He began working on the farm at nine, showing early talent as an inventor by making a rat trap from an umbrella rip and a branch of a willow tree.

[3] There he worked as an under-gardener, in his spare time mending watches[3] and creating devices such as a mechanism to allow a duck to get through a hole in a fence, closing a door behind it if a rat tried to follow.

Penn knew Josiah Turner, a partner of Newton, Wilson and Company, the makers of the machine, and in 1859 Starley joined its factory in Holborn.

The historian Edward Lyte wrote: "Each rider of the sociable drove his own big wheel independently, so the course of the machine along the road was rather variable.

He sat down to a cup of tea and forthwith invented the differential gear,[3] an important mechanical design concept incorporated, e.g., in the back axle of every rear-wheel drive car.

It was John Kemp Starley and Sutton who devised the recognisably modern Rover safety bicycle with 26-inch wheels (still a standard size), chain drive, and a diamond-shaped frame (no seat-tube as yet) in 1884, showing it in 1885.

John Kemp Starley experimented with an electric tri-car around 1888 but the petrol-driven Rover 8hp car was sold in 1904, two years after his death.