!
His inspiration was from his dad who was a motorbike trials rider and my mate did build a few trials bicycles that had super low gearing. I think he was welding small rear cogs to kiddie cranks iirc. Low gears and ground clearance!. Him and another lad would make a course up and try and clear it without putting feet down. Just like his dad would try and do.
Tbh; if a teenage kid (he wasn't the only one locally) was bodging these things together, in an english garden shed, then it was being done better elsewhere.
All the parts were available and it all needed to complete was a suitable frame that needed to have decent tubing and tyre clearance.

The Marin guys and gals were deffo the first to combine the words mountain and bike, sell the lifestyle, and make batches of frames and bikes but they didn't invent that type of bike. They just put a name to it and sold it to the world.
I have mentioned this before that they sold downhill racing , but they absolutely did not invent downhill racing, against the clock. I read about a bunch of RAF pilots, in ww2, who were racing against the clock down a local hill , with the airfield bicycles, on days off or when the cloud cover was too low to fly.
The big cheese put a stop to it in the end as they couldn't replace pilots, as fast as they were losing them, and couldn't afford to lose any pilots to injuries from racing the bikes.

One day i will find that book again as there was a photo of one of them doing it complete with goggles and flying hat. You can be sure that somewhere else the same thing was going on because those kids were always looking for things to go fast in, or on.

 

[legrandefromage]

Woodsie, even earlier. Off road cycling has been around since the dawn of the pneumatic tire. Charlie was the man who came up with the name and rightly credited as so. Rough Stuff, Pass Storming, all off road cycling going back over a century.

Anyway, I built the first Monting Bik by riding down the scrambles in 1975 and writing one of the first ever emails to Charlie telling him what a good idea it was

https://bicycledesign.net/2008/08/way-ahead-of-his-time/

 

[Nabeaquam]

There may well have been others before this one.

Around this same period(definitely in our super summer of '76) i had a friend , who was a good few years older, who was fitting multiple gearing systems and motoX bars to random frames for mucking about in the woods. What was commonly called a tracker, but he added road gears.
I remember him straight legging curved forks by heating them up and running out to the road to use a grate, for a drain, to gradually ease the bend out! . Bonkers!
His inspiration was from his dad who was a motorbike trials rider and my mate did build a few trials bicycles that had super low gearing. I think he was welding small rear cogs to kiddie cranks iirc. Low gears and ground clearance!. Him and another lad would make a course up and try and clear it without putting feet down. Just like his dad would try and do.
Tbh; if a teenage kid (he wasn't the only one locally) was bodging these things together, in an english garden shed, then it was being done better elsewhere.
All the parts were available and it all needed to complete was a suitable frame that needed to have decent tubing and tyre clearance.

The Marin guys and gals were deffo the first to combine the words mountain and bike, sell the lifestyle, and make batches of frames and bikes but they didn't invent that type of bike. They just put a name to it and sold it to the world.
I have mentioned this before that they sold downhill racing , but they absolutely did not invent downhill racing, against the clock. I read about a bunch of RAF pilots, in ww2, who were racing against the clock down a local hill , with the airfield bicycles, on days off or when the cloud cover was too low to fly.
The big cheese put a stop to it in the end as they couldn't replace pilots, as fast as they were losing them, and couldn't afford to lose any pilots to injuries from racing the bikes.

One day i will find that book again as there was a photo of one of them doing it complete with goggles and flying hat. You can be sure that somewhere else the same thing was going on because those kids were always looking for things to go fast in, or on.

1897, 1900 miles by bicycle. Black US army troops, buffalo soldiers, 25 infantry regiment. Prof of theory test.

 

[highlandsflyer]

Whenever this comes up, I have said what LFG said. As soon as there were bikes they were used off 'road'.

Like most new things, it takes someone to name it/patent it to get the recognition.