Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? | Hacker News Reader

Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

rootsofprogress.org

691 pointsexolymph492 comments

>Yet it was a simple mechanical invention

As a mechanical engineer, this statement baffled me. All manufactured technology exists in the context of the manufacturing capabilities available to the designer. The manufacturing tech had to be tremendously complicated before a decent bike could be made. Hollow steel tubes aren't simple. Ball bearings aren't simple. There is a reductionist viewpoint among "theory" people that misses the trees for the forest.

Anyone who had tried to make anything, especially anything original and with mechanical components knows this to be true. Even simple machines require a lot of forethought, planning, and iteration to be able to perform consistently and reliably. When we see an every day object like a bicycle we take it for granted and think that it must be obvious. But that couldn't be further from the truth.

Take even just a single part from it, like the chain for example probably represents centuries worth of technology. Each link has to be uniform to operate smoothly on a chainring or sprocket, which indicates some form of mass production.

Chains must be hardened to withstand stress, resist stretching. Soft steel would wear and deform too quickly.

Each link is in itself a complex component composed of a uniform bushing and pin shaped oblong symmetrical down the center and also quite small. It must pivot smoothly.

I doubt there are many people, even skilled people, who could make a complete bicycle from raw metal stock.

The Toaster Project is a good example of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODzO7Lz_pw

https://www.amazon.com/Toaster-Project-Attempt-Electric-Appl...

He attempted to build the basic components of a toaster from scratch. Smelting metal, molding plastic, etc. The book is a tough recommendation because he sortof gives up on the later parts and limps to a finish, but overall its a fascinating look at how difficult these processes are if you build them up from scratch.

HTME on Youtube also goes into the process of making seemingly simple things and the time and effort it takes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfIqCzQJXvYj9ssCoHq327g

One of the more famous videos is where it takes them ~$1500 and 6 months to make a chicken sandwich and they still used a lot of equipment that they didn't make themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE

  it takes them ~$1500 and 6 months
  to make a chicken sandwich

I watched that video and there's nothing really explaining what went into that price. Did they include the flights to the coast to gather salt? Hiring the boat? Renting an apartment to boil the sea water down?

It does seem to be a rather meaningless exercise and depends on what you start with. If you have a back garden or a tiny plot of land, you can easily grow the required ingredients and raise the chicken for far less than $1500, although the wheat will take that amount of time to grow. If you start with absolutely nothing and insist on farming wheat in the middle of San Francisco, it can certainly cost far more than $1500 to get your chicken sandwich.

I dabbled in electronics, then electromechanics then mechanics.

I'm now convinced that almost no software engineer is worth its title unless he made some physical apparatus on any complexity. Even a pair of scissors.

Why? That's akin to saying a mechanical engineer isn't worth their salt unless they know how to design and implement software. They're two different specialties that do different things. To be a good mechanical engineer you absolutely don't need to be good at making or even have tried to have make software.

Cross-discipline experience is invaluable, especially across several domains. One begins to appreciate commonalities, uniquenesses, and the infuriating significance of details only apparent on in-depth experimentation and iteration.

As with usability testing, small-n samples, say three to five, go a long way.

Do you have cross-domain expertise yourself?

That's all true, and almost entirely irrelevant to the (very strong!) claim "a software engineer who hasn't built some mechanism is not worthy of the title".

But why specifically manufacture of consumer goods, when there are so many other disciplines, like horseback riding, nursing, human resources, and so on.

I think you also have to argue for why, for your comment to be meaningful. Otherwise, I could just as well state that "no software engineer is worth their title unless they've competed in horseback riding, specifically dressage."

Yeah, whoever said that should try to make one without being able to go the the hardware store

Assembling a bike from parts would be a challenge for many people here.

Assembling a wheel from parts is beyond most people, including many bike mechanics. In fact most wheels are assembled by machines, else labor costs would be too high.

Used to be it was mostly serious amateurs and professionals that had them hand built. They’re more reliable, but I think it’s more to do with the combinatorial explosion of parts. Machines are for making 5000 of something, not one.

And even the reliability will fall at some point (maybe already, I’ve been out of the loop so long) The human picks up on things that don’t seem right. But if you built enough telemetry into the robot, you could measure all the elastic and inelastic deformations and probably reject/reassemble the wheel based on information a human couldn’t or wouldn’t track.

> Assembling a wheel from parts is beyond most people,

Just how shitty wheel would be admissible here? A wooden octagon?

Speaking as someone who has laced motorcycle wheels (same construction as bycicle wheels, just with larger parts) it is very much a non-trivial task. Even given a premanufactured hub, rim, and a bag of spokes assembling a wheel is time consuming and easy to get wrong. Spokes have to be laced following the correct pattern, and it may not be obvious there is a mistake until ~80% of the spokes are installed. There are (at least on motorcycles with a drop-center rim) 4 different types of spokes that aren't that dissimilar from each other & are easily confused.

Having rewound electric motors w/ no repair manuals avaliable & laced rims w/ repair manuals & directions from the spoke manufacturer, rewinding an electric motor is far easier to successfully accomplish.

I've built bicycle wheels from parts. It's a bit tricky and time-consuming, but perfectly doable. The real tricky part IMO is getting all of the nipple adjustments just right so that roundness, tension, and track are all acceptable at the same time.

Yes, but I don’t think that was the factor here. Ancient technology was astoundingly precise (see the famous Antikythera mechanism).

I think the problem was roads. If you combine bad (or nonexistent) roads with airless hard tires, the result is much much less useful than any modern bike on any modern road.

The first bikes were indeed wooden with wooden wheels. No ball bearings, no hollow steel tubes etc. But streets.

I could now say something about how engineers are so specialized in their perspective they cannot judge things without bringing current conventions into it but hey, every profession comes with it’s weakness.

Both factors are relevant. Modern mountain bikes with pneumatic tires (for example) would have been very useful going back to medieval times when roads were pretty rough. And, as you say, given streets, even low-grade bikes can be useful.

Would a wooden bicycle, with not-very-freely-spinning wheels, and a bone-jarring ride, be worth the considerable expense of purchasing? Would it even be better than walking and/or using a wheelbarrow? Doesn't the thing produced have to rise above a certain level of utility to merit making some copies of it? For human-scale power, I am not sure a bicycle without bearings or pneumatic tires works other than as a curiosity.

> For human-scale power, I am not sure a bicycle without bearings or pneumatic tires works other than as a curiosity.

Pretty much all modern rideshare bicycles do not have pneumatic tires, FWIW. Ride quality suffers, but it's not an awful tradeoff for short trips with whatever squishy compound they use now.

Yeah but the alternative in antiquity wasn't "whatever squishy compound", it was wood, perhaps with a metal strap around it, like a carriage wheel.

Which is why in the early wooden “bikes” (you were sitting on a wooden bar and pushing with your legs) they made the bar “squishy” by adding some sort of saddle or some adapted spring dampers or sth.

Understood.

It's interesting that wood is considered impractical for a bicycle... but somehow practical for a carriage?

Carriages used to have suspensions (made from some elastic whale bone I believe).

If someone would attempt to build a bicycle in a time of carriages with carriage wheels, I would then expect this person to also copy (at least in analogy) the suspension systems for carriages of that time, if not on the first try at least on the second...

That's not really accurate. Docked bikeshare systems in US major cities use real pneumatic tires. Citibike in NYC, whatever Ford Bike in SF is called now, Capital Bikeshare in DC, and more.

It's just some of the cheap dockless purveyors that use non-pneumatic tires, and these companies have been dropping like flies. The docked bikeshares by contrast are still (slowly) expanding with their superior, but admittedly more expensive, bicycles.

I think bicycling was really not relevant, because the peasants would probably rather take a mule or a wagon to carry stuff around and the aristocrats would rather take a comfortable carriage.

There was basically no rich middle class which had the time and money to fool around with individual transportation, and the other classes had either no real reason to want this or it was pure luxury.

Googling “bicycles in Africa” gives me plenty of examples of peasants who, I guess, would rather use a mule or wagon, but cannot afford one, and are much helped with a bicycle.

I also would think such people existed elsewhere in the world centuries ago.

Bicycles in Africa can exist only as output of the massive industrial base elsewhere.

Chinese wheelbarrows are the real endpoint of pre-industrial transportation.

> be worth the considerable expense of purchasing

Anyone with the means to pay would much rather use an animal-pulled cart instead of literally making an ass of himself.

Or just ride a horse like a gentleman. (Until the 'mad dogs and Englishmen' craze hit.)

The Antikythera Mechanism was a completely exotic Roman artifact. It was the space shuttle of its time. Not really a fair comparison.

Dually, Romans were known for their extensive roads system. My family home sites directly below the Ancient Roman frontier in Germany, where you can climb a mountain and still find a 10 foot wide stone road they built 2000 years ago mostly intact

As any cyclist who has been on cobblestones can tell you, the pavers used on Roman roads aren't friendly to bikes. This would be doubly true without a pneumatic tire. Amazing engineering but not suitable for a bicycle.

See also: Paris-Roubaix.

They often use customized bikes for that to keep from shaking their fillings out.

They actually use road bikes for these, though they're versions that are now called "endurance bikes". They're a pretty popular segment of road bike sales now. The two biggest models are the Specialized Roubaix (named after the race of course), and the Trek Domane. Both are basically road bikes with relaxed geometry and some compliance features to reduce/absorb vibration so the rider doesn't get tired as quickly. And of course wider tires, typically 28 or 32mm, but this has actually become the norm these days for road bikes anyway. (23mm tires used to be the norm, but that's gone out of fashion now, as people have decided you don't gain enough in efficiency with such skinny tires to make the downsides (punishing ride quality) worth it.)

The Roman pavers you would ride on today are 2000 years old, remember. Back then they were in much better shape, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads#/media/File:Pompei...

I'm a little doubtful. It's hard to make a large pretty flat surface out of stone. That looks better than the french paves (which they still lay by hand in some places today), but still not fun without a modern bike.

That still looks very uncomfortable without pneumatic tires.

I wouldn't want to ride on such a road with a racing bike or a normal city bike; but with at mountain bike with suspension and perhaps somewhat fatter than normal tires I think riding there would not be too uncomfortable.

I grew up close to old roman streets and even in it’s best times it is nothing that you would wanna ride on with any kind of bike.

What about a modern mountain bike? Those are built to cross worse paths than just a regular dirt path.

On a mountainbike, if you had a choice between that road and offroad, you'd prefer offroad if it's clear (e.g. not riding through bushes or over fallen trees). Riding right next to the paved Roman road could be nice, riding on it not so much.

Perhaps that's true recently, when you grew up, but not back then:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Aeclanum...

Greek artifact, not Roman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

From the early middle of the ancient Roman era. The nationality of the artifact is less significant than the time in assessing the state of the art especially in this case.

Could you please give us coordinate of that road? Or even a link to some map service pointing at it? :)

Fact check: The Antikythera Mechanism was a completely GREEK artifact. It was recovered in the wreck of a sunken Roman ship but there is zero dispute about its origins due to the Greek inscriptions, Greek calendars, everything Greek. It's not Roman in the least but I understand the confusion since it was found in a Roman vessel. The Romans had conquored Greece by that time (c. 85 BC when the ship went down) but the mechanism and other Greek marbles, sculptures etc. were tributes FROM Greece to the Romans, who valued and treasured Greek art and invention. The device is firmly dated to 160 BC, incidentally, before Roman conquest of Greece

We're in violent agreement here: But the Antikythera Mechanism was built in the Roman era. The time is usually more important than the place or ethnicity when discussing technological advancement.

If 160 BC is the Roman era, then sure we agree. But it straddles the Bronze Age and in fact it's almost definite that the mechanism discovered was merely one in a long line of such mechanisms and that first invention dated to Archimedes (c.272-205 BC). In any event, it's not Roman and thus the post should have read "Roman era." To call it a Roman device is simply inaccurate in any context.

You're right, I should have used the term "era" in there. ust to be clear though; 160 bc was certainly the Roman era. The city of Rome was founded in the 700's BCE. The Punic wars were fought between 264–146 BCE. Rome conquered Greece in 146 BC. Rome dominated the seas for generations before the mechanism was made.

Cicero is quoted marveling at the "Sphere of Archimedes." Numerous books have been written about the Antikythera Mechanism. Just google it or look at wikipedia under Antikythera Mechanism. It's not Roman in any way, shape or form. It's all Greek.

I should have specified time in my original post. Cicero was a Roman orator. The Mechanism is a Roman era artifact. The time matters more than the location when discussing the level of technological advancement.

Or try the BBC and History Channel documentaries. There's zero dispute about its Greek origin. It's painfully obvious, in fact.

"see the famous Antikythera mechanism"

As a counterpoint see the marine chronometer for measuring longitude. Clocks had been around for centuries so easy right? [1]

Making something strong/reliable is easy, making something precise is 'easy', making something strong/reliable and precise, oh and preferably lightweight is hard.

You do have a good point about roads though. In fact in the UK the first push to tarmac the roads came from cyclists, not from motorists. And the first tyres were for a certain Mr Dunlops sons bicycle.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer

Even marine chronometers, once they were perfected, were very expensive, artisan pieces that had to be handmade.

> Ancient technology was astoundingly precise

Highly skilled artisans could make one-off pieces fit together exactly. Doing so at scale was prohibitively expensive, because machine tools hadn't been invented that let you precisely machine things identically. So, if you had a broken bicycle, you'd need a skilled artisan just to repair it- off-the-shelf parts were impossible. Every single bike would have been a unique object. This is how guns, ships, clocks, and basically everything was made before reliable methods of achieving precision were invented at the dawn of the industrial revolution.

The antikythera mechanism had inherent looseness in its hand-wrought gears which greatly limited how accurate it could have been. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Accuracy

(source: this book, which I gather is pretty accurate, if pop-history https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B072BFJB3Z )

> Ancient technology was astoundingly precise (see the famous Antikythera mechanism).

Ancient technology was neither accurate nor precise. Making two specific things fit (e.g. THIS dowel pin in THAT hole in a brass plate) does not require precision in the actual sense of the word, you can achieve the goal by consistently small iterations (ex: grinding the dowel down until wanted fit is achieved).

Precision (all my threads are the same) and accuracy (and they fit with the thread from every other machine shop) are what made the industrial revolution. Ancient technology had neither of those.

Right. And one point that cannot be stressed enough.

Good steel, in quantity, only goes back to 1880.

Lots of things that "could have been built in antiquity" foundered on that basic fact. Before Bessemer, steel was as exotic as titanium is now.

The alternatives are not good. Cast iron? Too heavy and too brittle. Wrought iron? Maybe, but not that great. Lead? Too soft. Brass? Could work, but expensive. A king's kid might have had a brass bicycle.

If the iron workers of Cizhou, China, who had an air-blown steel making process by about 1100 AD, had made the next step to a Bessemer converter, history would have been completely different. They were close. Right idea, limited steelmaking capability, existing iron industry. Coal was available, but apparently not too easily.

The few places in the world with easy access to both coal and iron ore started the Industrial Revolution. Then came railroads, and the resources didn't have to be so close.

What killed the Chinese iron industry wasn't the lack of a Bessemer converter. What killed them was the mandarin bureaucracy. The mandarins saw that some commoners were getting rich in the iron industry, declared it to be contrary to the proper order, and shut it down. (Source: "The Victory of Reason" by Rodney Stark.)

Commoners got rich in commerce and in agriculture and landlording for most of Chinese history. A merchant legendarily put the first emperor's father on the throne of Qin in the third century BC.

The merchants were despised, as merchants everywhere are; the rich farmers weren't. And a hereditary distinction between commoners and nobles was gone by the tenth century.

So I'd want to hear a little more context to the claim that "the iron industry was shut down because of the effrontery of commoners getting rich there".

A reply, now deleted, pointed out that AnimalMuppet's "source" appears to be more of a work of ideologically-motivated fiction than a source of credible information, as described in the Amazon reviews: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RKTM14HNQUUFO

Stark's book, while polemical and shoddy (in a non-trivial number of places), is not really any worse than much of the literature he sets out to make straight. A significant number of works that are often cited as authoritative regarding the historical issues Stark focuses on, end up citing patently inaccurate accounts from the 19th century. For example: for whatever reason, a non-trivial number of authors from the 20th century were completely fine citing 19th century works as primary sources, even though the events under discussion happened many centuries before then, and so were necessarily secondary sources.

The right take away after reading Stark is to become skeptical of a non-trivial amount of historical scholarship regarding the issues he covers, and skeptical of Stark as well.

Joseph Needham is hardly a fount of objectivity and lack of bias too.

Now that I have access to the book, I'll try.

Stark says, "Eventually, Mandarins at the imperial court had noticed that some commoners were getting rich by manufacturing and were hiring peasant laborers at high wages. They deemed such activities to be threats to Confucian values and social tranquillity[sic]. Commoners must know their place; only the elite should be wealthy. So, they declared a state monopoly on iron and seized everything. As Winwood Reade summed up, the reason for China's many centuries of economic and social stagnation is plain: 'Property is insecure. In this one phrase, the whole history of Asia is contained.'"

Footnotes for sources list "Hartwell 1966, 1967, 1971, McNeill 1982" for the info on the iron industry, and "Reade 1925: 108" for the quote.

"Hartwell 1971" resolves to 'Hartwell, Robert, 1971. "Historical Analogism, Public Policy, and Social Science in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century China." The American Historical Review 76:690-727.'

Hartwell 1966 is "Markets, Technology, and the Structure of Enterprise in the Development of the Eleventh-Century Chinese Iron and Steel Industry." The Journal of Economic History 26:29-58.'

(No Hartwell 1967 is listed in the bibliography.)

McNeill 1982 resolves to 'McNeill, William H. 1982. The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000. Chicago: University of Chicago Press'

Finally, Reade resolves to 'Reade, Winwood. 1925. The Martyrdom of Man. London: Watts.'

I'm not sure that Reade is important for more than the quote. I suspect that Hartwell and McNeill are the source of the actual info on what happened in China.

And, presuming that Stark summarized adequately, the problem may have been hiring peasants for high wages. That may in fact have been somewhat disruptive to the existing social order...

That does not sound like a good argument at all. Metal for vast majority of human history gave you massive edge in weapon technology. Some Mandarin just shut something like that down? Seems super unlikely

Vikings transported Crucible steel all the way from Afghanistan to make high end swords. Damascus steel(actually manufactured in India) and then forged into weapon in Damascus.. etc

There got to be other reasons. Better or equivalent to Crucible steel but en masss.. you can have forged plate for everyone, horse full armor, heat treated crossbow bolt heads etc.

This kind of thing isn't totally out of the question. The mandarins famously shut down China's budding sea voyages because they were run by a eunuch, and the mandarins and the eunuchs were opposed factions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He

But there was never a Chinese ideological opposition to peasants becoming rich; the theory advanced by AnimalMuppet makes no sense.

Or, they shut down those voyages because they were economically absurd.

The Wikipedia article you referenced has much interesting information, including "China ... embarked upon a massive and expensive expansion of the Great Wall of China. In this environment, funding for naval expeditions simply did not happen"; and Zheng He's part in spreading Chinese influence throughout South-East Asia.

> That does not sound like a good argument at all. Metal for vast majority of human history gave you massive edge in weapon technology. Some Mandarin just shut something like that down? Seems super unlikely

The assumption here is that every thing works in a clear way so you can see the military or whatever advantages of a particular phenomenon. Now I don't know if AnimalMuppet is literally correct that the bureaucracy simply shut down the steel industry -- but if it happened it would be because all that cheep steel was not being used for obvious things, like the imperial army, but for other unexpected uses. Maybe arms and armour still had to be made the old fashioned way anyhow, so there was no immediate military advantage.

More likely, things were subtler. Things innovations can strangled long before their importance is clear. Imperial China had a vibrant merchant class, but it isn't the kind of place that is likely to tolerate the "disruptive innovation" which fuelled Britain's Industrial Revolution -- where a bunch of upstarts come and do things with unexpected things. Even modern China (or for that matter the modern United States) struggles with it.

Perhaps that was Wootz steel from southern India?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel

Strong reverberations of this in Western history as well, and it's quite possibly the strongest argument against monopoly:

Bernhard J. Stern, "Resistances to the adoption of Technological Innovations" (1937)

https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...

Good steel would only be strictly needed for axles.

Bearings could have been polished and oiled wood. The frame, wood. The hinge of the front wheel, brass or another small bit of steel. Transmission could be a leather belt. Wheels, wood again.

Would such a device somehow emulate a modern bicycle? Very likely.

Would such a device be practical, reliable, fast, to say nothing of comfort? I greatly doubt it.

Right, that's how you could plausibly have made one or two, as a palace amusement, or a circus act. It's a little surprising this didn't happen (as far as I know).

But efficient enough to go some distance, reliable enough not to need a full-time repair-man, and cheap enough to be sold to people who didn't already own a horse & carriage? That needed lots more technology.

> Right, that's how you could plausibly have made one or two, as a palace amusement, or a circus act. It's a little surprising this didn't happen (as far as I know).

You also need people to ride it. It wouldn't fly as a palace amusement because the king (and more importantly the little prince) would keep falling off. They won't have an incentive to value the skill until there is a horde of middle-class, 19th century, hipsters showing him up.

A circus act is more plausible, but only if there's some continuum of other simpler circus equipment leading up to this rather sophisticated bit of engineering.

Bamboo-frame bicycles exist today as a fashionable item, and as far as I can tell without having ridden one, they work for practical purposes just as well as metal-frame ones.

I suspect you could make a perfectly acceptable modern bicycle with 18th century technology, albeit not as durable. Metal axles aren't much of a problem. Light and strong wheels are trickier, but you could get away with solid wooden ones, or emulate modern spoke systems with sturdy leather strands. The chain is difficult point - leather won't cut it as you need immense tensile strength and rigidity - but if you didn't want to meticulously hand-craft a modern chain (possible but tedious), a direct-gear solution might be practically possible.

No, what was missing was the very concept that it would be a worthwhile thing to attempt to build. It would have taken an incredible visionary to follow the above steps, especially in a world where the poor quality of roads made such a device of questionable value. And anyone rich enough to afford such a thing was doubtless rich enough to afford a horse carriage - who in that set would aspire to pedal through the mud?

tl;dr expensive, flimsy bicycles are completely useless in a world with poor roads and deep wealth inequality.

> expensive, flimsy bicycles are completely useless in a world with poor roads and deep wealth inequality.

You make a last great point with this.

Without paved roads, rubber, decent springs; all of the shortcomings are amplified. The gear drive works, but if you have a wood wheel, with a wood axle, w/ wood cogs, the tolerances to be both comfortable and effective on cobblestone or dirt would be troublesome.

> Without ... rubber,

as a one-word piece of supporting evidence, let me just say - Boneshakers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocipede#Boneshaker

Agreed. Vulcanized rubber tires appear to be the major missing component. Vulcanization wasn't discovered until 1839 [1] and the need to further improve ride comfort (from solid rubber tires) helped spur the creation of the pneumatic tire in 1888 [2].

[1] https://www.britannica.com/technology/vulcanization [2] https://www.britannica.com/technology/tire#ref117797

Might not rubber belts have been possible instead of chains? Rubber was available 18th Century - maybe not in industrial quantities but still. In fact, latex was was available to the Mayans and Aztecs according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rubber#History

AFAIK you'd need vulcanization to make rubber belts practical, so wouldn't have been available much earlier than chains and sprockets.

Leather "chains" were used on bicycles for a while, made from several small pieces of leather riveted together, in order to form ridges that gears could grab onto.

Good design may not have made up for the "wealth inequality" aspect of ancient bike production ... but it could have surmounted the issue of bad roads: The Rungu 3-wheeled electric bike seems to be well suited to rough, off road, conditions:

https://electrek.co/2019/05/23/first-ride-rungu-three-wheele...

The existence of huge numbers of wooden scooters called chukudu in Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda disproves this. Apparently they are made with simple woodworking tools, transport 500 pounds and last 2-3 years.

The Chukudu is more practical and simpler than the penny-farthing. And the roads in the Democratic Republic of Congo are rough.

Leonardo da Vinci could have built a Chukudu in 1490.

I read one source that says metal ball bearings are used to attach the wooden wheels to the wooden axle. Makes sense, because otherwise the friction would probably make the device impractical.

>he chain is difficult point - leather won't cut it as you need immense tensile strength and rigidity - but if you didn't want to meticulously hand-craft a modern chain (possible but tedious), a direct-gear solution might be practically possible.

Leather is good enough for motorcycle drive belts. Nowadays belt drive bikes use cogged composite belts, but once upon a time they were leather.

And the chain. The chain has more pieces in it than the rest of the bicycle by a significant margin. A safety bicycle could never have been created with out modern precision mechanical engineering and production.

Leather belts would work fine if you made them wide enough. I'd expect a canvas belt to be used instead - wide again being key. I'd expect to need a the belt to be a couple cm wide to work. A chain is better, but this should work.

You'd need good steel for spoked wheels too- without that you have heavy solid wheels instead.

I often wonder as I am building/fixing something (often my bicycle as it happens) and I happen to toss an extra screw in the trash how miraculous a simple screw of this type would have been to a middle-ages craftsman. The precision of keeping all those threads perfectly spaced is one thing, but the technology to make them in such volume at these sizes (often quite tiny), and in volumes so as to make them essentially disposable is a true marvel.

We think a computer is an impressive piece of technology, but many of the things around us that we consider less than mundane are just as incredible if we look just a couple hundred years back.

I recently read "The Perfectionists", which is a very readable book on the topic of how vital precision and machine tools was to the industrial revolution and the material world we live in. It really gets to the bottom of how the advances in our material capabilities and the invention of precision went hand in hand.

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B072BFJB3Z/

Next: nano-tech

Femtotech! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtotechnology

GRIIIIIIIIIFFFFITH! (Cue berserk soundtrack)

But for real, interesting read. Thanks for linking that.

Would love to see some applications of such a thing.

"The precision of keeping all those threads perfectly spaced is one thing"

Making the first precision screw requires a "screw originating machine".[1][2] This is a special-purpose device which can make a better screw than the ones used in building it. Then you can install the first precision screw in a lathe and make more screws in harder metals. This is how precision is bootstrapped.

[1] https://chestofbooks.com/home-improvement/workshop/Turning-M... [2] http://collection.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/co46546/tool-...

> "The precision of keeping all those threads perfectly spaced is one thing"

> Making the first precision screw requires a "screw originating machine".[1][2] This is a special-purpose device which can make a better screw than the ones used in building it.

I hadn't realized screws would be needed to create a screw-making machine. I love that we have machines that make better versions of their own components, something I never even thought to think of!

I don't have a source, and maybe I'm misremembering, but I think compilers (for software) and CPU production tooling (for hardware) both bootstrap off their own performance.

A better compiler can compile itself more efficiently, same for CPU/chip layout systems.

You’re exactly right about this. Of course compilers which compile themselves come with their own risks! https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358210

Risks which can be ameliorated: https://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust

The original version of the C# compiler was written in C and C++, but today's version is indeed itself written in C#!

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27513234/in-which-langua...

Often, the first bootstrapped is the bare minimum to get basic functionality available, to then build upon what features you can support.

Its been a while, and I think it was gcc 7.x timeframe, and IIRC, you had to have at a min, gcc 4.x available to bootstrap, and it took something like 3 separate bootstrap iterations to get the final compilers was like 4-6 hours if memory serves.

> compilers

Absolutely. Otherwise, all compilers would be written in Assmebly. Most compilers used today are written in C and the compiler for C (GCC) is written in C itself.

The C language was also written by Ken Thomson, because he was unhappy with the BCPL language, so the compiler for C was originally written in B. So on and So forth.

More Recently, the initial compiler for Rust was written in OCaml but is now written in Rust itself.

Slight nit: GCC has been written in C++ (not C) for several years now.

This is accurate, but compiler runtime efficiency and compiler effectiveness at producing efficient programs are inherently orthogonal.

There is certainly a major milestone in each new language though, when it becomes feature complete enough to write its own compiler.

Amusingly, most commercial screws today are made with rolled threads, where the wire is rolled between two ridged dies. But making those dies is a pretty high technology in its own right. The use of screw machines is now limited to making specialized or super-precision parts.

This is kinda inherent in everything, our tech generally moves upwards based on iterations of improvements. Even cheap mass production shitty stuff is still an improvement. Or do you mean exactly screws?

Really when you get down to it, like computers, tools are used like 30+% of the time to build other better tools. Jigs, more accurate cutters, measurement devices, etc. With code that's things like test frameworks, rpc mechanisms, version control, code gen, etc. In fact in software engineering you're usually seen as a better engineer if you build things indirectly (frameworks) instead of mass production of the solution.

Check out the home machine shop series to see how you'd build up a tech stack from basically scrap metal and wood and Sand.

The Metal Lathe (Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap Series Book 2) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007USU8HU/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_Gh...

The lathe is pretty much the ur-machine, and a lathe is really just screws

There is an old Jewish tradition (written down in Pirkei Avot ~1700 years ago) which lists the objects that God created "on the eve of the Sabbath at twilight" after finishing the rest of creation. Most of them are religious or mystical in meaning, but the final object listed is "[the original] tongs, for tongs are made with tongs."

here's a link to the text https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.5.6?lang=bi&with=all&lan...

That's really interesting. The Tanakh never mentions an "evening and morning" for the Sabbath, unlike the first 6 days.

Good catch. That's because we're still on the 7th day according to the Tanakh.

The form of the verb translated that God "rested" is in fact progressive in the original Hebrew.

https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2011525

I spent many years building a database backend from scratch. Right from the beginning, you need a fast way to look up a file address given a simple key, and that mechanism needs to be persistent. Thus to build a database you first need ... a database. Bootstrapping this thing was tricky.

The Technium is a superorganism.

Which is incidentally yet another reason why it's very important to ensure stability of our technological civilization. We've pulled ourselves by the straps of our boots a couple hundred meters into air now; it's not safe to stop pulling. Given big enough shock to economies and populations, we'll regress not a decade or three, but all the way to the beginning of industrial revolution - you can't build the technology we have now from scratch, as it's full of cyclical dependencies. It would need to be rebooted from scratch.

This is one of the most fascinating things I've read on this site. Do you know of any resources that go into this in more detail?

See resources around the thread about precision manufacturing. Consider how Industrial Revolution started thanks to easy access to high-density energy sources like coal, and how we've mined and burned pretty much everything that's accessible by hand. Observe how modern mining requires huge amounts of energy and sophisticated technology. It's all intertwined.

Consider also the amount of people needed all across the industries and supply chains of any product you know. I don't have hard sources, but I fondly remember this essay by Charles Stross[0]. TL;DR: how many people does it take to maintain (not improve) current technology level of our civilization? Charlie puts it at 100 million to 1 billion.

And now think of the economies and infrastructure needed to just feed these people. We hit 1 billion around 1804[1], which is far in the industrialization process, and most of these people weren't working to support the technology levels anyway.

For some insights, I recommend tracking down and watching Connections[2]. It's an old show, from the era where TV shows actually made sense, and it drives home just how much our current technology is dependent on right combinations of social, economical and technological conditions.

EDIT: fixed site reference in [2].

[0] - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insuffic...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_milestones

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series); I hear you can find it on a site that starts with "daily", and ends with "motion.com".

Thanks! I'll check those out. It would be amazing if someone had put together a piece that tied this all together.

In some ways this is what has happened with the transfer of manufacturing to China. Building things requires building components, and their components, and their components, and so on down. That whole stack is withering in western democracies, so it’s incredibly difficult to “bring back” something like iPhone manufacturing without retaining a deep dependency on China anyway.

This is the answer to the question "Why not build more Saturn Vs". We no longer have the tools to build the tools to build the machines to build the parts of the Saturn V.

Why not?

Because "unused muscle atrophy" applies very much to our technology as well. A lot of knowledge surrounding technological processes isn't really captured beyond institutional culture and individual memory. So if there isn't demand for some specific technology, the capacity and knowledge to build it will wither and die with the organizations and people who built it.

We can't do a Saturn V today. We might be able to do a Saturn V equivalent, though, as both NASA and SpaceX are retracing the steps towards heavy lifters.

You should write all this up on a single place, it's very interesting.

I just might put it up on my blog. Need to collect references for the things I've been saying first.

I first need to finish and ask someone to proofread my long overdue post on my views about advertising industry.

I can proofread if you want.

Thanks. I'll send you a draft later tonight.

http://jacek.zlydach.pl, yes? I eagerly await this piece. I can think of a lot of people (and groups) who would find it enlightening!

Yes. I see you have an e-mail address in your profile; I'll drop you an e-mail when I'm done with it.

Thanks. Already subscribed to your feed :)

Hey person, I hope it wouldn't be to presumptuous for me to also ask for an email about this? I'd be very interested in what all you have to say.

Not at all! But since you don't have your e-mail published in your profile, you need to mail me so I know where to send the notification :).

I remember reading that some of the textile techonology that enabled the arctic/anarctic expeditions in the early 20th century has already been lost.

They're having to analyse the garments in medical scanners to work out how the fabrics work.

The idea that technology that enabled the equivalent of the space race could be lost within a century is quite sobering.

This. And if one still struggles to understand the importance of institutional culture + individual memory, I would like into invite you to the following thought experiment.

“Imagine waking up the next morning and the world totally forgot all knowledge on Linux Kernel, and you are now tasked to release the next major version with major changes / improvements”

And remember the documentation and tests we have on Saturn V is certainly not as great as what we have on Linux kernel.

Perhaps more critically, we've burned most of the easily-accessible fossil fuels, which means that if we drop below a critical threshold we won't be able to reboot from scratch because there will be insufficient high-energy-density material available.

That too. I'm increasingly strongly of the belief that ensuring the stability of what we have now is the most important thing. We can keep fixing things incrementally, but if we break our civilization now, we condemn the next couple dozen or more generations to medieval life on a severely damaged planet.

That's why it pains me when I see activists crying for correcting the wrongs at all costs, "justice" at the cost of "order". It's ultimately a self-destructive approach that's akin to cutting off the branch you're sitting on, after first setting it on fire.

The biggest threats to the current order today are not the people calling for more "justice", or more "social justice", however.

The biggest threats to the current order are companies and politicians that refuse to address our unsustainable level of pollution, which is pushing our climate out of balance.

They're the people advocating for a "starve the beast" approach to governance, literally trying to create a financial crisis just to get a few percent taxes shaved off their bottom line (and probably think they can profit off the crisis too).

They're the people pushing for increased gerrymanding and census manipulation, which radicalizes politics on both ends of the political spectrum, shuts out people in the middle, and erodes faith in our institutions on the long term.

These things are by far the biggest threat to the long term stability of the current order in the US.

I agree. And I didn't mean to say that pursuit of justice is a problem, but I do have an issue with calls for justice at the expense of everything else that I sometimes hear from the Internet pitchfork mobs, and I worry that it may gain momentum at some point.

I wonder how difficult it would be leapfrog oil and go straight to nuclear power.

If any necessary and non-substitutable material or equipment is based on petroleum chemistry, then we won't be able to do that. I'd love some nuclear engineering experts to chime in on it here; my uneducated guess is that it's extremely unlikely that there isn't a hard petroleum dependency somewhere in there.

Just think of all the protective equipment. What do you think it’s made of?

I think it would be a lot easier to go with internal combustion of ethanol and biodiesel (and possibly wood gas) first.

The coal-powered steam locomotive era and the nuclear power era overlap. We almost did go from coal to nuclear. Especially in the UK, which had little domestic oil or gas in the 1950s.

This is also why the protection of supply chains and international trade is essential. The cause of the Dark Ages was the collapse of the security surrounding the Roman road network, making trade hazardous, and subsequent reversion to local production of everything resulting in the loss of technological prowess.

In our current economy, that reversion would be even more painful. In the short term, as much as I hate the US military, their "freedom of navigation" guarantees are essential. In the long term, every nation/bloc should make sure it has the materials to re-bootstrap if necessary.

Here in Korea, we just had to scramble because Japan decided to limit photoresist and high-purity HF exports. I count the scramble as a good thing for national self-sufficiency.

My apologies for going way off topic.

Your first paragraph is very interesting. Got a link or book you could recommend to learn more?

The Hardcore History episode "Thor's Angels" goes quite a bit into that territory. It covers period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire until the formation of the Holy Roman Empire.

For fans of that podcast, it's one of the best single episodes. Dan Carlin has a particular style, which is not for everyone, but fans know what to expect.

https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-41-thors-...

There’s a great book about exactly this - including an attempt to help you reboot it by giving people the Igor clues in the right order.

The knowledge, How to rebuild the world from scratch https://www.amazon.co.uk/Knowledge-How-Rebuild-World-Scratch...

That risk seems like a liability to me. It's also the Achilles' heel of all the new non-fossil-fuel-based energy production methods at scale - they all end up being dependent on that same advanced industrial base and transportation network, which is complex, fragile, and incidentally still runs on fossil fuels.

> It would need to be rebooted from scratch.

With no readily-accessible source of energy, we would never be able to reboot. And everything readily-available has already been mined. We now drill deep below the ocean surface for oil.

Someone else linked a book, but this TV show, Connections by James Burke [1], follows this idea of cyclical dependencies in technology. Society starts with the plow. Definitely a great watch, even though it was made basically pre-internet.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)

"Dark Age America" is a fascinating book by John Michael Greer that goes into the wicked dependencies in our technology stack.

That is one of many of his books to focus on this topic.

The Ecotechnic Future, The Retro Future, The Long Decent, Not the Future we ordered - all great books on what will happen if these systems crumble from resource depletion.

As much as I want disagree with his views, they look more sound every day. He is actually doing a follow up series on these topics on his blog (Ecosophia) currently.

> I love that we have machines that make better versions of their own components, something I never even thought to think of!

This is how compilers for example are made. You initially compile the improved source code of a compiler on the previous version.

I wonder if there is an ancestry trees (or I guess chains) somewhere of the major compilers out there?

I heard an interesting anecdote about screw manufacturing. A friend of mine was in china talking to manufacturers there.

He asked about standard screw sizes and was told that there were no standard sizes or "in stock", and he should just tell them what size he wanted because their supplier just makes whatever size screws they need.

It's similar with nails. If you tour Jefferson's home Monticello, there was a "nailery" where the nails needed were forged by hand, one by one. Being handmade, the each nail was valuable.

People would burn scrap lumber to recover the nails.

That's wild! I thought nails were way easier because you could maybe just cast them. I guess forging would make them substantially stronger.

Casting parts like that is actually incredibly difficult. The iron will want to freeze before filling the mold cavity, since the cross section of a nail is so small. While tedious & time consuming, hand forging a nail is significantly easier than attempting to cast one. Plus, cast iron is much more difficult than forging simply due to the much higher temperatures required. A simple charcoal fire is adequate for forging, the higher temperatures required for casting necessitate specialized equipment. Hence why many village blacksmiths didn't have the capacity to produce cast iron parts.

Oh interesting! TIL, thanks!

Burn scrap nothing, In Colonial America they'd burn decrepit houses to get the nails. Enough that colonial governments passed laws against it.

Which reminds me when I was a little kid people would carefully pull the nails out of old boards and save them.

I did too. These days, I save nuts and bolts. Not because they are expensive to buy, but I don't want to spend a couple hours going to the hardware store to get one.

I thought everyone had a container where they keep a random selection of nuts and bolts that have been collected over the years...

I have two clear plastic drawers from a refrigerator I had 15 years ago almost overflowing with extra hardware. While it’s mostly just nuts, bolts and nails I also throw any extra part that comes with random widgets. I just dug through it yesterday to find two small machine screws to tie together a broken plastic connector. It’s not hoarding if you use it right?

Yeah, I have a tub with random springs, brackets, spacers, clips, and odd metal bits pulled off of devices I threw away. It's surprising how convenient it is when you need something.

While the our industrial capabilities are indeed incredible there still is an insane complexity gap between finely threaded screws and nanometer pattering ultra-purified materials, treating them with some of the most aggressive chemicals known to mankind as a mere cleaning step. The complexity of the patterns, so intricate that people can't even design them by hand anymore. Or those barely-practical national treasures that are EUV lithography machines. And all this is mass-production.

There recently was an article on HN that fabs install microphones and other environmental sensors everywhere and use deep-learning to extract QA information from the sensors.

There was a very interesting discussion on One Hour One Life mailing list about how fast we would go from prehistoric tech to modern tech if we knew all the steps and one key point was that we would have to make several iterations of increasingly precise machinery.

I learned that in 1751, Vaucanson made this full-metal lathe: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/metal-turning-lathe/... that was a kind of breakthrough and the ancestor of modern lathe, one of the first precision machine tool. Add that to his automata and his invention of punch cards to program looms and I am now realizing how much of a Da Vinci that guy was.

I'd rate Henry Maudslay's invention of the three plate technique for producing extremely flat surfaces (popularized by Joseph Whitworth) as the most important step toward modern mass production. All precision machining ultimately depends on accurate surface plates, so without them interchangeable parts are impossible.

See the excellent book "Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy" by Wayne Moore of the Moore Tool Company for details.

(Maybe not as precise as screws, I'm not sure, but) I'm freaked out by bicycle chains, so many pieces, each manufactured to precise tolerances. $15.

Especially fun are the fact that some of them are now asymmetric with hollow pins, though that one is a bit more expensive. Incremental improvements. A bike today looks fairly similar to a bike from 50-60 years ago, but every last bit is very different.

https://bikecloset.com/product/shimano-cn-hg901-11-dura-ace-...

Or consider how useless you would be if transported back 400 years.

You would be able to offer great advice about washing hands or the solar system generalisations. But actually create something to show people....even the simplest things would be beyond most of us.

You could draw/paint modern devices which would then eventually inspire others.

If you could figure out how to make wire, you could make a working electric motor.

You’d also need to make magnets, know their polarisation, create bearings, and have the skill to assemble all of that as well.

None of that is necessary. I built a working electric motor in cub scouts using several feet of wire, tape, some iron nails, some sheet metal cut from tin cans, a wood board to mount it on, and a battery.

Tools required: tin snips and a hammer.

A battery can be made from a jar, lemon juice, and two electrodes.

Believe me, as an 8 year old, my skills were limited to using a hammer to mash my thumb with. :-)

Electromagnets substituted for magnets, and bearings were a dent in the sheet metal that the point of a nail sat in and turned. Simple and effective.

Once you showed this to a medieval craftsman, they could reproduce it and start improving it.

I’m both impressed and have learned something new. Thank you :)

I found a variant that uses magnets:

https://www.bu.edu/gk12/tommy/Electric_motors.pdf

The version I built was far simpler, and used electromagnets instead of the magnets, but you can see the general idea.

I didn't design it, I don't know where the Den Mothers got the design from. But I found it fascinating, as you could see and feel how it worked.

I built several of them. One day, I got a little bolder and replaced the battery with an A/C cord. The motor buzzed loudly and burst into flames. I learned about alternating current that day :-)

I looked it up, people knew how to make wire then. From that you could build a working telegraph system, even a telephone system, with what was available at the time.

There is a good chance you might just end up as another Ignaz Semmelweis. The idea that washing hands would help against illnesses did not agree with the state of medical science.

Near Stonehenge they found a 4000 year olds dagger. Its handle "was decorated with 140,000 tiny gold studs, each almost as fine as a human hair and set into the wood at more than 1000 to the square centimetre."

Even 21-century craftsman would find that impressive.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/stone...

The Haya people from contemporary Tanzania began making steel 2,000 years ago.

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi385.htm

Hmm... And so? Hardly the first. [0] Although, I admit, I wouldn't have thought that Tanzania would be so advanced in that era.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_metallurgy

Your citation was about iron metallurgy in Rome, not steel.

But you don't need advanced materials and technologies. You don't need steel. You don't need ball bearings.

Archimedes could have built a velocipede, using mostly wood, same tech as ox-driven carts, just the wheels being lighter and more narrow since the load is much less, and it would have worked fine.

I'm just not sure about road surface quality back then. I suspect that was a bigger limiting factor.

Also, bikes are kind of a city thing. On the country side, horses work just fine.

I think even horses was more of an upper class thing. Most humans throughout our modern history have used their own muscle power for work and transportation. In poorer rural communities a bicycle is immensely helpful in getting your products to a market more quickly and economically then walking. This is as true today as it was in the early 19th century.

I've seen rural roads in poorer parts of Eastern Europe some decades ago. They definitely used bicycles and found them useful, but that was more of a fair weather type of thing. And bikes were exclusively used to get one person from point A to point B; to carry goods they preferred 4 wheel vehicles, either motorized or not.

Perhaps that's just my experience.

You're right about horses. Oxen were the preferred power source to move goods. Sometimes donkeys. Horses were used for the same purposes, but that indicated the owner was definitely not on the lowest rung on the social ladder. The context here is the Eastern Bloc decades ago.

I remember oxen being more practical and cheaper but not as high status as horses from Laura Ingalls Wilder's books.

> I'm just not sure about road surface quality back then. I suspect that was a bigger limiting factor.

It was a limiting factor for modern bikes too, sealed roads were invented to make cycling easier.

> The alternatives are not good. Cast iron? Too heavy and too brittle. Wrought iron? Maybe, but not that great. Lead? Too soft. Brass? Could work, but expensive. A king's kid might have had a brass bicycle.

Well that still leaves wood.

not strong enough for the frame without being too heavy. there are wood composite bicycles, today, but that is whole other thang

The technologies developed in ancient China are staggering, the more so as they'd been largely fogotten by / rendered invisible to the Chinese themselves.

A find of the past few years has been Joseph Needham's truly epic Science and Civilisation in China. Begun in 1954, still in production -- the series is not yet completed, 7 volumes, 27 books. Simon Winchester (also author of The Perfectionists, mentioned in this thread, has an excellent biography, The Man Who Loved China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...

It still blows my mind that they abandoned the printing press for aesthetic reasons, long before Gutenberg was born.

And bamboo really is a hell of a material. The breadth of vocational materials science they had was staggering.

Well, their printing press wasn't nearly as useful as Gutenberg's. Mostly because of weak materials.

A printing press isn't as useful if you have to manually verify and fix the types ever other print.

I had heard another other issue cited as a possible culprit - that their alphabet wasn't very suited to it given their vast number of characters not gaining as much.

It brings to mind one artifact of letter construction being based upon the writing method - cuneiform vs ink pen letters for instance.

In _My Unwritten Books_, George Steiner has a go at Needham for hypocrisy in using his authority on Chinese civilization to make false statements about the Vietnam War

This threw me on a bit of a tangent to learn about iron and steel, and I came across this good video about the history of the two including the Bessemer Converter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E__zqy6xcw

Haven't they made working bicycles with wooden frames?

Yeah - https://celilocycles.com/ for instance. But it's not easy and I don't think they can mass produce them.

The frame is incidental.

It is the little parts that matter. Not just screws; really-spherical ball bearings, ceramic-hard bearing races, micrometer adjustment.

Without good bearings, friction and wear make it a short-lived toy.

What about making a bike out of wood? It would have a lot of friction, sure, but it might be better than walking?

If you poke around there were a number of bicycles made of wood. Wood is an excellent material from a weight to strength standpoint.

Bamboo, maybe, although the joints would have been very difficult and you still have the problem of bearings and other moving interfaces.

Can you, or anyone else, recommend any good books/resources that chronicle the history of ‘manufacturing’, if that even is the right term to use. I.e. the various ‘discoveries’, such as steel manufacturing, railroads etc.

How to invent everything is a great, fun introduction to this.

Bamboo can work well enough.

I don’t disagree with you per se but wooden carts (with wooden wheels) has existed a long time before bicycles.

Albeit such devices would be “powered” by animals rather than people. So the friction of baring-less wooden joints was probably less of a concern.

You can make a decent bicycle out of wood (albeit with modern manufacturing): http://www.makery.info/en/2018/03/06/le-top-10-des-velos-en-...

You can buy 1kg of titanium for $10 on the internet. It's not that exotic.

And bicycles made out of wrought iron would work perfectly fine. First bicycles were made out of wood and durability wasn't their main issue.

You don't need steel tubes for a bicycle, you don't even need steel at all. In fact there were (and still are) wooden bicycles and they work fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooden_bicycle

As for ball bearings these are incremental improvements not a necessity (see horse chariots and carriages with wheels used for millenia before we had ball bearings). For another example see medieval wooden windmills - all cogs and bearings made from wood with some animal fat and skin for bushings and lubrication - worked well enough for centuries.

https://ethw.org/Wheels

> Tutankhamen's chariots give us an opportunity to study the details of wheels and axles. The aspect that is most striking to a present-day engineer is that the axles were made of wood and the wheels bad wooden journals. The favored materials were elm and birch, which were imported because neither wood was native to Egypt. Anyone accustomed to modern practice finds it hard to believe that wood-on-wood could function as a bearing at all. This primitive arrangement was improved in a few cases by the addition of a leather bushing. Lubrication in the form of animal fat or tallow is known to have been used, although the exact composition has not been determined.

https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/course...

https://vimeo.com/14166672

First mass-produced bicycle (velocipede) had no ball bearings until a few years later.

> As for ball bearings these are incremental improvements not a necessity (see horse chariots and carriages with wheels used for millenia before we had ball bearings). For another example see medieval wooden windmills - all cogs and bearings made from wood with some animal fat and skin for bushings and lubrication - worked well enough for centuries.

...

>> Anyone accustomed to modern practice finds it hard to believe that wood-on-wood could function as a bearing at all. This primitive arrangement was improved in a few cases by the addition of a leather bushing. Lubrication in the form of animal fat or tallow is known to have been used, although the exact composition has not been determined.

You'll notice that your examples involve a lot of power driving the mechanism - a team or horses or a windmill can overcome the kind of friction a wood-on-leather bearing implies. If you've ever ridden a bicycle where the fender was rubbing on the wheel, you'll know that human power is much more limited.

It would be less efficient, but still workable. Even just wood on wood is sufficient. Proof:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcvFpbh2fjE [1]

I think people vastly underestimate what you can do with very simple "naive" technology.

[1] Yeah it uses aluminium spacers on the chain, but you can do a bicycle without a chain.

> It would be less efficient, but still workable. Even just wood on wood is sufficient. Proof:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcvFpbh2fjE

Your "proof" is unconvincing.

1. The bike looks super wobbly and seems like it takes a lot of effort to just make it function properly. Yes, it is an example of a wooden bicycle, but it is not an example of a useful wooden bicycle. It seems like it probably has a pretty short working life and low speed. In short, it's worse than just running.

2. The bike is being run on a paved road. All of my earlier criticisms get magnified by the stress of taking the bike off road. Yes, dirt roads are a thing. No, they are not nearly as smooth as asphalt. Also, much like carts, a bicycle like that would start to put ruts in a dirt road.

Well it was a youtube gimmick, just a proof that wood-on-wood isn't as high friction as people think.

But there were wooden bicycles without ball bearings in real-life history and they worked with the infrastructure they had. How well they worked is a different thing, but still it proves "no tech to build a bicycle" isn't the reason we waited for bicycles for thousands of years.

We had people jumping off towers with wooden wings for centuries before aeroplanes were made after all ;)

It would be perfectly possible for Romans to make bicycles from technological POV. Just wouldn't make sense because 2 slaves with some chair on sticks were cheaper.

BTW - first real world mass-produced bicycle added ball bearings after several years:

> On the new macadam paved boulevards of Paris it was easy riding, although initially still using what was essentially horse coach technology. It was still called "velocipede" in France, but in the United States, the machine was commonly called the "bone-shaker". Later improvements included solid rubber tires and ball bearings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle#1860s_a...

I completely agree with you, slaves were a major cultural and economic motivation behind technological innovation (or lack thereof). Consider the aforementioned example of the cotton gin, which used rather simple tech to replace slaves. This device was only invented when slavery became legally dubious. If Romans (or Greeks, or Egyptians, or the Chinese, etc) of antiquity could have opened their eyes beyond the use of slavery as a source of power, technological innovation would almost certainly have improved

To amplify number 2; I just spent a week in Rome; Cobblestone would seemingly destroy the fragility.

Anecdotally, on a bike ride recently, on a modern bike, hopping an inch curb snapped a chain.

Modern bikes are built yo tight tolerances for their purpose. Taking an inch curb in a mountain bike is nothing, taking it in an ultra weight optimized road bike is a different story.

Road bike chains aren't that delicate. It sounds to me like this person's chain was already old and near EOL. An inch curb on a road bike isn't that big a deal either, unless maybe it's a time-trial bike or something. The main problem with road bikes is that the wheels aren't as rugged as mountain bike wheels.

3. The test ride was down a hill. It is hard to judge without being there, but that is probably a 5% grade or so (see 6:54 in the video)

It's not just wood. It's thin wood glued together .. but yes .. a wooden bike is possible .. but there is a reason why nobody does use it in everyday life.

Baffling, maybe. It's a good question, not because the answer is trite but because it's interesting.

The invention itself might have even occurred, or parts of it. If you pressed hard enough, maybe you might have gitten a decent prototype built in the bronze age.

History has to take its course, in a sense. It has to be.practical and economical to manufacture, acquire and use one. A major part of that is what it takes to build one that's good and cheap enough. Another part is the path (roads, good steel parts like hollow tubes). Then it needs to be invented in a way that can lead to some decent number being made, demand of some sort considering that it still sucks. Enough people need to learn to ride one... There need to be engineers around with an interest...

It's dense with trees, but forests assume trees are inevitable. Nothing here is really. Maybe the invention is, on some level. But things usually need to be invented into existence over many iterations, events and chains before they totally stick.

It is reductionist. Bicycles are complex machines, simple to us now because we can view examples and understand them readily. But to create one from nothing requires imagination. He hints at it with the cotton gin and flying shuttle. He also discounts the whole balance thing stating that you balance on a horse. Not true you sit on a horse you don't balance on one. Further the horse is firmly planted on the ground on four legs. It is not obvious that someone could balance on two wheels. It seems that the foot powered “walking” bike was the development that taught us to balance.

What bothers me with such speculative and unsupported history is now it will likely be thought true. Everyone believes that there were two sleeps per night in the past or that doctors brought women to orgasm to relieve stress. These ideas have little substantiated documentation and are hard to believe yet they are repeated by know-it-alls frequently.

>He also discounts the whole balance thing stating that you balance on a horse. Not true you sit on a horse you don't balance on one.

Have you ever ridden a horse? You have to have balance to avoid falling over. And if you have ridden one, it sounds like you've never ridden English-style.

>Further the horse is firmly planted on the ground on four legs.

Only when it's standing still. Try riding one while it's jumping over things.

I have seen bicycles built using bamboo. I mostly agree with the assessment that the tech and need just wasn't there in antiquity, but I would definitely stress that it could have plausibly been built using the materials available.

What were the hub and drivetrain made out of?

Steele tubes is new bicycle technology. The earliest bicycles were all wood. The bicycle was already a known and popular thing before steel. But they were thought of more as toys or akin to a swan paddleboat than a serious mode of transportation. They could and were made by skilled woodworkers, so manufacturing technology is not the deciding factor. I think understanding and caring about complex mechanisms brought on by the industrial revolution is what prompted the devices; that is, it was cultural rather than technological that prompted their introduction.

Did you read the article or just that line? Most of what you mention is addressed plus a number of other factors.

"Technology factors are more convincing to me. They may have been necessary for bicycles to become practical and cheap enough to take off. But they weren’t needed for early experimentation. Frames can be built of wood. Wheels can be rimmed with metal. Gears can be omitted. Chains can be replaced with belts; some early designs even used treadles instead of pedals, and at least one design drove the wheels with levers, as on a steam locomotive."

"Second, advances in materials and manufacturing were probably necessary for a commercially successful bicycle. It’s a bit hard, from where I stand, to untangle which advances in design were made possible by new materials and techniques, and which were simply sparks of inventive imagination that hadn’t been conceived or developed before. But the fact that people were willing to put up with the precarious high-wheeled design indicates to me that pneumatic tires were crucial. And it’s plausible to me that advanced metalworking was needed to make small, lightweight chains and gears of high and consistent quality, at an acceptable price—and that no other design, such as a belt or lever, would have worked instead. It’s also plausible to me that wooden frames just weren’t light and strong enough to be practical (I certainly wouldn’t be eager to ride a wooden bicycle today)."

It seems this comment was made before reading the whole of the article, which goes into much detail about the invention and the many iterations that were needed to arrive at the current design.

This is addressed in the article to some degree. Wheels and the frame can be made of wood. Wheels can be lined with iron or bronze plating. Ball bearings are not strictly necessary. Chain can be replaced with belts or some alternative transfer mechanism. The result would not be as comfy as a road bike today, but it would be a functional vehicle.

Neither of those is necessary for a basic bicycle. A wooden frame with a fixed gear ration and chain or belt would work just fine for moderate riding

And let's not forget the pneumatic tire; Wikipedia suggests they were invented 1847-1888. (It says they were invented to help make bicycles/tricycles comfortable.)

If anyone thinks these tires aren't important, then why are almost all vehicle tires still pneumatic?

> Ball bearings

Couldn't you just use anything sufficiently round and uniform and Mohs-hard, given a lubricant oil to protect it from wear? Glass marbles? Pearls? Rocks after a ridiculous amount of tumbling?

"Sufficiently round" is harder than it may seem. A roller or needle bearing would be immensely easier (cylindrical grinding between centres is a bit of a doddle compared to spherical accuracy)... and then you've still got the problem of making them sufficiently precisely that all of the rollers actually bear. Even today you make 'em in quantity first and sort them afterwards. A well-lapped plain bearing/bushing would work better than a bad roller.

(Yes, you can make something that looks like a ball or roller bearing even on a cheap 3D printer, and it may even have less friction than the thing that looks like a plain bearing/bushing you can make on the same machine, but it's not going to roll freely and take a load.)

Can you imagine having a bicycle made of casting iron with the technology of the past? Tetanus would be a problem, people wouldn't be able to have bicycles close to the ocean, it would be even dangerous if the person fell on the ground.

It certainly is amazing how people take for granted the marvels of current technology.

The TV series "Connections" did a great job demonstrating how often that more often than not we're not short on ideas or inventions or inventiveness.

Usually there are a lot of great ideas, but availability of materials in quantity, or a key part is what is missing, sometimes for centuries, and often comes from someplace you might not expect.

And if you don't have smooth roads you need rubber for the tires no? there is a lot of technology involved in making a useful bicycle (ie not a toy).

The article also didn't mention weight. The lighter a bike is, the more effective it is. One made out of wood and iron would be simply too heavy. Imagine a cast iron wheel.

Lots of people dismiss the Wright Bros as "bicycle mechanics". They kinda miss that lightweight bicycle technology, like chain drives and steel wire, were essential for their working airplane.

If ever you're in Washington, D.C., visit the Air & Space Museum, which has a room containing the ORIGINAL Wright Flyer. It is absolutely spectacular. To give context, the room contains one of their bicycles along with much context and background. Worth the trip every time I visit D.C.

You're right, and I've been there. That room gives me the chills! To me, 1903 was the beginning of the modern era. To go from that to landing on the moon in less than a single lifetime!

Who could ever believe such a thing could happen?

I think you are really overthinking it.

Bicycle can be very simple. You need just two wheels (can be made of wood with some steel support, just like a wagon wheels) and some frame to connect these (again can be made from wood). You do not need any bearings or even a belt - you can connect pedals directly to the front wheel (as was done in early design).

All of this can be made with simple carpenter and smith tools.

Wooden bikes seem like an obvious materials argument. Here's one I saw in a shop recently:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/7mzTsrKgUgENoDkQ9

I suspect the answer is complexity. There are a bunch of inventions all together in a bicycle. From the frame to the spokes to the tires and headset, there is a lot of IP there.

It's not a simple mechanical invention at all, I agree with you, this is a silly/absurd statement.

I recall in my freshman physics classes asking my professor "why are all the modules using inclined planes and pulleys? wouldn't we be able to learn better if the problems involved something we're actually familiar with in everyday life like a bicycle?" (I attended the university with the most bicyclists in the world)

I only needed to see his reaction to realize that a bicycle is pretty damn complex.

There is an economic component in this. The people who would really want a bicycle had neither time nor money to develop them nor money to afford one. People with time and money would immediately think that horses were more practical. And they wouldn't be wrong.

It wasn't until the mid 1800's that the people who would want a bicycle could afford one if such was available. You had a middle class with disposable income. And simple mechanical contraptions like bicycles were cheaper. Because steel got about 20 times cheaper from 1860 to 1890. And things like chain drives had become industrial commodity items.

Exactly. You need pressure and necessity to deliver most inventions, especially at scale. Who's going to do all that work when horses were a hell of a lot easier?

Why not bamboo or balsa or bone?

The wheel existed before ball bearings - why are they necessary for bicycles? (is it an efficiency thing, for human powered?)

The safety-bicycle chain requires cheap precision mass engineering, but rope, rubber, axial rod (as in a car), or interlocking gears also work. Or direct, as in a penny-farthing. Or, no wheel power transfer, but push along with your feet, as in the Kirkpatrick bicycle.

I swear Cannondale road bikes have more in common with aircraft than terrestrial vehicles. You gotta see the aluminum welds on insanely thin tubes.

Disclaimer: I lost my 20+-year-old baby-blue R800TT to frame damage that I bought while making $4.25/hour. #SadDayForMe

This is becoming less true, perhaps: modern road bikes now are largely made of carbon fibre, not aluminum. The cheap $1k ones are still Al, but anything over $2k is now CF.

Of course, some commercial aircraft are now getting CF parts, but they're still mostly Al.

Your points are all literally stated in the article's first bullet point.

> a reductionist viewpoint

I once tried to figure out how to make iron from nothing. There are several "from scratch" guides on the internet, but all of them include "buy these needed chemicals from a supply house".

You tried to make an element from... nothing?

Nothing provided by civilization. It's the old "you're dropped naked into the wilderness 10,000 years in the past" challenge and have to make iron to impress the tribe so they won't eat you.

To clear up the confusion of the grandparent comment: I guess you mean smelting iron from its ore (because actually creating new iron atoms would require nuclear fusion)

Chains and gears are especially not simple

It goes both ways. Imagine what motor vehicles and transportation in general would look like today if we were able to manufacture and process titanium alloys like we do steel. How far away are we from that breakthrough?

Conversely, what would the world look like today without steel? No airplanes? No WWI nor WWII? No huge panamax ships? No global markets?

The most compelling counterargument, to me, is mentioned in the article: clocks. I still don’t know how to make a clock and I certainly do not think it’s easy. Yet they were making clocks centuries before the first bicycle was invented.

The same was very much true for Babbage and the Difference Engine. If I remember correctly, the level of repeatable precision and quality needed to make something like that was simply well beyond what engineers could manage even at the height of the industrial revolution. In theory everything that Babbage was designing was technically possible at small scale, but simply couldn't be done on the scale he imagined.

If memory serves, even the London Science Museum's partial reconstruction in the 1980s was a massive challenge of engineering.

Yeah. Do not underestimate the amount of technology that goes into bicycles.

Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics, before they pivoted into inventing heavier-than-air flight craft.

This entire discussion is very interesting, with arguments for and against the idea that the underlying materials technology was (or was not) sufficient for a bicycle to have emerged 50 or more years earlier.

This discussion is similar to flawed arguments about evolution. It assumes that at any given point in time, there was an exhaustive search of solution space (in this case for personal transportation). In discussions of evolution, people often propose that a particular solution occurred because it was optimal in some way.

But neither evolution, nor technology development, involves an exhaustive search. Things happened by chance, and some things were not tried as early as they might have been (or they were tried and tried and found lacking in some way), until, by chance, the right conditions allowed the technology (or evolutionary trait) to emerge.

The role of chance is often under appreciated.

> (Some commenters have suggested that it was not obvious that a two-wheeled vehicle would balance, but I find this unconvincing given how many other things people have learned to balance on, from dugout canoes to horses themselves.)

I'll be one of those commenters I guess.... What!??

Balancing in a canoe is in no way similar to a bicycle. I can jump in a canoe having never been in one, and it will balance itself. I can probably even manage a few trepidous rows of an oar (or hand, or arbitrary object) without tipping it. Without me, the canoe will stand on its own. If I fall, it will often right itself without me.

On top of that, a canoe is both an evolution on previous working designs (rafts), and analogous to nature (whether it be a fish, crocodile or a floating log).

The horse, with its four (not two!) legs is an even more ridiculous comparison.

It seems pretty clear that the development of the bicycle would've been significantly hampered by the fact that balancing on two wheels was:

(a) unintuitive as an idea with no analogue in nature or previous innovations

(b) had a marked learning curve

(c) that learning curve was separate and independent for each design. Riding a modern bicycle doesn't automatically make you an adept penny farthing, unicycle, nor tandem rider. Nor any of the umpteen other technological iterations.

I wouldn't be surprised if this trumped material/manufacturing limitations as a hurdle. See this whimsical video for "evidence" of this [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yJdz-kjfLk

If you saw off a disc-shaped slice from a log of wood, and it rolls a few meters, you experience first hand that a single wheel can balance itself. Some say this is how the wheel was invented in the first place [citation needed].

Right, now stand on said disk. Turns out the you+disk system doesn’t trivially balance...

That's not a fair continuation of the thought, is it? Even balancing on an entire rotating log isn't trivial. The problem here is standing on a small patch of surface that is moving under you.

The required insight for the bicycle is that, counterintuitively, a rolling wheel doesn't fall to either side. The axles, fork, frame, and seat are 'just' the elaborate way of mounting yourself to those rotating discs so that you can move along with them while sitting still.

That sounds like a unicycle, which is a hundred times harder to balance than a bicycle.

The physics of how a bicycle balances itself when you are moving is very different than that, complicated, and quite unintuitive. Basically when the bike starts to lean to one side, the rotation of the front wheel causes it to steer to move the bike underneath the direction you are leaning. This happens several times a second, and faster than a human can react.

https://www.citylab.com/design/2015/05/the-weird-wonderful-s...

>> ... a unicycle, which is a hundred times harder to balance than a bicycle.

It's not that hard to unicycle. It just seems so to people who didn't try it until they were an adult.

In Japan, any junior high school may have a few unicycles and you frequently see kids larking around on them in the playground. Nothing special.

Agreed, i think they take a somewhat equal amount of time to get going on. Probably takes a few hours over a few days on both of them to get going.

Anyone can experience this by overtightening the headset (the steering axis) on a bike. Suddenly one has to focus on balancing way more and riding a bike no handed becomes almost impossible.

> The horse, with its four (not two!) legs is an even more ridiculous comparison.

The comparison is, as I understood it, the rider balancing on the horse itself. I've only ever done this myself with saddle and stirrups, so I don't know if this is significantly more difficult without those.

I think you're being a little generous with the canoe. Boarding a canoe without a dock (that is, climbing in from the water) is tricky, and requires some thought about where your weight is. (Since the lip of the canoe, in my experience, sits well above the water line, and you're about to pull down on the edge to attempt to board, but that same motion is the motion that moves the edge closer to the water which will flood it.) I've seen plenty of people flip and subsequently flood a canoe after an unsuccessful attempt to board.

But a canoe floats, as a horse stands.

A bicycle simply does not stand up on its own.

Surely it can, it's just a case of finding the balance point? [Ignoring macroscopic effects of the Earth rotating, etc.]

Horses can certainly be ridden without stirrups. In fact stirrups weren't invented for over 4000 years after the domestication of the horse. The Roman Empire had no stirrups. The hardest part of riding without stirrups is mounting. It requires some mixture of strength, coordination, and a cooperative animal to mount from the ground without stirrups. Once you're mounted, staying mounted is not much more challenge than staying mounted with stirrups.

Yeah in deep water you either have to have somebody on the other side holding that gunwale down, or you have to pull yourself up on one end. Nobody boards that way from the shore, though. You just have it sitting in the water where it will barely touch bottom if you put all your weight in. Then you get in, and it's sitting on the bottom, balanced. Then you push off with a paddle or stick. The whole process is much easier than using a dock.

>It seems pretty clear that the development of the bicycle would've been significantly hampered by the fact that balancing on two wheels was:

> (a) unintuitive as an idea with no analogue in nature or previous innovations

> (b) had a marked learning curve

> (c) that learning curve was separate and independent for each design.

This! It's completely non-obvious that balancing will work and there is no analog in nature to copy.

Skating was a thing long before cycling was. With enough forward momentum one can go quite far balanced on one ice-skate.

Rotating wheels generate a self balancing moment that resists falling over... which has nothing to do with balancing on a thin blade.

For the purposes of this discussion, that's probably true. However, I wouldn't be surprised if some super-precise slow motion video of a skater gliding on one skate revealed small adjustments analogous to the steering motions of a cyclist.

It does seem utterly counterintuitive that a vehicle that cannot balance by itself would be able to balance with the addition of a heavy rider elevating its center of gravity. Usually making an object top-heavy renders it even more unstable, and bicycles are not stable to begin with.

And adding a rider on top of a bicycle does make it more unstable, but the amazing flexibility of the human brain allows us to transform that instability into stability, kind of like how modern fighter jets are intentionally unstable to make them more manoeuvrable.

Bicycles are a marvel of physics and biology working together.

Bicycles are entirely stable without a rider as long as they’re moving. The human is only really necessary to provide motive power. There are a ton of videos showing this.

It is totally unlike the intentional instability of a modern jet fighter.

That relies on the front fork being at an angle, though, doesn't it? If they made it straight down (which is the obvious choice) or pointing backwards, it would be much, much harder to ride.

Bicycles actually are less stable with a more angled fork. If the fork was perpendicular to the ground it would be very difficult to turn.

the geometry of the ride type of a bicycle or motorcycle is really interesting [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_geometr...

Maybe in spherical cow land, but in the real world bicycles don't get very far without a human to maintain balance. It would fall over the first time it had to ride over a piece of debris on the road.

Objectively not true. Here’s a video of a unmanned bike rolling over a curb without any trouble: https://youtu.be/oZAc5t2lkvo?t=145s

Stuff on the road will only knock the bike over if it stops the motion of the bike first. The need for motive power was already acknowledged.

I read a biography of the Wright Brothers, which pointed out that they spent quite some time and effort with their gliders, learning how to fly. So they were already skilled pilots before they attempted powered flight. The book suggested that this idea occurred to none of the other airplane inventors.

There might have been a similar problem with the bicycle: Anybody who built the first one had no idea of how to ride it, and lacked the advantages of being six years old, namely closer to the ground and quicker to heal from minor injuries.

What I want to ask: Why are we still waiting so long for the bicycle? There just seem like so many barriers to more widespread adoption.

> The book suggested that this idea occurred to none of the other airplane inventors.

Gliders were pretty important for other airplane inventors of the era, as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation#Heavier_th...

One possibly overlooked factor: the nature of travel has changed dramatically in the last 200 years. Right up until World War 1, my ancestors literally had no reason to ever go more than ten miles from home, and even that was rare. The entire extended family lived within a two mile radius. This was because they were all farmers, and farmers didn't need to travel often. Furthermore, if you did travel, well, you already had a horse. Which, to make a point not made in the article, didn't have to do with the cost of the horse; it had to do with the fact that you already needed to have a horse to farm. So the horse was a sunk cost.

If you did travel frequently, this was likely because you were in the business of shipping goods, ie tobacco or cotton or some other agricultural staple from where it was grown to a port, and hence speed wasn't your primary concern; inexpensive transport for bulk goods was. For all that is awesome about bicycles, bulk transports they aren't.

So: at least one factor was economic, but of an indirect sort. We had to have a critical mass of population that needed to travel regularly farther than they could conveniently walk, and for which horses were not sunk costs.

Indeed, bicycles have generally been transport within cities and close-by. A world where most people lived in rural areas would not be that practical for bicycle travel even now.

Bicycles surely played a considerable role in inter-village traffic in the earlier parts of the 20th century. Maybe not in particularly poor or sparsely populated areas, but where villages are close enough to touch each others at the very edges of their walkable productivity zones? Maybe they got their bikes a few years later, maybe their cars a few years earlier than in the cities, but that still leaves quite a few years of cycling.

You can look at the history of the fax machine. There were primitive fax machines very early, but they were a bit cumbersome, but more importantly nobody needed to send documents that fast anyway. It was easy and normal to send a guy on a horse, and for business purposes at the time, that was more than fast enough, for the distances that were being covered by the first fax lines.

Well, I'd argue that they didn't need to travel, because their world was set up for people who couldn't. The spacing of villages most places was set by how far you could walk to the fields & still do a good day's work. Riding around on horseback was for a tiny elite, most places -- a horse eats more than a person, in a world where food was the majority of income. Once people could travel, they did, and the world got re-organized around this assumption.

But still, bicycles took off as a technology when they were too expensive for farm-workers, as a sort-of upper-middle class leisure craze. Only later did they enable mass mobility.

[comment moved]

This is not entirely correct. If you are a farmer you (or a someone working with you) still need to travel for numerous reasons, including to bring your products to market, to round up your animals, to buy equipment and supplies, etc.

You say they had horses for those types of traveling, except they most likely didn’t. Only a successful farmer could afford a horse. And even if they had a horse, chances were it was busy or tired for farming works to be used for transportation.

Most people walked to were they needed to go, in if the modern bicycle would have existed a farmers dream would be to have a successful crop one year so they could afford a bicycle. In fact a modern bicycle would have been a good investment for many farm as they allow farmers to bring more products to a market quicker and more efficiently, in turn allowing the transporter to be back at their farming job quicker and less tired.

This can be seen in today’s poorer regions where no trains nor road runs. But the occasional farm has invested in a bicycle to help with transportation.

“...including to bring your products to market, to round up your animals, to buy equipment and supplies, etc.”

No... Farmers didn’t bring their products to market unless they were running a plantation, ie they were very large operators, which were few and far between and would certainly nit having been riding a bicycle - those guys would be going in a nice two horse cart. The small guys sold to a local buyer who handled the shipping. Part of the reason for this is that the products you produced for sale were very bulky. A tobacco bale could be over half a ton; similar for cotton. Bulk grains and beans weren’t as likely to be sold to distant buyers, but they too are too bulky to carry by bicycle.

I round up animals on a daily basis. A bicycle is worse than useless for this purpose. Which is why farmers don’t use them for rounding up animals today.

Shopping was done at most a few times a year. You rode your horse (or mule or donkey - see below) to the general store. Often, salesman came to you, specifically because you weren’t going to town much. So you’d have traveling brush salesmen - or pots and pans salesmen, traveling patent medicine salesmen, tinkers and ferriers.

When you went to town, the kinds of things you were buying were usually too bulky to carry by bike. You didn’t go to town to buy a shirt or two. You went to buy a plow, or if you had a good year some china. Popping in to town on a nike would have been a very niche use case.

Also, you weren’t buying very much equipment. What you couldn’t make yourself you had the local blacksmith make for you. There’s very little on an 1850s American farm that wasn’t locally produced.

“Only a successful farmer could afford a horse.”

Err... no... Not in the US anyway. In order to farm you had to plow and in order to plow you had to have a draft animal. That wasn’t always a horse, in some cases it was a mule or donkey, or sometimes in the west an ox. And all of those animals were also used for transport. Granted nobody rode oxen but they often pulled wagons, hence the term “oxcart”.

There was a term used coined after the Civil War: “40 acres and a mule”. It comes from field orders issued by Union General William “Tecumseh” Sherman with the approval of Abraham Lincoln, and it redistributed white property to newly freed slaves. The idea was that the slaves needed at minimum those two things to be self supporting.

But in any case, you’ve got the order wrong. You didn’t buy a horse (or a mule) once you became a successful farmer. You bought a horse in order to become a successful farmer, in much the same way that the successful programmer today will own a (or will have an employer-provided) computer. It was an essential piece of equipment.

We might both be guilty of over generalizing. Farming practices differ very widely across cultures and time. Farming in post colonial America was often done on big areas of land that was often handed out for free (or very cheap) and the markets were far away. This is in contrast to farming where land was scarce and small and a the markets relatively close (2 hours walking).

In the latter case bringing a freshly slaughtered goat, a couple of basket worth of grain, or textiles, to town three days a week, and sell in a public market is not uncommon. In the former case it is unthinkable.

In the case of rounding up animals I can see bicycle being quite useful if you have a small stock that you grace in large swaths of shared uninhabited lands. At the start of the gracing season you might not use the bicycle, but during the gracing season you might need to move them from one area to another, then it is definitely handy to be able to bike to the first area, herd them to the next one, walk back, and bike home.

Note that neither of my examples were ever common in post colonial America, but quite common throughout Europe and are still common in sub Saharan Africa.

I fully concede that conditions were very different depending on time and place, and I was talking specifically about the US (mostly the eastern US, where I’m from) in the period after independence up to World War I.

By the 1850s the local blacksmith was making nothing. The industrial revolution was in full force "back east". Factories could make and ship product cheaper than the local blacksmith. The local blacksmith was a repair shop (after the car they almost all became mechanics) and fine tuning to fit. Before the industrial revolution there were very few blacksmiths, you made it yourself on the farm or did without.

You say they had horses for those types of traveling, except they most likely didn’t. Only a successful farmer...

We can't make a universal rule like this. Everyone has a particular mental image of how farming worked long ago, but circumstances varied. Horses can eat a wide variety of plants, including something that is growing wild right outside your door. The density of farmers probably had more to do with whether they could afford a horse than anything else had. In locations that hadn't been farmed relentlessly for centuries, there was spare pasture for a horse or two to feed themselves. For an example, just look at traditional herders. Those people are poor as dirt even today, yet they all have horses. Or look at swiddeners. They didn't move every year, but they moved often enough that not every square meter of land had been converted to intensive agriculture. Many of them, both today (when swiddening is rare) and millennia ago (much more common!) had all sorts of livestock including horses.

Many ancient farmers couldn't have owned horses because they didn't have a way to feed them. Many other ancient farmers did own horses and could feed them.

Horses could bot be used for farming until the invention of the harness which was actually pretty late (steam tractors were not far behind). Until then oxen were used which could use a simple yoke. Even after the complex harness oxen were generally more practical for farm use.

There were horse collars in Europe by 1000 AD, and the Chinese had them much earlier. Pulling a plow isn't the only use for a horse, anyway.

Yes, and like the edison light bulb and birdseye frozen fish, you need infrastructure: smooth roads. Horse and cart are more tolerant.

As a side-side note, ever asked someone (friends, family, etc.) to draw a bycicle by heart?

This guy did:

http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html

Those renders are extremely cool. It looked like he made them without any 3D modeling at all which seems really challenging. The perspective is spot-on.

There is a video here:

https://www.facebook.com/GianlucaGiminiLTD/videos/1419410561...

where the Author shows 9 hours of work (condensed in 4 and a half minute)

From here:

https://www.core77.com/posts/53240/Five-Questions-for-the-De...

>The renderings are all done in 2D with an elaborate editing technique that mixes post-production and digital painting. So I would pick a sketch, then I would look for a picture of a real bicycle that seemed a good starting point for my representation. Then I would search for pictures of all the components I needed to match the sketch: saddle, handlebar, chain, etcetera. All had to be shot in the same angle and light. Then everything was put together with many parts designed from scratch. Especially frames.

This is cool. Except it's driving me nuts that I can't figure out what's wrong with the first picture, or at least why it would immediately break.

It's missing the chain stays (a section of the frame linking the frame near the rear wheel to the pedal area). There would be a large cantilever arm trying to support a large part of the rider's weight, and it would likely break under the stress.

It's missing the chainstays, which are the tubes from the bottom bracket (where the pedals attach) to the rear axle.

The seatstays (the tubes from under the seat to the rear axle) are only connected to the seat tube with a small weld. When you pedal, you're using the top part of the chain to pull the rear axle toward the pedals. This force is going to break the weld connecting the seatstays to the seat tube.

Note that a chain can't push, only pull, so the bottom part of the chain cannot counterbalance this force.

I think the fact that the crossbar is not connected directly to the headtube (part where the fork & handlebar assemblies pivot) would also cause a problem!

Its missing the bar from the pedals to the back tire. If you sat on this bike, all your weight would rest on the joint under the seat, bending the front half of the frame away from the back tire, at least sending the pedals into the ground, if not snapping the frame outright.

Picture the downward force generated by sitting on the bicycle causing the rear axle and bottom bracket to spread away from each other, causing the seatstays to break at the seat tube. This is what chainstays prevent on a complete frame.

Since there's no derailleur, the chain would do a good job of resisting that force (though since it's only on one side, maybe it wouldn't be enough, and the wheel/seat stays would twist)

Though when you start to pedal, the chain would tend to pull in and bend the seatstays, but there should be some level of force that is less than the opposite force caused by the rider's weight, so this bike could work under light pedal pressure.

It is missing the part of the frame from the rear wheel to the bottom bracket.

The back fork should be connected to the seatpost with a pair of horizontal braces.

It's an exaggeration to say it would immediately break. But if you put weight on it, it will tend to spread out (imagine putting weight on a bent piece of metal shaped like a ^). Still, the front fork isn't braced, and bikes exist with quite a large rake angle on the front fork (think a Harley-Davidson style chopper). So maybe you can make this design strong enough to bear a person's weight.

As it's a single speed with no derailleur and the missing braces would be in tension, might not the chain itself fulfill the role?

It could, but undue tension on the chain vastly decreases the efficiency and longevity of the chain, and potentially, the cog/chainwheel. This would also present a safety issue because chains can (and do) break.

Other people pointed out the chainstays are missing, although most people are missing out why they are important. Hint: the name tells it all!

Without them, the back "triangle" of the bike would flex, causing the distance where the chainstay would be to shorten, resulting in the chain popping off the gears, or at least causing it to skip a bunch. The chainstay causes the chain to ... stay.

in addition to what others mentioned, the chain attached to both wheels will make turning.. difficult

Same can be said, perhaps more accurately, about the wheelbarrow. From https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/312366/the-knowledge... :

> The wheelbarrow, for instance, could have occurred centuries before it actually did—if only someone had thought of it. This may seem like a trivial example, combining the operating principles of the wheel and the lever, but it represents an enormous labor saver, and it didn’t appear in Europe until millennia after the wheel (the first depiction of a wheelbarrow appears in an English manuscript written about 1250 AD).

And the European wheelbarrow is vastly inferior to the Chinese one (see https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbar...)

Many of these kinds of industrial-history questions can be answered along a few different angles:

* Trade and access to raw materials. This is often one that limits development and diffusion even if the concept is known, and for the bicycle, it's one of the biggest immediate factors. Trade deprivation can often be a factor in historical innovations as the market starts searching for substitutes.

* Education and basic research. The 19th century saw a second "printing revolution" because paper was getting cheaper, enabling the likes of dime novels and penny dreadfuls, but also making literacy a widespread phenomenon, with public schools appearing throughout the industrial world and academia gaining larger libraries and greater capability to specialize on logical-positivist STEM topics, rather than the classical education of nobility and clergy. Less reinvention means more effort towards innovation.

* Market readiness. You can't sell software if nobody has computers; and for manufactured goods the development of an urban lifestyle has to take place. None of the early bicycles do well on unpaved roads. Bicycle adoption trailed automobile adoption, since the latter gave the motivation to pave every street. In the late 19th century, systematic city sanitation policy was still a new innovation and large cities suffered from stinking rivers, open sewerage, and disposal methods that consisted of emptying a bucket out of a window. People were dressing for this reality in heavy suits or dresses and boots, while bicycle usage relies on being less encumbered(and that is still a factor even today).

Today the hype for rental e-scooters can be followed througn a similar series of developments: while scooters as toys have been around for about as long as bicycles, the early 70's saw polyurethane wheels introduced, and this made skating(on boards and in shoes) almost a new sport, since they were inexpensive and could reliably compress and keep rolling without stopping or shattering like clay or metal wheels; scooter wheels are bigger, but also benefited from this change. A few decades passed and Razor introduced the folding kick scooter concept to mass markets, making the scooter as easy to carry as a skateboard. With the last two decades we got better battery power density and smartphone diffusion, making the "dockless" rental scooter commercially viable, along with electric-powered versions of shoes, skateboards, bikes, etc. But there is somewhat of a market readiness issue, since while the potential is obvious, it's hard to use these devices safely on current streets, and there is no established etiquette to their use.

Same for steam engines: it turns out Watt spent most of his effort on getting components manufactured and having the associated manufacturing processes developed. The basic idea of the steam engine had been around for a long time prior. You can ask the same question of Romans and electricity. They had all the necessary tech: glass for insulators, acid for batteries, metallurgy for wire etc.

Reminds me of John Salvatier's point about the "surprising level of detail" in reality, i.e. yes, the idea that "steam can drive a wheel" is simple enough, but you have to get a lot of small details right that don't make it into textbooks like reliable manufacturing tolerances.

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255

I'm regularly imagining what I would actually be able to accomplish if I went back in time 200-2000 years. Details are always the problem. It reminds you how little you know, but also helps you to form a background interest in engineering, metallurgy, geology, chemistry, etc.

You have to make the machine to make the machine that allows you to make your final product.

You would still have the advantage of being able to beeline past technological dead ends, but you still have to build up the industrial base. Even then you run into problems with chemicals simply not being available on an industrial scale because previously there was no need for them. The world is a massively complex interconnected system.

Related quote from the computer game Alpha Centauri:

"Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a [computer chip]. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken."

https://www.quotes.net/mquote/2325

The people who authored quotes for Alpha Centauri deserve some sort of award. It's probably the most quoted game I've seen, and those quotes are all pretty insightful.

I've mention this a few times I think, but there's an old TV series about this topic, James Burke's Connections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connec... episodes can be found on Youtube.

About how one development leads to the next and so on. And how a break in the chain (eg. New York blackout of 1977) could lead to the entire collapse. The underlying topic is still, or even more, relevant with today's technological dependance.

Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” remains my favorite (and very funny) exploration of this.

He also innovated the engines processes, using heat efficiently and reducing waste. Effective machining and manufacturing then scaled his innovations.

The other half is this is the efficiency of Roman steam engines where so low as to make it more novelty than useful.

Seeing an expensive device that does less than 1/100th the work of a horse does not obviously translate into a revolution.

I wonder if the 19th-century emergence of mass urbanism wasn't a factor. If you're a farmer living in the countryside you already have the space and supplies necessary to keep animals, so keeping a horse along with all the others isn't a problem. But if you're an industrial worker living in a city where space is at a premium, keeping a horse becomes complicated and expensive -- you have to maintain a place to stable it, have to find a way to keep it fed and watered, etc.

Even if you could afford all that it's still a pain to deal with, and outside the aristocratic class I doubt most people could afford it. So urbanization meant there was a steadily growing market for some non-horse alternative that fit the facts of urban life better.

A lot of the discussion here is about materials and manufacturing, which certainly wasn't available until the late 19th century to make and produce bicycles.

But the real title of the article should have been, and the real unanswered question, is "Why did we wait so long for the draisine?" An all-wood two-wheeled single-track vehicle that was just kicked along like a scooter. This was invented in 1817, and the article postulates that cultural reasons kept it from being invented in the classical or medieval times, and even in the Renaissance where ideas for human-powered carriages were floated, no one came up with a draisine because of cultural reasons.

That's an insufficient explanation, I think. What other reasons could have kept the draisine from being invented in classical Greece, or medieval Germany, or any other time and place before the 19th century? Technological arguments fall flat as the original draisine didn't use any tech that hadn't existed for millennia.

Roads were a necessety for the invention of bicycles. And by roads I mean roads with a certain standard.

Another necessety was a certain type of middle class which would actually desire individual transport. If you are a worker why would you prefer a bicycle over a wagon that transports all tools? If you are an aristocrat, why prefering a bicycle over some comfortable carriage, especially when you don’t even know the way?

It is no accident, that the bike was invented by a certain type of rich middle class in cities with good infrastructure. More as a toy first (basically a horizontal bar with two wheels and you had to push with the feet), but more serious later

> Roads were a necessety for the invention of bicycles. And by roads I mean roads with a certain standard.

The chicken and egg actually went in the other direction. Bicycles became popular and bicyclists lobbied for better roads.

This is true! A good article about this:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/bicycles-bad-roads-det...

> City roads at the time were paved with cobblestones, which were good for horses but too bumpy for bicycles.

This is one of the draws for the Paris-Roubaix spring classic race, a +200 mile, single day race with dozens of sections of rural cobble stones. Though, generally well maintained, the roads are narrow and brutal on modern road racing carbon-fiber bikes on 23mm wide tires. Lots of attrition from accidents. Typically pretty wet weather for the (spring) race and the cobbles are slippery and also get muddy. Riders tend to ride on the dirt shoulderer when they can, because it's smoother, but this can lead to tire punctures. The sections of cobbles are also narrow, so getting around 200 riders through is harrowing by itself. Smallest mistake by one rider compounds quickly.

Also mechanicals such as punctured tires and tossed chains are common. Rough corners/edges on the stones and gaps between cobbles easily puncture tires. The bikes have no suspension, so the chains bounce quite a bit, easily being tossed and in extreme cases, can be bent or broken if they jump a chain ring, requiring a replacement.

For their efforts, the trophy? A cobble stone with adornment.

The race is a spectacle. Probably one of the greatest one day spring classics of the UCSI Pro Tour. 6 hours or more of grueling, punishing cycling in crappy weather while being vibrated like crazy from the cobbles (the whole race isnt cobbles, but significant sections are, usually +20 sections, ranging in length of around a few kilometers each).

> Typically pretty wet weather for the (spring) race

Paris–Roubaix is certainly memorable when it's wet and muddy, but the last time it happened was in 2002! Early spring is the driest part of the year in north-eastern France, and so the usual conditions for the race are dry and dusty. See the Inner Ring: https://inrng.com/2016/04/rain-for-roubaix/

Sadly, I've not been able to see the race in quite a while. At least in my region, NBC sports doesn't seem to carry it anymore. Previously, Universal sports did, which I somehow lost after comcast aquired them.

One of my favorite images of the race is Bob Roll literally riding in the ditch, covered in mud [0]. Think it epitomizes the race.

[0] https://images.app.goo.gl/K8CHHQMGA245iZt48

In 100 years will we wonder why recumbent bicycles took so long to catch on? MIT's David Gordon Wilson, the writer of the excellent book Bicycling Science, had been advocating for recumbents as a more efficient design to replace traditional modern bicycles for decades.

http://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-designer-inventor-author-bike-b... and https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bicycling-science-third-editi...

I've ridden many different types of bicycle from fixed gears, single speed mountain bikes and more traditional mountain bikes and racing bikes. Recumbent is horrible to ride in traffic (you are below the height of most traffic) and the handling is atrocious.

Yes they are maybe more efficient but they are not pleasant to ride.

TBH the current design is efficient enough, is well understood both in terms of the technology. Almost all improvements now are iterative.

Also more modern materials (carbon fibre, aluminium) are either expensive, brittle (carbon fibre is easily damaged in a crash) or both. A lot of riders (especially the fixed crowd) have a saying of "Steel is Real", frames are normally cheap, easy to come by and even after crashes easily repaired (you can just bend it back most of the time).

The same can be said about many of the more modern gearing systems. Anything past 2 up front, 8 speed at the back is again typically more expensive to fix, parts are less easy to come by and is prone to failure.

Shimano's hub gears need regular maintenance where traditional derailleur setup will go on for thousands of miles with only basic maintenance. Maintenance on a derailleur system is typically cleaning (fairy liquid is fine) and using cheap lubrication that can be bought for a few pounds/dollars will suffice in most cases.

>Recumbent is horrible to ride in traffic (you are below the height of most traffic) and the handling is atrocious.

I disagree. Some of them certainly are 'below eye level', but that is an awfully broad criticism of the group as a whole.

I ride a LongBike Slipstream. The length of the bike is LONGER then a Smart Fortwo. I sit eye-level with almost every sedan I've encountered. SUV's and raised pickup trucks are indeed above my eye-level, but sporty cars are usually below it.

I usually get exceptional room allotted to me by other drivers when I'm on the road. The exception being assholes, but luckily the are the exception and not the rule.

>TBH the current design is efficient enough, is well understood both in terms of the technology. Almost all improvements now are iterative.

"Efficient enough" ? All of the land-speed records for human-powered vehicles are held by recumbents. http://www.ihpva.org/home/

It's ok if you don't like them. But please don't pass off your opinion as fact.

> "Efficient enough" ? All of the land-speed records for human-powered vehicles are held by recumbents. http://www.ihpva.org/home/

I am not trying to break the land speed record on the way to work. I just want to get there in one piece.

The point I was making is just because something is on paper technically better there are other considerations, for someone that commutes regularly being able to go to the local bicycle shop and pick up a spare whatever is more important to me than any perceived efficiencies.

I own a fixed gear with some rather fancy kit on it. Despite the simplicity of the bike, getting replacement parts requires me having to order things online. The cheap 1990s Marin Hawk Hill mountain bike I cycle to work on, I can literally get parts for it anywhere and an be fixed with a set of allen keys and a spanner.

> The length of the bike is LONGER then a Smart Fortwo

Yes, and that's another big disadvantage. One of the criticisms against cars is that they waste a lot of space, but recumbent bikes reduce that advantage. Bicycle lanes can get quite packed already.

> Recumbent is horrible to ride in traffic (you are below the height of most traffic)

Depends on the recumbent. Mine (an Azub Six) isn't - I commute through London on it every day. And cities are (slowly) getting better at keeping traffic out of the way.

> and the handling is atrocious.

How so? You have to take a different line through corners, but you turn later (front wheel is further back) so it's if anything easier to go through the kind of right-angle turns that are expected in cities.

> Yes they are maybe more efficient but they are not pleasant to ride.

That's the opposite of my experience - upright bikes put so much weight on the wrists and, uh, taint, that they simply can't be pleasant for any length of time (particularly for those of us of an, ah, less athletic physique). A certain proportion of the population is able to sit comfortably on a traditional bike saddle, but many people aren't. As scooters and e-bikes open up more of an on-ramp into cycling for a wider demographic, I'd expect more and more people to find that saddles aren't working for them.

> Shimano's hub gears need regular maintenance where traditional derailleur setup will go on for thousands of miles with only basic maintenance. Maintenance on a derailleur system is typically cleaning (fairy liquid is fine) and using cheap lubrication that can be bought for a few pounds/dollars will suffice in most cases.

Ordinary consumers aren't up to even basic maintenance - cars went through the very same progression, in the '50s or '60s it was normal for a car to require basic maintenance by its owner. Low-maintenance hub gears will continue to get cheaper (an expensive model like the Rohloff already goes for thousands of kms without maintenance) and commuter bikes are increasingly switching. I'm sure that racing bikes for enthusiasts will use derailleurs for many years to come, but for commuters who just want to get to work the hub gears are already taking over.

> Depends on the recumbent. Mine (an Azub Six) isn't - I commute through London on it every day. And cities are (slowly) getting better at keeping traffic out of the way.

I cycle through through and around traffic. I don't keep myself out of traffic I am part of it.

I personally hate being in a cycle lane, because I know that many other cyclists normally aren't paying attention, don't know how to ride (they never check over the shoulder, poor handling skills etc). Also separating cars from cyclists just make car drivers less aware that cyclists exist. Not everywhere has cycle lanes.

Then again I don't live in London which has to be now the worst city in the UK.

> How so? You have to take a different line through corners, but you turn later (front wheel is further back) so it's if anything easier to go through the kind of right-angle turns that are expected in cities.

Handling isn't just about going round corners. I can track stand at lights, ride down stairs and going round a 90 degree bend is easy. I can almost turn in the bicycles own circle on my old mountain bike. If I need to bail of the bike, I can just drop the bike and roll off.

> That's the opposite of my experience - upright bikes put so much weight on the wrists and, uh, taint, that they simply can't be pleasant for any length of time (particularly for those of us of an, ah, less athletic physique). A certain proportion of the population is able to sit comfortably on a traditional bike saddle, but many people aren't. As scooters and e-bikes open up more of an on-ramp into cycling for a wider demographic, I'd expect more and more people to find that saddles aren't working for them.

You need to get the right saddle and yeh if you try riding 60 odd miles on a new saddle and you don't cycle regularly you are going to have a bad time. It would be like trying to run a marathon in a pair of new trainers, not a good idea. As for cycling putting pressure on wrists or too much weight on your arse then the bike probably isn't the right size.

As for the wider demographic. I don care what they do. There was a fad in the late 90s early 2000s for mountain bikes, mountain bikes are rubbish on road unless you kit them out with touring tyres, there is simply too much road drag. Also suspension looks flashy but is pointless on a tarmac road.

A lot of people follow fads. I don't.

> Ordinary consumers aren't up to even basic maintenance - cars went through the very same progression, in the '50s or '60s it was normal for a car to require basic maintenance by its owner. Low-maintenance hub gears will continue to get cheaper (an expensive model like the Rohloff already goes for thousands of kms without maintenance) and commuter bikes are increasingly switching. I'm sure that racing bikes for enthusiasts will use derailleurs for many years to come, but for commuters who just want to get to work the hub gears are already taking over.

It is still simpler to repair derailleur setup than any hub. Any bike ship can fix your derailleur gears (unless it is a BMX shop). I doubt the same is true about hubs. Also derailleur gears will work still without maintenance, almost none for years on end. Modern 8 or 9 speed chain is very reliable.

Hubs normally require specialised tooling parts and are always more prone to failure due to the nature of a hub. The only hubs that do work well are the really old sturmy archer hubs because they are again much more mechanically simple than anything else.

There was a fad in the late 90s early 2000s for mountain bikes, mountain bikes are rubbish on road unless you kit them out with touring tyres, there is simply too much road drag. Also suspension looks flashy but is pointless on a tarmac road.

A rear suspension is stupid on any road better than cobblestone, but the shocked front fork on a hardtail is nice in many situations. If the commute is less than five miles or so, wider tires won't hurt anyone. I agree that I don't want knobby tires on the road, but it's easy to change tires. (All mountain bikes have easier-to-change tires than several road bikes I've serviced.)

On even gravel tracks having wider tyres will help you more than a front shock. Cobblestone or similar is easy to ride on a racing bike, a shock is totally unnecessary.

> I can track stand at lights, ride down stairs and going round a 90 degree bend is easy. I can almost turn in the bicycles own circle on my old mountain bike. If I need to bail of the bike, I can just drop the bike and roll off.

Recumbent handling is different but has its advantages. Steep downhills are easier (while there's no bike I'd be happy riding down stairs on, if I was forced to pick I'd take my chances on the recumbent), the turning circle is zero at low speed, if you do get into a front-on collision your body's in a better position to absorb the energy before you hit something with your head, and if you fall off sideways you can shrug it off.

> You need to get the right saddle and yeh if you try riding 60 odd miles on a new saddle and you don't cycle regularly you are going to have a bad time. It would be like trying to run a marathon in a pair of new trainers, not a good idea. As for cycling putting pressure on wrists or too much weight on your arse then the bike probably isn't the right size.

This is "you're holding it wrong" logic. Nope. I did cycle regularly, got my bike fitted, and all that. But there's no getting away from the fundamental physics of pressure = force / area.

> Also suspension looks flashy but is pointless on a tarmac road.

Not having to slalom around the potholes comes in handy. Yes you can work around not having it.

> It is still simpler to repair derailleur setup than any hub. Any bike ship can fix your derailleur gears (unless it is a BMX shop). I doubt the same is true about hubs.

Derailleurs are more popular at the moment so more shops can handle them, but does that matter? If we're talking about a non-enthusiast commuter they're probably going to take it to the bike shop they bought it from for any required maintenance.

> Also derailleur gears will work still without maintenance, almost none for years on end. Modern 8 or 9 speed chain is very reliable.

> Hubs normally require specialised tooling parts and are always more prone to failure due to the nature of a hub.

This is backwards - a derailleur's parts are inherently exposed and vulnerable, an unmaintained derailleur is always going to fail faster than a good-quality hub. The Rohloff recommends an oil change every 5000km, but in fact people ride them for 10000 or 15000 without problems. Derailleurs make sense for enthusiasts who do their own maintenance or racers who want the lightest weight gearing possible, but for commuting or touring they're only used because of price, and the price of hubs will keep coming down.

>This is "you're holding it wrong" logic. Nope. I did cycle regularly, got my bike fitted, and all that. But there's no getting away from the fundamental physics of pressure = force / area.

Nope sorry it isn't the "your holding it wrong logic". If you do any physical activity that you are unused to you will have slight pains etc. I recently started Thai boxing again and loans behold my body hurt after the workout. Pretending otherwise is simply denying reality.

> Not having to slalom around the potholes comes in handy. Yes you can work around not having it.

Unless the pothole is massive then it is usually moving a foot to the left or right, hardly a slalom. if you can't avoid it then you can either just unweight the front wheel by moving your weight back slightly or just hop it.

None of these are particularly difficult to do (except for maybe the bunny hop, but potholes are rarely that large).

> This is backwards - a derailleur's parts are inherently exposed and vulnerable, an unmaintained derailleur is always going to fail faster than a good-quality hub. The Rohloff recommends an oil change every 5000km, but in fact people ride them for 10000 or 15000 without problems. Derailleurs make sense for enthusiasts who do their own maintenance or racers who want the lightest weight gearing possible, but for commuting or touring they're only used because of price, and the price of hubs will keep coming down.

No it isn't backwards. Derailleur gearing has had over 110 years of development and improvement. They are cheap, reliable and easy to fix and almost never go wrong. Typically only the cassette and chain need replacements (and that is after years of abuse) and a 8-9 speed chain is £10-15 and a 8/9 speed cassette is a few pounds. They take maybe 10-20 minutes to change.

I am sure the Rohloff is better but that is like comparing a Rolls Royce to a Ford Fiesta. Sure the Rolls Royce is better and will last 20 life times but it costs 100 times and the cheap Ford will do most of what you want. If we compare Shimano hub gears (which have a terrible reputation) they are more expensive and less reliable and give you less gears.

What you don't seem to understand is that just as I said at the start just because something is technically better on paper it doesn't actually make it better in practice. Sure I am sure hubs are better for most on paper, but much like old languages like Fortran, Shimano, Campagnolo and a bunch of other companies have been working out the quirks in the design since the 1930s.

I would say the whole conversation comes down to the"Worse is better" principle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

> If you do any physical activity that you are unused to you will have slight pains etc.

It's not about being used to it - I'd been cycling for years. There will always be muscle soreness from using your legs, but an upright brings a totally unnecessary set of aches and pains in other places - wrists, taint, shoulders, neck - because of the awkward hunched position and the fact that you're supporting your body weight on a handful of tiny contact points. I made the switch to a recumbent and even with far less experience than I'd had on an upright, I was easily riding twice as far per day before things became too uncomfortable to continue - and I was able to stop needing padded shorts or gloves as well, which means less luggage when touring or less need to store special clothes in the office.

> Derailleur gearing has had over 110 years of development and improvement.

Derailleurs having so much history of development is precisely why I expect hub gears to take over as they go through their own years of development and improvement.

> They are cheap, reliable and easy to fix and almost never go wrong.

They jam or fall out of alignment pretty often, so I wouldn't say "almost never go wrong". Yes an experienced cyclist can fix them pretty easily, but it's a barrier for newcomers and for non-enthusiast commuters who just want something to get them to/from work.

> Sure the Rolls Royce is better and will last 20 life times but it costs 100 times and the cheap Ford will do most of what you want. If we compare Shimano hub gears (which have a terrible reputation) they are more expensive and less reliable and give you less gears.

The technology trickles down though. If you go back far enough then things like ABS, electric windows, or fuel injection were something you'd only find on the Rolls Royce (because carburettors were cheaper and more reliable and just required a little bit of manual adjustment occasionally); now you find those things in the cheap Ford too. It'll be the same for bicycles: right now you only find good hub gears on the Rolls-Royce tier tourers, but that will change as the technology gets cheaper.

> It's not about being used to it - I'd been cycling for years. There will always be muscle soreness from using your legs, but an upright brings a totally unnecessary set of aches and pains in other places - wrists, taint, shoulders, neck - because of the awkward hunched position and the fact that

Your bike doesn't fit! This is like saying "I wore shoes that are two sizes too small and my feet hurt". This isn't a valid argument.

> you're supporting your body weight on a handful of tiny contact points.

Your hands, feet (those thing that are at the end of your legs that you can stand on all day) and arse are a tiny contact points? Give over, this is nonsense.

> I made the switch to a recumbent and even with far less experience than I'd had on an upright, I was easily riding twice as far per day before things became too uncomfortable to continue - and I was able to stop needing padded shorts or gloves as well, which means less luggage when touring or less need to store special clothes in the office.

You are not everyone and just because you have problems the vast majority of people do not. My nan who is 4ft 11 (so a very small lady) managed with a regular bicycle until she was in her late 70s. Are you saying that you are frailer than a woman in her late 70s?

I ride almost everywhere in jeans and t-shirt unless when it is boiling hot in summer when I wear T-shirt and shorts. I don't ride like some people who seem to think it is the tour-de-france everyday.

In my bag, I have a set of lights, a pump, a puncture and repair kit (which is the size of a small wallet), some light water proofs (I am driving if it is tipping it down) and my lunch.

> They jam or fall out of alignment pretty often, so I wouldn't say "almost never go wrong". Yes an experienced cyclist can fix them pretty easily, but it's a barrier for newcomers and for non-enthusiast commuters who just want something to get them to/from work.

No they don't fall out of alignment often. Fixing the chain coming off is literally just feeding it back on. Does it take years of experience to loop something round cog ... no.

You are just making stuff up to win the argument at this point.

> The technology trickles down though. If you go back far enough then things like ABS, electric windows, or fuel injection were something you'd only find on the Rolls Royce (because carburettors were cheaper and more reliable and just required a little bit of manual adjustment occasionally); now you find those things in the cheap Ford too. It'll be the same for bicycles: right now you only find good hub gears on the Rolls-Royce tier tourers, but that will change as the technology gets cheaper.

Except it hasn't. Hub gears have never worked well, the only ones that have stood the test of time are the extremely limited 3 speed sturmey archer models (which require oiling) and very expensive Rohloff models. Every so often hub gears come up, or belt drives and they don't go anywhere.

At this point I am pretty sure you want to be right so this is my last reply to you on this thread.

> Your bike doesn't fit! This is like saying "I wore shoes that are two sizes too small and my feet hurt".

Happened with multiple bikes, after having a fit, and it's not like I got the recumbent fitted. And a post back you were saying it was normal for cycling to feel like boxing training. (It is - for upright cycling).

> You are not everyone and just because you have problems the vast majority of people do not. My nan who is 4ft 11 (so a very small lady) managed with a regular bicycle until she was in her late 70s. Are you saying that you are frailer than a woman in her late 70s?

So someone who's about half the weight of the average person didn't suffer issues from having too much weight on too small an area. That's exactly what I'd expect. The vast majority of people do find cycling uncomfortable - and don't cycle as a result.

> I ride almost everywhere in jeans and t-shirt unless when it is boiling hot in summer when I wear T-shirt and shorts. I don't ride like some people who seem to think it is the tour-de-france everyday.

Does this not suggest that it's you who's unusual? People don't wear those padded shorts for fun, they wear them because it's unpleasant not to. Maybe you're some combination of light, riding short distances, insensitive to particular kinds of pain, or just unusually suited to saddles via some random quirk of anatomy. Lucky you, but you are not representative.

> Fixing the chain coming off is literally just feeding it back on. Does it take years of experience to loop something round cog ... no.

You think that as an experienced cyclist. I've had to stop for people on the side of the road who couldn't/wouldn't put their chain back on, more than once. A normal commuter just isn't interested in learning how to do maintenance, even something that basic.

> You are just making stuff up to win the argument at this point.

Wow, that's some first-tier projection there.

> And a post back you were saying it was normal for cycling to feel like boxing training. (It is - for upright cycling).

I know I said I wouldn't reply but that is a totally disingenuous interpretation of what I said and there is no way I could leave that be.

I never said such a thing. I said if you don't do something for years you will ache. Thai boxing was an extreme example to ram the point home as you were being thick headed about the subject.

> Does this not suggest that it's you who's unusual? People don't wear those padded shorts for fun, they wear them because it's unpleasant not to. Maybe you're some combination of light, riding short distances, insensitive to particular kinds of pain, or just unusually suited to saddles via some random quirk of anatomy. Lucky you, but you are not representative.

No not at all. I see many people cycling in normal-ish clothing on fixed gears, racing bikes, mountain bikes etc.

It is really frustrating when you will deny reality. I've cycled to work in many different countries (UK, Spain, Denmark, Germany) and the vast majority of people where normal clothes.

Here are some from Denmark (not taken from me but I did live there)

https://imgur.com/a/9b4O5l5

https://imgur.com/a/IoXzYVx

This was taken by me while waiting in Gibraltar.

https://imgur.com/a/xkDXWal

This is a picture from Bournemouth

https://imgur.com/a/dHdpA5J

A shot from Manchester (I used to live there as well)

https://imgur.com/a/wlr2xWx

All wearing normal clothing and not struggling. I am sorry but it simply isn't true that I am unusual.

I bike everyday in a large city in south east Asia and I would be dead a long time ago if I had been riding a recumbent bicycle.

How do you find day-to-day usability of the azub once you are off the bike? I.e. locking it to a post or bringing it into a building. Do you have the under seat stearing?

How do you store it at home/work?

I'll generally just lock the rear wheel to something, sometimes through the luggage rack - there's no real way to lock the frame, but it hasn't been a problem yet (I suspect it's a less attractive target for thieves than a conventional bike). Moving it around a building is pretty much the same as an upright - it's a little longer but still just about fits in trains, bicycle racks etc., and you can wheel it around upright on its rear wheel the same way as an upright - I do this to get it in the lift at home. At home I just keep it in the hallway of my flat, inside my front door on the third floor (there are bike racks outside but I've had too many bikes stolen from there in the past).

At work I can't actually fit it in the wheel slots of the racks they've got but that's more about having wide tyres/tubes than it being a recumbent (an upright mountain bike would have the same problem) - I've got a stand so I just park it in the rack row resting on its stand, it takes up the same amount of space (no problem with having other bikes in the slots on either side).

I went for the above seat steering - I do touring in various countries so didn't want anything that would be too unconventional / hard to fix.

I found moving it around in buildings (HP Velotechnik Speedmachine) quite a lot more cumbersome than my regular trekking bicycle. Fitting it through doors/elevators (especially with panniers) but I guess that is what you are eluding to, wheeling it upright and all that.

Did you ever bring it on a train in the UK?

Obviously it's a little longer than an upright (possibly helps that I'm fairly short), so the threshold for how tight a corner is before I have to put it vertical is a little lower than it would be for an upright. But I was mostly thinking of cases where you'd have to do the same either way - my building's lift is too small to fit any kind of bike without putting it vertical on its rear wheel.

And yeah I take it on UK trains fairly often.

> Shimano's hub gears need regular maintenance where traditional derailleur setup will go on for thousands of miles with only basic maintenance.

I think you got that bit wrong: you have to clean and change parts more often with derailleur systems (the teeth for example erode much quicker). Insurances for hub systems bikes are cheaper because of this reason, at least where I am in Germany.

Not a bike expert but I happen to have a hub-geared bike with an insurance and I was told that by the insurance guy.

> Almost all improvements now are iterative.

Improvements are directed to where the money goes. UCI racing rules hold back experimentation outside of concept bikes. E-bikes may have broken the dam open and we'll start to see a lot of interesting things come out in that direction.

This is another silly argument, the UCI doesn't regulate bicycles sold in the shops. I can (in theory because the bike will cost as much as a good second hand car) go to the boutique bike shop and get a bicycle with all sorts of fancy electronic shifters, carbon fibre frame that is under 6kg. Those bikes are lighter than the bikes in the tour de france.

The fact of the matter is that the current design is near optimal and other designs aren't as well understood, aren't as cheap to make (it is three triangles made out of tubes stuck together with a fork shape at the front) and normally have some horrendous downside.

While efficient conversion of rider input to forward motion is obviously important in bicycles, it’s not the only attribute that matters. Recumbent bikes make efficiency gains here in some riding scenarios at the cost of a great many other attributes, which is why they have never really caught on.

Also, they are really hard for young people to pop wheelies on, and that’s important too :)

As a bent rider myself, I too am baffled.

In my mind from the very first instant I saw one (late 1970's or early 80's Dick Ryan was interviewed on broadcast TV [likely as a novelty] and I was captivated. My child mind saw this as 'proper evolution' and I had to have one.

Here's a great summary of the history of the recumbent bike:

https://www.lightningbikes.com/riders/martin-krieg/recumbent...

Some people are intimidated by change, others are energized by challenging the status quo. Those will always be my heroes.

First mover advantage? Upright bikes are everywhere, and I could easily find one to learn, plus they're cheap. Recumbent simply don't offer enough perceived advantage to justify the investment to even try one out.

I don't think I would ever regularly use a recumbent bicycle, since you don't seem to have as much control over the bike than with a traditional one. You can't jump a curb or swerve around parked cars very easily on a recumbent. Also it's nice to be over top of the bike so you can easily jump off or redistribute your weight whenever you have to.

> In 100 years will we wonder why recumbent bicycles took so long to catch on?

In 100 years, most likely only crazy hipsters will know what a bicycle is because everything will be electrified. E-Scooters will eradicate bicycles for most uses in the next 10 years or so.

> E-Scooters will eradicate bicycles for most uses in the next 10 years or so.

That seems completely non-obvious to me. For starters, will Bird et al even continue to exist for 10 years? And even if they do, why would they replace un-electrified bicycles, which have a number of advantages?

"The quality of roads is relevant, but not really the answer. Bicycles can be ridden on dirt roads or sidewalks"

Bicycles can only be ridden safely on rough surfaces with good pneumatic tyres. As for the sidewalks, 1) their quality was also very variable, 2) they didn't offer a continuous path anywhere unless you only wanted to cycle around a single block (often not even then), 3) they were full of pedestrians trying to avoid the rough, filthy road surface, 4) hopping on and off kerbs is not a good idea without pneumatic tyres and a lightweight frame (early bicycles were ponderous and heavy).

The description of the technical progression needed to make the bicycle practical is fine, but the author seems to need to dismiss all previous thought on bicycles simply to justify their argument. Firstly, that's not a motivation I admire, secondly the dismissal of those obstacles and the other cited disincentives is just wrong: those obstacles were definitely there, something technical and social progress had to address before a bicycle was a reasonable and useful idea.

That's an interesting piece, which reminded me of another interesting article on the wheelbarrow that surfaced on HN as well some time ago:

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbar...

I think the article misses:

1) Those 'hypotheses' seem like a perfectly good starting point for a very long list of cumulative reasons as to "Why not to get a bike".

2) It doesn't separate bicycle 'the tool' from bicycle 'the toy'. All those original machines were fashionable playthings for the wealthy. Bicycles the tool took off they were demonstrably better than walking (which is then the combination of improved tech and reduced cost overtook walking and alternative transports)

So it looks like there were attempts but they had fatal design flaws and technology (metallurgy) was immature.

One question raised is why didn’t we see a trike come about before the bike?

It’s more stable and propulsion via direct front pedal isn’t as awkward as the front pedal bike.

While it’s maybe surprising, have you ever tried riding something with a 1:1 drive ratio? There’s a reason even bikes with a fixed gear still have gears...

Pedals connected directly to the front wheel would be truly awful for virtually all adult bicycle use cases.

Well, the obvious contender for that is the penny farthing. It’s not dreadful (it was good enough to be commercialised with vague success at least), but it’s inconvenienced by the necessary size of the front wheel to make any progress, and the fact that you can’t have a front-wheel brake as you just rotate over the top of the bicycle when applied.

Have you seen a human ride a penny farthing? I don’t think dreadful is overstating it. Sure it made the most of available technology at the time, but one doesn’t need to be expert in bikes to see why this design died.

Just getting on a Penny Farthing can be problematic, given it tries to compensate for 1:1 drive by using an enormous front wheel.

Yep, there’s a bunch of late-Victorian enthusiasts who ride them around London every year: https://pennyfarthingclub.com/

They have obvious faults of course, but they were around for 15-20 years, were better than their predecessors, and didn’t kill off the concept of the bicycle in general to stop future development. That’s enough to give them some credit at least!

I mean, people ride unicycles too. But there's a reason most don't.

We did. The ad for the Rover Safety Bicycle in this article says "Safer than any Tricycle". From Wikipedia you can see that trikes beat bikes by at least a hundred years, depending on your definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricycle#History

Interesting! Trikes make sense. Better stability and have cargo hold capability making them pretty useful for light transport of goods. Alternatives were porters or an actual cart; horse, ox or human drawn.

It's dangerous in a curve as you can't lean.

But a trike with a big front wheel could have had a decent speed with direct drive and yet be less dangerous than a penny farthing.

They did ish. (from the article https://rootsofprogress.org/img/early-bicycle-models.png)

I think the big problem is weight, you probably had to be fit to ride, so why pootle around on something safer and even heavier. Its like trying to get a mamil to ride a sit up and beg.

The unicycle was invented shortly afterwards. Here's a patent from 1869, for an over-complicated unicycle with a treadle mechanism instead of pedals on cranks. https://patents.google.com/patent/US87355

Many of the objections about how complicated the bicycle is don't apply to the unicycle. The Romans could have made a perfectly good one out of wood with brass cranks. But maybe it was even less obvious than the bicycle that it was possible to ride.

If unicycles had come first, would bicycles have ever surpassed them?

I don't think so. I use both and there are use cases for both, but the bicycle is generally safer and faster.

What is the use case for a Unicycle?

The author briefly outlined the incredibly tortuous path of inventors adding every possible technology together over centuries to create a human-powered-vehicle that was even marginally safe and useful on the roads of their time, and then once they finally crack it, the author chalks it up to cultural and social factors. Trust me, as someone who tried to build a ride sharing service before the smartphone, it only seems “cultural and social” in hindsight. Its not. There are a million tiny technological barriers that nobody remembers.

Bicycle was useless without paved roads. Horse was much more convenient. I have personal anecdote about these issues. As a kid in 1967 I made 250 km bicycle trip in two days. My father was amazed: "How this is possible? I made exactly the same trip in 1929 also in two days, but I had a very good horse galloping half the time." We were both camping at the same forest at halfway point too..

I think it's less about the road quality and more about pneumatic tires. Same for cars. Would you rather drive a car on a dirt road with modern tires, or on a highway, directly on metal rims? The answer seems obvious to me...

You do not understand. These was no road perse in 1929, just two deep grooves for carriages and cars. It was impossible to bike on that. The first coast-to-coast american biked on railroad tracks. They were bumpy obviously but evidently much better than any roads.

This is ridiculous. Bicycles were near 50 years old by 1930. There was a ton of riding done before nicely paved roads were everywhere. The Tour De France is happening right now, it was first run in 1903 and covered 1500 miles, with riders doing up to 250 miles in one day.

Bicycles do fine on dirt roads & trails, pavement is absolutely not required. Bicycles have adapted to better roads over time but they never required glass smooth modern paved roads.

Horse-and-carriage type roads were very particular. The middle was very soft and the grooves were quite narrow. You just cannot see them anywhere nowadays. I bicycled from Finland to Yugoslavia in 1971 often trying to ride on those kind of roads. Occasionally I used old Roman Empire roads. They were "paved" but made of big slippery plates and even more difficult to ride on.

The arguments given all seem reasonably convincing.

The interesting thing is the kind of argument this blog and some here engage in. That is, one looks at argument X, decides it's not convincing and then pushes argument Y.

It's sort of a single-cause fallacy. Maybe bad roads weren't enough but they contributed. Maybe technological limitations weren't enough but they contributed, etc.

The problem is that combining factors are hard to see and hard to argue for. A factor here (a meta-factor, haha), modeling how all the different factors came together or didn't come together is hard. You'd need a historical look at how the bicycle was invented and a look at how at how could have been invented earlier but wasn't. This goes into how people think, how people design machines, how people allocate resources, etc. Which is to say we'll likely never know how the associated factor contributed and how much.

But we can tell that the vagueness of the situation doesn't stop people arguing.

> I don’t think horses explain it either. A bicycle, from what I’ve read, was cheaper to buy than a horse, and it was certainly cheaper to maintain (if nothing else, you don’t have to feed a bicycle).

I don't think this is so simple. A horse can haul a lot more than a human can. How much human bicycle power is equal to one horse power?

An average human can peak above 1HP for short amounts of time (think sprinting). They definitely cannot maintain that. I think the Horse Power was defined at a sustainable rate for the horse.

1 HP = 746 watts and most people on a bike would cruise in 100-250 watts range. The top cyclists can maintain more like 400 watts

https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/blog/2018/06/how-does-your-...

A horse peaks around 15+ horsepower depending on age and breed they can significantly exceed it. They also generally average above 1HP for long stretches.

1hp is at best one measure of the average consistent power output of an average horse doing a full day of work every day for months. Or about the equivalent of a person doing 0.05 to 0.1 hp.

The story I heard was that a horse is good for about 0.5-0.6HP continuously. The farmer lied about his horse.

No, James Watt behaved like a sincere merchant, and he made a more powerful engine than he actually measured, in order to avoid making it again in case he complains that the engine is too underpowered.

Interesting, “It was found that a horse could conveniently raise a weight of 100 pounds attached to the end of the rope while walking at the rate of two and one-half miles per hour, or 220 feet per minute. This is 220 x 100— 22,000 foot-pounds. W att, however, in order to allow for friction in his engine and for good measure added 50 per cent to this amount, thus establishing 33,000 foot-pounds per minute, or 550 foot-pounds per second as the unit of power.” https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1466&...

It lists other estimates ranging up to 1.5 HP, and also has peak HP from one contest at 14.88HP though that was published in 1926.

PS: One even has Tredgold 6 hrs. 125 lbs. 3 m. p. h. = 1HP.

Yes, if Watt behaved like today's marketers, he would design his engine to have 25% less power than he measured and sell two engines rather than one. And he would make some screws loose to sell them again and again.

It all comes from Watt trying to calculate how to sell his machines to the owners of the mines, who depended before on ponies:

http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/103_fall2003.web.dir/Chris_Peter...

"Watt was working with ponies lifting coal at a coal mine, and he wanted a way to talk about the power available from one of these animals. He found that, on average, a mine pony could do 22,000 foot-pounds of work in a minute. He then increased that number by 50 percent and pegged the measurement of horsepower at 33,000 foot-pounds of work in one minute."

"A horse exerting 1 horsepower can raise 330 pounds of coal 100 feet in a minute"

"his business partner Matthew Boulton standardized the figure at 33,000.

The number wasn't quite scientific: Watt looked for horses at peak performance, and for his purposes, it didn't truly matter how accurate his measurement of a horse's power was as long as it was close enough to be believable. Much like his engine, the metric struck."

Yea, it was a ballpark estimate not really a major study.

https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1466&...

Shows several other HP estimates for horses at up to 1.5 HP per hours and even one at 125lb * 3mph over 6 hours = 1 hp. Also includes a peak from a contest at 14.88 HP.

>1hp is at best one measure of the average consistent power output of an average horse doing a full day of work every day for months. Or about the equivalent of a person doing 0.05 to 0.1 hp.

Which is exactly the point. It makes a good unit for figuring out about how much animal an engine replaces.

1 HP actually equals 746 watts / second

No. HP is a measure of power. So is watts. Watts/second is not a meaningful unit.

It is the standard unit of power response slope over time. 1 horse of power equals 746 Watts, though.

But over 1 hour, no?

No. 1 horsepower, this instant, equals 746 watts, this instant. An average of 1 horsepower over an hour equals an average of 746 watts over the same hour.

Ah right. 746W over 1 hour would be 746Wh.

Yes.

And, a horsepower-hour is a thing. Railroad locomotives are often used by other railroads than the owner (in the US). Those "foreign" uses are often tracked in terms of horsepower-hours.

I stand corrected...

Thank you for clarifying. I was using the standard unit, since that is how I've always used it in, for example, conversations about cycling.

Ahh, I had the number wrong, thanks!

"When considering human-powered equipment, a healthy human can produce about 1.2 hp (0.89 kW) briefly (see orders of magnitude) and sustain about 0.1 hp (0.075 kW) indefinitely; trained athletes can manage up to about 2.5 hp (1.9 kW) briefly and 0.35 hp (0.26 kW) for a period of several hours."[1]

100W on a bike is easy to maintain for several hours, even for non-trained humans. An output of 1hp (750W) only lasts a few seconds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower

Innovation takes an unreasonably twisty path. An even more stark example: suitcases with wheels. If you have the technology to build a siege engine or a crossbow, then surely you can build a suitcase with wheels. And yet they post-date the Saturn V rocket. How reasonable is that?

Why would you need a suitcase with wheels when you have a porter who carries your cases for you? Remember that if you could afford to fly in the sixties, you could easily afford it to have someone else deal with your luggage.

If you are building a startup, knowing how answer to the "Why now?" question is quite important, this article might be a good inspiration.

Why did we wait so long for the elevator? Circular dependency and incentive. Combining a ratchet with a pulley is incredibly simple and both have been around since the ancient Greeks. But with a few exceptions, it didn't make sense to build buildings big enough to need elevators. I mean, how would you get up and down the buildings? Answer: an elevator... but it didn't exist yet... hence, nobody could imagine how to get up and down tall buildings efficiently. That, and steel-framed buildings that could support themselves over 10 or so floors didn't come into vogue until after the renaissance.

And there wasn't enough water pressure for the upper floors.

There's about five centuries in there between the renaissance and steel-framed buildings!

But of course cranes existed (on building sites, and in factories) since approximately the day after we invented the rope. But an elevator safe and reliable enough to make rich people buy an apartment above the 2nd floor? And cities dense enough that they were tempted to do so? Those took longer.

I think the post downplays the value of a horse. Horses are incredible. Not only do they provide transport that is even better than bicycle (you don't have to pedal, and they can go over almost any terrain) but they also provide labor. Indeed, horses actually generate a net surplus of labor above the labor required to grow food to feed them. That is, a farmer with a horse can grow far more food than a farmer without a horse, even after all the food the horse eats.

If I could safely and legally keep a horse in front of my house and office I would totally get rid of my bike.

Then I hope you would clean up it's poo.

Great article, but I would like to point out a common misconception regarding mechanical advantage that featured in the article. Mechanical advantage is not completely determined by the gear ratio. You also have to take into account crank length and the wheel size. Total mechanical advantage is determined by these three factors together. See https://sheldonbrown.com/gain.html

Great article. Yes is amazing how humans are often blind to obvious (with hindsight) and relatively simple innovative ideas. Another good example of this is the - wheeled suitcase - not invented till 1970!! http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/10/04/wheeled.luggage.ann...

There was still active research into why bicycles are stable as recently as 2011. Here's a talk about that research: https://youtu.be/YdtE3aIUhbU

If the bicycle was some sort of "obvious" machine, people wouldn't still be studying the basic stability mechanics 200 years later. Very few things are as simple as they seem. Even levers can get a bit complicated.

> Yet it was a simple mechanical invention. It would seem to require no brilliant inventive insight, and certainly no scientific background.

That's a seriously weak premise. A bicycle is more than a metal rod with wheels; it needs a good steering mechanism and driving mechanism, not to mention ergonomic seating mechanism. Humans have certainly had a lot of things in their blind spot which makes us wonder why it took so long, but bicycle isn't one of them. Eraser-butt-pencil, may be. Bicycle, certainly not.

Also, the sheer number of crazy models that happened in its evolution is a testament to the fact that a bicycle is anything but intuitive. Remember, it was an age where mechanical devices was a rage. It was sort of like the AI-ML of that era. There was a lot of activity by people of varying levels of expertise - from tinkerers to people who knew what they were doing to people who thought they knew what they were doing. Despite this it took that long.

So its absurd to start off with the said premise.

Points like material and manufacturing process are red herring IMO. This argument is backwards. What needed to be made was a prototype. The things mentioned would follow naturally. No one had to invent a "professional grade" machine at the word go. An example from software: HLL were not invented first and then OS were written in it, but OS were written first, and in the process people realized HLL would be more productive, and OS were rewritten in them.

The conclusion about cultural and economic factors also seems unconvincing. The only plausible reason could be the clout of horse carriage mafia or something like that which influenced the powers that be and stifled rival technologies.

If you don't already have good roads, then you need a very rugged and durable bike, which wasn't possible at a reasonable price with the materials and tools available at the time. Even with today's technology, a cheap "mountain bike" from Walmart would be unrideable after just a day or two of true off-road use.

Prague museum of technology has a huge collection of early bicycles. Side by siders, rod drive, front wheel drive, bamboo...

By the way, push bikes (i.e. the hobby horse) are very common among toddler and preschool age children in my circles. I don't see why a wooden version of this couldn't have been common much earlier than 1817. Wood is sufficient for its construction, although I do suppose a metal bearing would be superior.

At the very least it would be a fun way to descend steep hills.

>In light of this, I think the deepest explanation is in general economic and cultural factors.

Indeed, with enough people with enough spare wealth, you can have significant progress even when technology remains flat.

There is an immense difference between the Greek dark age and classical Athens, but not technologically. And intellectually curious people can figure out how to fly just using paper.[1]

Apparently, the first iteration of the bike in the early 1800s was a briefly popular toy: the very epitome of unguided discovery is play. Only later was it made practical by inventors working from that exiting idea.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers

>In light of this, I think the deepest explanation is in general economic and cultural factors. Regarding economic factors, it seems that there needs to be a certain level of surplus to support the culture-wide research and development effort that creates inventions.

A related concept is the "adjacent possible" coined by Steven Johnson:

https://www.google.com/search?q="adjacent+possible"+steven+j...

(Linked a google search query because many "adjacent possible" articles are behind a paywall and can't tell which will be visible to you.)

If i had to point to a specific technical factor, it's pneumatic tires.

I've, in some past article linked on (I think) HN read the answer to this very question as advanced, efficient bearings (so, the ability to produce finely accurate small metal objects).

I recall hearing that it's tube steel. The previous iterations used solid steel (maybe cast iron?) and were super heavy.

I'd say horses are the most important factor here, as why would anyone bother with bad roads and easy to break (due to the lack of tech) machine when horses and donkeys were so much superior way of transportation

When the materials and manufacturing options (MMO) are dodgy and limited, you have to come up with almost a perfect design to take advantage of what's available. There's less room for error.

When MMO got better, you could get a lot "wrong" and still have a useful device.

In other words, early on you have two obstacles: MMO and finding a good enough design. As time goes on and MMO improves you only have one obstacle: design, meaning progress is faster or at least shows enough promise to motivate further experiments.

"Bicycles can be ridden on dirt roads or sidewalks (although the latter led to run-ins with pedestrians and made bicycles unpopular among the public at first)."

Little has changed.

I really enjoyed the markup/css styling on this piece. While the content is certainly up for debate, it was presented in a very visually clear and informative manner.

Thank you! I have actually spent a good amount of time getting the image layout just right

I think the author is trying too hard to think outside the box here. Sometimes the answer is the obvious answer, inside the box, whether you want it or not.

This seems to assume that the current bicycle design is obvious and inevitable, but that is not true. The bicycle went through a lot of different designs before we got the "safety bicycle" in the 1880s. Here is a small video showing some previous designs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI6lgUlEUFU

Its a lovely article, I much enjoyed reading it. I now think of it as part of a long list of scattered around publications that tried to describe the same process. Each with their own flower bed of opinions I don´t agree with and soiled with technical misconceptions.

Having red a good number of patents and an interest in the innovation process I had to giggle a bit how the 100 year old design was described as THE bicycle. As if we've reached the final destination. Iḿ sure they thought the same about the bone breaker and the face smasher designs long after better ones were made.

We use to have a local bicycle shop ran by a guy who financially really didn't need to, it was his passion (and rumor had it it that he did it to get away from his wife.) I went there one day to ask him why he only sold normal bikes, you have a huge store but all the bikes are pretty much the same? He explained that he use to have 1 or 2 special designs but that people looking to buy a bicycle changed their behavior from circling the shop 2 or 3 times then buying something to making half a lap then standing there gazing at that "weird" bike for a minute... and then they just left! He apparently put a good bit of thought into it since the loss of sales didn't bother him. His eventual decision was that he didn't want to disrupt peoples train of thought. They are here to look for a new bike, I should facilitate that to the best of my abilities.

Most bicycle mods or improvements are not useful but they are all weird to people. I invented 2 myself that increase efficiency and the quality of the work out by a truly unbelievable amount. The process was wonderful, I made rusty old clunkers that felt like high end bikes. While there was some encouragement from cycling enthusiasts I didn't care much for other peoples opinions, the manufacturing and marketing was already boring to me but the moaning was truly something else. The funniest part was when I left a rusty old test bike parked among hundreds of other bikes, something I never did, then someone let the air out of both tires. It was poetry to me, I wasn't even mad. How dare I have something weird on my bike.

more on the normality enforcement: https://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/59406/why-are-r...

Would love to hear more about your mods! Have any photos? Just curious as a layman who rides one nearly every day.

If I ever chose to do something commercial it will be a race against the replicators. Ideally they only take notice when a concept takes off. You could even get the patents?

Not to offend you at all but its an interesting cultural phenomenon to just ask for the fruits of ones labor when it comes to innovation. If you would bring a large bag of money to the conversation I would still be reluctant to share. I'm not at all sure what role I could play in manufacturing.

It sort of reveals what happens with most inventions from raw to polished. I probably wont produce or share anything. There must be millions of iterations of this formula ranging from not very good to stuff that blows the mind. All taken to the grave.

I suppose the inventor catch 22 joke is that one could potentially make a lot of money with ideas if one had the funds to gamble. Inventors are of course dreamers so don't expect anything to happen. We are all missing out on much more than we could possibly imagine.

In all fairness, if you look at what is out there my ideas do not make for a much better vehicle. If you simply add an aerodynamic body to a recumbent bicycle then put some electrical assist on it there is very little need for further efficiency.

> First, the correct design was not obvious. For centuries, progress was stalled because inventors were all trying to create multi-person four-wheeled carriages, rather than single-person two-wheeled vehicles. It’s unclear why this was.

In the 1800, most people were poor, and any transportation should be aimed for people with some level of wealth, who would not like to labor to drive themselves around.

It takes a while to convince oneself that a bicycle actually works, i.e. is stable and does not fall over. Perhaps that is the reason.

My answer to this question these days is: "What good is a bycicle if there is nothing you can ride it on?" Sure bycicles may be hard to engineer, but the environment in which a bycicle could be useful only existed in a select few places on earth.

I think the author is to quick to dismiss road quality as a primary issue.

It's funny that what I expected this article to be is to explain the seemingly rising interested in bicycle as an urban transport today

I don't have any data, but I definitely feel a trend for moving to more compact and energy efficient personal vehicles and I really wish it gathers more and more momentum.

I think he underestimates the horse. If you live in a mostly horse and human powered society where the infrastructure to support your means of transport is ubiquitous (ie, stables, smiths, feed supply, etc), there would be zero reason to consider a clumsy first iteration of the bicycle as promising.

I don't think the modern two wheeled in-line design is an obvious starting point or design iteration. It's not obviously user friendly either. Proof: 90% of the people reading this thread probably had to be "taught" how to ride a two wheeled bicycle.

This might be a function of age and development? I couldn't learn to bicycle at the "proper" age. (7? 9? I don't know exactly when it was but I could tell my parents were frustrated.) I just couldn't do it. Later as a teenager I tried it and it was easy.

Another interesting invention we had to wait so long is ski/snowboard.

Modern ski tools were commercially available after 1970s and some of them aren't affordable until late 1990s: Steel edge, binding with release system, polyethylene sole, fluorine wax and curving ski.

Anyone interested in the evolution of bicycle technology who is also in the bay area should visit the Marin Museum of Bicycling and Mountain Biking Hall of Fame: https://mmbhof.org/

In the frame of my PhD defense talk I once created a

    Rough timeline for the development of the bicycle:

https://img42.com/sAN_u

Bicycle chains are really complicated and have tons of moving parts.

Bicycle chains are pretty complicated, but steam powered devices (mills, saws, etc) were using flat leather belts for decades, and rope drive existed as well. Many modern bicycles come with belt drives. Also periodically people produce shaft drive bicycles which require a bit more machining, but have few moving parts and are quite reliable.

Leather belt drives were used for early motorcycles (1890s-1910s) even while the roller-chain was already in wide use for bicycles.

the Ancient Greeks and Romans could have attached paddles to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile and basically get something like that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_steamer

That is why i wondering what should i attach to what to get a [preferably cold] fusion :)

I'd probably ask the same about self-balancing electric transportation.

If the original Segway was more like a Uniscoot Hovercycle[1] I could see it selling quite a lot more.

Not really: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zHHPCAao4k

could there be any simpler explanations like a modern renovation of the temple where this was added?

are there other recorded appearances of this modern-looking but very-early bicycle in the region? why was there a gap in its existence until it was re-introduced in the 20th century?

Because asphalt/concrete roads have only been around since 1920s. Biking on dirt or gravel isn’t fun, horses do better on such surfaces.

Bicycles were one of the first items that an individual acquired through disposable income.

Another good question in similar Spirit, why did we wait so long for wheels on suitcases?

The appropriate metal and quality of roads seem like the biggest factors to me.

Why are we waiting so long for cheap and everywhere electric bikes?

Because without an 18 speed bike you might as well be walking.

while the premise of this entire article makes no sense, it is full of interesting history of the bicycle

It's always obvious after the fact

Pneumatic rubber tires

I’m pretty sure this author is trolling the reader.

1. Wheel technology: Hard tires instead of pneumatic tires are absolutely horrendous, especially on any vehicle without suspension. Wheel technology of the time usually consisted of solid wood or wood spoked tire with an iron/steel rim, it is heavy as balls and you have garbage traction.

2. Gearing: You need a reliable chain and reliable gears to get reasonable speeds out of anything with a wheel under a 4 foot diameter. While such technology did exist, it was similarly heavy, required constant maintenance and lubrication, and is prone to jumping a tooth and falling off. Without being able to change gears you got a single gear ratio which makes anything but flat terrain garbage. Also like a fixy you can't stop pedaling.

3. Material science: Available materials where much shittier and far more expensive which not only made the bikes easier to damage and more prone to flexing and warping, but it also made a bike even heavier than it already was. The labor costs of making tube steel is also pretty damn high as it required skilled labor and additional tools and modern welding didn't exist to attach two pieces of pipe together without weaker flat brackets at rivets or pins.

4. Storage and hauling capabilities: Bikes, especially really heavy bikes and fixys, can't hold a whole lot, due to both space and weight limitations. Throw an extra 50 pounds on your bike and go up some of the same hills as usual and you will be whipped. People didn't just travel 20+ miles to have a cup of tea on a whim, if you are going that far or farther you are going to be bringing supplies or goods, and if you are carrying more than just a few pounds it would be easier to walk.

5. Maintenance: Without ball bearings you need to constantly oil your bearings, which also means bringing oil with you. Drive chains are not standard and have to be built, repaired, and fitted on a custom basis and thanks to substandard materials and a flexible bike it would be prone to damage. Tires require a wheelwright to build and repair custom wheels fairly often for a luxury vehicle.

5: Fitness: People of those times weren't just a bunch of lard asses so walking 20 miles isn't a daunting or, in numerous cases these days, an impossibility. People might even run most of it at the time and get a faster average speed than a fixy bike anyways. If you can't walk, you definitely aren't biking that far.

6. Terrain: While modern mountain bikers can go offroad, a fixy heavy bike with no tread/traction and hard wheels would not make it half way through a mud puddle and going down any incline offroad with one is a quick way to crashing and dieing. You would be forced to forge new paths for your bike since existing roads are mostly rutted dirt and mud over uneven ground and are also already occupying the most convenient paths.

The only places a bike in the past would be useful is a well maintained and paved stone or wooden road, however any place with flat wooden or stone roads is also going to have everything you would want within walking distance. And if you both lived in a place with such roads and also wanted to go a significant distance, there would be plenty of wagon traffic that you could simply ride on and stay relatively clean and rested rather than getting yourself covered with horse shit flying off your wheels or slipping in some horse shit and crashing your bike and ruining your extremely expensive clothes.

So basically, it is expensive as hell for an inferior product with marginal benefits in extreme edge case uses. Image having to pay $8,000 for a walmart bike, not gunna find many takers.

Bad quality article.

There's a simple answer: ball bearings are relatively high tech that requires lots of innovation to come together at the same time.

True for a modern bike, but a brass (whatever metal) bushing would work for a more primitive bike.

Such a primitive bike is only a novelty, not a mode of transportation. It would be less efficient and more expensive than just walking. (I.e., a toy.)

How could it be less efficient than walking? Unless your region is perfectly flat, you could walk the bike uphill and ride downhill and still save ~50% of the effort of traveling any medium distance.

Only 50% if you count walking around carrying a table as 100% the same as just walking :)

That said, my non-expert opinion is that a penny-farthing without ball-bearings would probably still work OK; a rover-style bike with a chain would be much harder. But the ability to make bicycle chain, and the ability to make spokes for wheels, I think these happened about the same time too.

Relatedly, my favorite example of "why didn't this get invented before" is wheeled luggage which (from what I've read) wasn't sold until 1989, even though the wheelbarrow (the same basic idea) has been around since prehistoric times.

IIRC, the reason it didn't appear sooner was a combination of a) getting reliable castors[1] for wheels that small is a non-trivial problem, and b) there wasn't much demand for it until the 80s.

[1] These things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster

Do you have an article or book you can link to on the subject? I'm very curious why there wasn't much demand for wheeled luggage until the 80's.

Is it because people flew less? Because more people checked luggage more often and carry-on was less common? Because airports were smaller?

It doesn't apply until the 1980s, but for luggage as for many, many other things it's worth remembering that many technological (and thus expensive) effort-saving and conveniences make no sense if the work and incovenience can 'simply' be handled by servants, poor/cheap laborers or slaves. Much of technology only makes sense if manpower is expensive.

In Victorian era, if you can afford to travel where you need luggage, then you definitely can afford people to carry that luggage for you, and those people would have been cheaper than high quality bearings that wheeled luggage needs.

It's attributed to Agatha Christie (1890-1976) autobiography that in her younger years she never thought she would ever be wealthy enough to own a car – nor that she'd ever be so poor that she wouldn't have servants; and yet eventually she was in both these conditions at the same time.

I got fascinated by this when I saw mention of this elsewhere. I'll agree that getting sturdy casters at a reasonable price was definitely part of the problem. As the linked wikipedia article reminded me, 20-odd years ago you'd still come across wonky casters on very expensive supermarket trolleys.

I think like the bicycle, it was just combination of factors preventing adoption - and once these had all moved, it was an obvious improvement.

e.g. The luggage you put the wheel on. My distant memories of family suitcases weren't rigid. Deformable cloth over a flexible outer band of some type. First ones with wheels I saw just had them on one bottom corner and a drag handle on the opposite top corner. Where f'in vile to use, as the whole thing would flex as you pulled (Toppling and attempting to break your wrist). They only really became 'good' when we got rigid luggage (carry on bag with extendable handle or rigid-shell case like Samsonite).

But another reason is that previously "You didn't have to move it yourself" In 'the golden age' a porter would put your trunk/case on a wheelbarrow for you. Then these transformed into 'rows of luggage carts in the airport'. Then as the decline continued 'rent-able luggage carts, you didn't have local-change for'... and at this point lack of service for your bag, crossed our ability to make wheeled luggage - and we all bought it.

But early wheeled luggage didn't have casters, just straight wheels. And those wheeled carts that you see old people dragging home from the supermarket (in some cities) existed long before -- metal frame, sagging canvas bag, works great.

There are lots of other factors though. One was buildings with lots of smooth floors & no stairs, which IIRC was partly about designing to be wheelchair-friendly, and partly about luggage carts.

Another as you say was flying becoming less of an elite thing -- the private jet people today sure as hell don't muscle their own luggage anywhere, so theirs just has to look good in the hotel room.

Another was just savvy marketing: again IIRC, the breakthrough came from marketing them heavily to pilots first, cool people in smart uniforms (who did not have porters) breezing along with smart leather bags. Precisely to break the image of old people dragging their potatoes home.

I agree with every single one of those points.

Other thing I'd meant to mention, was that the territory of "wheeled luggage" has expanded. Previously maybe at an airport you'd haul your luggage to a car at the kerb that will take you to your destination.

Modern airport usually has some public transport that takes you into town, and from there you get further transport to where you wish to go. i.e. Having your luggage be less of a burden opens up your choices.

I live in a university town with a lot of foreign students. It's now entirely normal for me to see one 'herding' (for want of a better word) a flock of cases quite successfully down the pavement infront of me.

From my understanding, the biggest reason was that most buildings were not wheel chair accessible until after the late 80's. Once this started to be mandated, wheeled luggage became useful.

Good point, but I'm not sure this is a major reason. I've used wheeled luggage over long walking trips, and it's still a huge improvement, even if you have to lift it over some steps here and there. I would often wheel luggage from my place in SF to the Powell station, and you had to pick it up for a few short staircases but it was still great.

I went looking to see when ball bearings were invented, and came across this wildly detailed history, prepared for NASA in the 1980s:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/198100...

It's page 5 before it even gets to the invention of the wheel!

Why did we wait so long after the modern bicycle to see it as transportation rather than recreation? Awareness of climate change maybe? It seems that a) bicycles were not primary transportation even before cars, and b) the push to replace cars with bikes could have happened at any point, even before cars took off. So why now?

Bicycles seem really expensive to me, relative to cars, considering how much simpler they are and how much less total material's involved. Plus they're a whole lot easier to ship. Not TCO, sure, but sheer cost of the manufactured object at retail. And on the cheaper end they often barely work correctly at all anyway, and all of them seem to require a lot more maintenance than a car, per hour of use or (especially, by long shot) per KM travelled. I assume these are economy of scale issues that may be sorted out if bicycle use grows significantly—though I'm not sure about the reliability.

To address costs: most bicycles on the market are sport/racing bikes. Road racing, time-trial, track, cross-country, downhill, trials, BMX. If all cars on the market were sports cars for road racing, track racing, or off-road racing, cars would be far more expensive than they already are.

Commuter and touring models are a small part of the bicycle market, particularly in the west. Inexpensive commuter bicycles with very little maintenance requirements are more common in other parts of the world. Even so, a name-brand commuter bike can be had in the US for $300 (Giant Escape, similar bikes from competitors exist) that will run with minimal maintenance for many, many years.

i think this is off base. Don't forget the cost to own a car with depreciation, insurance, fuel, maintenance etc etc. Not even mentioning the cost of infrastructure required to drive said car.

I don't recommend it, but you can buy a bike from Walmart for $78.

I'm from the middle of the US so all my experience is with $200 and cheaper bicycles (maybe $300 adjusted for inflation) since I'm not in the racing "scene" and bike commuting's infeasible outside very small areas (though I was able to, and did, do it for a while), but bikes never seem to quite work right—one set of brakes keeps slipping no matter how many times you fix it, a couple gears that you just cannot get to hold, tires lose enough air every 48 hours you have to add more to ride yet don't seem to actually have a leak and anyway you changed them once (and god is that a pain) and they still do it, chain keeps getting loose, that kind of thing. The best bicycle I've used I'd have raised hell and tried to return it under lemon laws if it were a car and had that many little problems. Meanwhile $300 is still, what, 1/50th the cost of an entry level new car? That's why it seems high. It seems like you should be able to get 50 very good and reliable bicycles for the same cost as a car. Not 50 that suck. There seem to be improved bits of hardware that fix some of the problems but then you're talking more like 1/20 of an entry level car, which, yikes.

The cost for a Bike is all in the little things like brakes, shifters, etc. As long as we're talking Steel/Aluminum frames (not Carbon Fiber) the difference in cost between bikes is largely put into these important parts. Hence the $300 bike not being great but the $600 bike will be so much better.

I bet if you were buying 50 bikes at a time you'd get a nice bulk discount.

Did you ever try a bike from a bike shop? This sounds like a department store bike experience. Multispeed bicycles are not generic widgets you unbox, hop on, and go. They need tuning, like a musical instrument, and a lot of the adjustments are interdependent on one another.

That's like saying you can't just buy a harbor freight engine and expect the carb to be properly tuned. 99% of people are going to have no problem with how it performs as configured right out of the box.

You are mistaken. https://www.sheldonbrown.com/gloss_da-o.html#department

> The average department-store bicycle is ridden about 75 miles in its lifespan from showroom floor to landfill. The manufacturers know this, and build them accordingly. Department-store bicycles are most commonly sold in a partially disassembled and un-adjusted condition.

I should also clarify that SINGLE SPEED pedal brake bicycles ARE nearly maintenance free, and those DO work for most people out of the box in whatever state it might be in.

I'm fortunate to have a bicycle Co-op in my city. It's a do it yourself workshop to fix your bike and upgrade parts when the time comes. The staff are volunteers and the bikes they sell are all donated. Great tuned up second hand bikes can be purchased for $50. I enjoy using top of the line 1990s technology in my commuter bikes which can be had for a fraction for the price of new bikes.

We are also lucky to have youtube with lots of tutorials which I wish I had when I was first learning.

I agree the relative maintenance of cars is much lower, but I equate the time it takes to clean my chain to be the same as stopping to get fuel for my car.

I'm not against cars, I just feel the cost of ownership is underestimated.

Cost of ownership is nuts. My car basically just sits, but I have to pay $1000 a year just to keep it legal. My bike was $50. And that was it.

I paid $800 for a bicycle in 2008, have put thousands of miles on it, gone through three chains, two cranks, perhaps a half dozen tires. All that for maybe $200-$300 of total cost. That’s equivalent to four or five low-end car payments. And the bike is in great shape and has thousands more miles in it. Doesn’t seem to bad when you compare actual quality bicycles meant to last.

you can buy a quality bike from 10-20 years ago for ~$300 right now on a second hand website, and probably put $50 in maintenance / year. Lower quality, second hand bikes will be a lot less than that.

Well, it depends on where, seemingly you forget Europe in the years around (before and after) WWII and of course whole China.

Bicycles were heavily used for transportation before cars at least in those countries where they were available at reasonable cost. Anecdotal, but my grandpa and his pals ride bicycles their whole youth and even later, got his driver's license when he was 50, and didn't give a about any environmental issues (though he was no fan of consumerism and made pretty much everything he needed himself and overall preferred simple life, but also deeply hated "those hippies who can't actually do anything useful with their hands", which still characterizes 99 percent of the so called environmentalists...). Back then the distances were smallish, usually under 30 km which made bike the most convenient way for travelling.

I see nobody recognizing that bikes need pretty good roads to be efficient. That was the main reason to prefer walking in some areas even if you had a bike.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2011/aug/1...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com