Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? (2019)
blog.rootsofprogress.org
blog.rootsofprogress.org
A velocipede at best saves you a bit of energy going flat or downhill, with relatively little increase in speed, with a relatively high capital expense. Compared with walking and horses, it doesn't help much.
You have to get all the way to the safety bicycle (with pneumatic tires) before you have something that beats walking for someone that is not a cycling enthusiast.
It's a bit like the question of why the steam engine wasn't invented earlier. It was invented to pump water out of coal mines. Being 2% efficient (for the original model) didn't matter, since it was only used to mine its own fuel. I don't think we'd ever get to modern steam and later internal combustion engines without coal deposits making the initial prototype feasible, and then funding continual improvements.
By that sort of logic, we are lucky that European aristocrats were bored and enjoyed scary proto-bicycles, or we'd still not have them today. The final safety bicycle is practically a Segway by comparison with four wheel carriages.
Off-road bicycle is a far more sophisticated and modern invention that builds on massive supply chain and production capabilities to be produced competitively compared to price of horse of yester-years.
Also, consider when vulcanised rubber and inflatable tires were invented.
Maybe the issue is the defintion of "button" but still.
There's this non-serious book, "How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler", which describes things you could introduce if you were beamed back in time. Things you could actually make and just took people to think of (vs like a smartphone that requires high-tech). "Buttons" was one of them.
I think a fundamental inability to intuitively grasp the potential mechanical efficiency of the concept must have been a major barrier though.
There's also a second major benefit. Some amateur theory: There are two main advantages to wheels generally: A) Hold up your butt (support weight), and B) reduce friction with the ground, preserving momentum. Wheels move weight.
Walking A) puts weight on your legs, and B) is series of high-friction interactions with ground - on each step you would almost stop if you didn't expend energy to propel yourself forward to the next step (depending on how fast you're walking). You forward momentum is mostly wasted on each step.
Compare carrying something heavy walking and in a wheelbarrow: The wheelbarrow bears the weight and also uses forward momentum much more efficiently. The wheelbarrow was a high-impact innovation.
But the wheelbarrow still requires you to walk! So put your own butt in the wheelbarrow and using a crankshaft, pedals, and some gearing (and maybe a second wheel), propel your own weight forward too. Now you have a cargo bike. :)
The boss of Trek says the product (the bicycle) has been fit for purpose for a century. I think he is right, even though I am not riding anything before 1989, when indexed gears, decent brakes and many user improvements came along thanks to Shimano, a favourable Yen and the mountain bike 'fad'.
As for 'beats walking', the pre-war roadsters with nickel plated steel, hub gears, lights, a pump, mudguards and big springs in the seat, on OG Dunlop cotton sidewall tyres, I would take the bicycle any day over walking, particularly if the streets are full of horse manure.
This was the biggest time for cycling in the UK, the car took over after the war. Meanwhile, in the USA, the car had ousted the bicycle, street car and train to a huge extent, putting them on life support.
Back to the transport museum, the amount of experimentation for things like brakes is wild, with many unlikely designs after WW2, when I expected something more recognisable. Then there was no innovation from Europe apart from minor iterative improvement until the Japanese showed everyone how it is done, with Shimano being the dominant player, with Suntour as the plucky underdog. Innovation was then like the latte 90s for PC's, everything would be out of date within six months and you would need to upgrade.
There was nobody with a master plan, guiding the cycling boom along, it was just a convergence of shared interests, with 'mountain biking' being a response to bicycles no longer being welcome on the roads.
BMX also played a part, as that 'fad' resulted in chro-moly 4130 steel frames, welded in the Taiwanese Province (tm) rather the usual lugs and brazing used in the West. The BMX factories provided the capacity and they had the tooling for mountain bikes, so that played a part in the 'secret plan' to engineer a boom (as if).
In the context of mountains of machinery and incredible innovation of peak Industrial Revolution, and my personal recollection of the MTB boom, I don't believe there is a 'lived silver thread' that explains all, only historians can weave together a narrative that sort of makes sense.
Incidentally, the bicycle is still the cradle of innovation. Clothing is an interesting area, typically, in a given era, cycle clothing, including shoes, helmet, sun glasses, gloves and 'lycra' is on a different technology level to anything the likes of Nike or Adidas are doing. Hydro-formed aluminium, carbon fibre and much else is far more advanced on two wheels than on four, where the vehicle weight is 100x lighter.
There is a lesson there that is relevant today because our economy has forgotten it: to have innovation you need people to have spare time.
- [pneumatic tire] -> bicycle.
- [battery, touch screens, high bandwidth networks] -> mobile phones
- [transformer architectures, massive datasets] —> “ai” as we know it today
The Wright Brothers started in a bicycle workshop, as did practically every auto maker, in Europe, in the early days. The bicycle workshop was the cradle for many things.
The Wright Brothers were not good for progress. Their game was patents. They were rent seekers, as in 'patent trolls', not innovators. This is why so much early aviation switched to Europe.
With the bicycle the Wright Brothers patented the left-hand thread. This is needed on a bicycle to prevent one of the pedals working its way lose over time and is how it works today.
This was 'target practice' for the Wright Brothers, their innovation was in slowing down technological progress by patenting solutions that were not entirely innovative.
Yet we have invented this story where the Wright Brothers are the heroes, and anyone that questions that might as well be communist, or whatever the slur of the times may be, 'Spanish' maybe. Please mod me down in flames for being un-American, without hesitation!
This just isn't true. The Wright Brothers solved fundamental problems in aviation that no one else did.
The three axis control mechanism is still what every plane uses today. They literally had to invent that notion. Adverse yaw is something that every single pilot learns about and handles.
They discovered the notion of stalling (literally they were the first to identify the notion and use the term) and the relationship between angle of attack and stalling. This is the sort of thing that will 100% kill you immediately when you fly, but if you know what to do it's part of routine training.
And that's just the start of it. You should read "What the Wright Brothers Did and Did Not Understand About Flight Mechanics—In Modern Terms" by Fred E.C. Culick
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/What-the-Wright-Brothe...
This has nothing to do with being American or not.
I tried to verify that a couple of years ago, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709428 . It does not seem to be true.
https://www.wright-brothers.org/Information_Desk/Just_the_Fa... says "Wilbur and Orville were in the vanguard of those manufacturers that offered right-hand threads on one crank arm and left-hand threads on the other" but not the inventors.
I was also able to find earlier uses of left-handed threads for bicycles, like in this 1881 book, at https://archive.org/details/indispensablebic00stur/page/14/m...
"The Centaur Crank is first screwed up to a shoulder on the axle with right and left-handed threads, so that the pressure of the foot tends to make it all the more secure ; whilst, to prevent its loosening by “ back-pedalling,” a slightly tapered conical pin is driven through both crank and axle, and secured with a nut."
Do you know the patent number? I searched the USPTO but found no bicycle related patent by either of the Wright brothers.
Still, plenty of people were skeptical that powered heavier-than-air flight could be achieved. The Wright brothers deserve the credit for putting all the pieces together, getting the controls to work, and managing not to kill themselves like countless other early aviators. It probably helped that they were from Ohio which is flat.
Their bicycle shop was successful, and the brothers used both profits and spare parts in service of their prototype: the controls involved bicycle spokes, and steering used a handlebar. They were decent engineers. I believe they created their combustion engine using not much more than hand tools and a lathe.
Anyway my comment was in the context of speed of innovation. Humanity that struggled to get a cycle going for 50 years managed to fly in the next 10 years and within the next 50, intercontinental regular passenger flights were common!
https://repository.si.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/02b8e94...
I don't know about other countries, but in the UK it was the cyclistists that led the call for tarmaced roads.
When the trains came along (to replace the canals), people just took the magic teleportal that was the train, same for goods traffic. This led to there being nobody using the 'road', with the road becoming reclaimed by nature. The way between towns was the train, with road not being an option, except to get you to the train station.
The canals and trains were part an parcel of the industrial revolution. That if anything led to more road traffic.
Yes it may not be long distance, but it's still to the nearest town/train station.
It's like suggesting that a local road next to a motorway suddenly doesn't get used. It won't get used by long distance traffic. But it attracts traffic from people wanting to get to the motorway etc.
There were many cycle touring clubs, and this was how men met women without their mothers being around!
The trains connected communities as never before and what we call the 'A roads' that connect towns had nobody using them, simple as that. Why would you go on an arduous journey that would take all day when the train would get you there in twenty minutes?
At the time there were no local authorities to look after the roads, it was each parish to its own, with the locals doing the work. Toll roads were the solution to the problem of maintenance, and toll roads were the 'A roads'. When they no longer had customers, due to the trains, they were done.
As for the bicycle and the reopening of roads, this had a lot to do with men chasing women, before the bicycle you were somewhat restricted to the gene pool in your village, with the bicycle there were neighbouring villages. It wasn't all about getting to the factory for work, there was this huge leisure/dating aspect to early cycling culture.
Trains were 10x faster than horses and men - at walking speed - on rough roads. The toll roads just withered and died. Confronted with a mountain, the train would just blast through, whereas the road would be a treacherous mountain pass, no tunnel, cutting or massive bridge provided. Trains were rocket ships.
Before that, canals had their own quirks of geography, with much of it to do with feeding or resting horses. The signs are for the next horse stop, not the nearby town.
With many a British town the town centre can be dated by when the canal arrived and when the railway arrived, since the buildings in the town centre start in local stone, then you get slate from the canal arriving and then brick, because the train made it to town.
It is incredible that so much of the final mile was by horse and cart. Only with 21st century goggles on does your idea of induced vehicular traffic make sense, trains were just too good.
I'll just note if there's one thing I've learned from studying a lot of history writing, it's that being a good writer has little correlation with establishing a ground truth. Indeed, there may be a negative correlation. You're almost certainly more likely to perceive somebody who can craft a compelling narrative as a "good writer". Compelling narratives are entertaining and satisfying. Reality can be a lot more boring. I find that a very significant portion of history writing takes a few tiny scraps of real information from primary sources (which could itself be embellished!) and extrapolates to what society must have been like, and does so in a way that makes it sound interesting.
This is not a commentary on Carlton Reid specifically. I have not read his writing. But I think this is a general principle to be aware and careful of. The reality is that in most cases we don't have a comprehensive historical record, especially for anything predating the 20th century, and history writing involves a lot of plausibly but not necessarily truthfully filling in the gaps. People telling you "this is what society was like" sates your curiosity a lot better than "we don't really know tbh".
I live between Manchester and Bradford. 2 towns that didn't exist before the industrial revolution. 2 entire cities built, basically because of that induced demand.
In fact I grew up next to probably what was the major road between the 2 judging by the number of ex inns.
Yes. You will get less traffic going Manchester <-> Bradford on the road. But you have some guy in between those 2 points that wants to sell his cloth. He needs to get it to one of those 2 points. You need to get the wool to the factory. Etc, etc etc. that mill exists because you have those 2 cities, further they are connected elsewhere where.
Yes Bradford had factories, manchester had factories. But any small village around here had factories. Where I grew up was nowhere near the railway, canal, Huddersfield and Halifax were miles away, it still had 2 mills. I'm currently in pecket well, a tiny village of less than 50 houses on the top of a hill, I can see it had at least 1 mill because I can see it, now flats.
Yes, the stuff was only going to hebden bridge. But what was moving before that? Not much except wool and judging by the ratio of weavers cottages to mill cottages, a lot less than when the mill was here. Induced demand!
That industry was ours, in Gloucestershire and in Devon. All that red cloth that native peoples the world over wanted, and clothed every soldier, that was our broad cloth.
You meanies undercut us and put us out of business. We had teasels and Fuller's Earth, you had machines (and brains).
Let's be honest, that was no 'heavy haulage'. That cloth that took whole families months to make did not need an articulated lorry convoy to take it away, to be sold by the East India Company.
In Gloucestershire we had pack horses to collect the woollen goodies, which would not be finished cloth from villagers, the people in London had the cloth making sewn up, before then it was in Flanders.
The public house was where it all happened, the merchant brought goods from outside and sold any old rubbish for a huge mark up to a captive audience.
Journey times were huge for relatively short distances, when you see the old roads and how they remorselessly go over steep hills, you can see why, it is very much like hill climbing, where 20 miles a day is good going with a camping rucksack, but imagine massive wool sacks and some horse. 4 mph, is that optimistic? I should say so. Today, with mountain bike, a lot of pushing is involved, with descents being technical.
Thinking of the inns and pubs that used to be inns, there are quite a few in small villages that make sense at pack horse speed, but no sense in today's world, blazing past at 70 mph, latte in cup holder, burger on seat, A/C on full blast, Spotify playlist also on full blast, sat-nav telling you about the hazards ahead, on your way for some clothes shopping in the big city that is another dozen miles up the road, to be there in fifteen minutes, in a car that is five thousand miles away from needing to be looked at under the bonnet, texting whilst driving.
That inn might have had a heyday when everyone stopped by, to get hay, beer, a bed, advice from fellow travellers coming the other way regarding the road ahead, entertainment, specialist leather services, blacksmith services, a small shop, parlour games, female company, live music, the warmth of a fire and much else.
Anyway, just to explain your local history, you guys STOLE our trade. This is why you went from nothing to mills, bypassing aeons of cottage industry. A few clearances later, you have got your labour force.
Instructions to readers: mod parent down as he shows no remorse for his ancestors stealing the wool trade from the hard working people of Gloucestershire and Devon!
We were weaving wool before the industrial revolution.
Yes we probably did dominate during the revolution.
Feel free to add your own local history, but around here the weavers went from piece work at home to the factories, probably in the same village. The mill is more productive, ergo more going in and out of the village, ergo more traffic. Rince and repeat for just about every tiny village around here.
Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39774253 - March 2024 (238 comments)
Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25331858 - Dec 2020 (83 comments)
Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20443822 - July 2019 (492 comments)
There is whole physics around it and even legal regulations [1].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_geometr...
Looking at the state of stomatology and medicine back then early velocipedes and bicycles were indeed mad. I wouldn't get on any of it earlier that sometime 1910s, once the safety bicycle was somehow perfected.
I would say that this is very on point. Even during the renaissance "inventing" was a hobby for the aristocracy, as the author gets around with Giovanni Fontana. I'm not sure if a bicycle would've been a "cool" invention at the time. Because what would you do with it?
For the majority of people there was very little need for personal mobility in society. I know we have this nice fantasy idea of towns having taverns and getting visitors, but in reality, most towns didn't even get what we'd consider a modern pub until the industrial revolution. Sure there were ale houses, but an ale house wasn't a permanent establishment, it was simply whomever had most recentely brewed beer. You'd bring your own chair, and your own cup. So even if you had a bicycle you would frankly have nowhere to go.
People regularly traveled to nearby market towns. There's still a strange omission: why didn't anybody in Europe invent the Chinese-style wheelbarrow, with the single central wheel? This seems to be the closest equivalent to a cargo bike that works well without modern materials. It's well suited to moving modest quantities of goods over poor roads, unlike the European wheelbarrow which is optimized for quick loading/unloading, and best suited to moving things short distances.
for example, I think one-wheeled devices / unicycles are crazy and only someone with a lot of time, energy and motivation will to learn to balance and use one.
But nowadays computers make it possible for normal people to use them without as much skill.
We might have a "why did we wait so long for simple one-wheeled transportation?"
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another analogous musing -- why did we start with main+tail rotor helicopters?
Nowadays 4-rotor quadcopters appeared and have taken over.
The quadcopter advantage is in it's mechanical simplicity, but having fewer longer blades is better for aerodynamic efficiency(at the expense of max airspeed). This matters less at RC scale, but at full size, even an all-electric helicopter will likely have more range than a quadcopter with the same batteries.
Quadcopters are basically obligate fly-by-wire vehicles which necessitate at least pneumatic PID controllers if not computer chips to fly.
You can make a helicopter work reasonably well a lot earlier in a pre-computer “tech tree” than you can a quadcopter.
Here you go - drops slightly slower than a brick. The pilot has to speed up the descent on purpose so that he can use that stored energy to slow it down just before the crash, thus converting the crash into merely a hard landing. https://youtu.be/05_WFvh9ISk
> Here you go - drops slightly slower than a brick.
The glide ratio of a brick, even if it is initially traveling at 80 KIAS is ... 0:1. This is the same glide ratio that an unpowered quadcopter would have. Bell 206B, Robinson R44, and R22 all list their unpowered autorotation glide ratios at 4:1 - that is a mathematically infinite multiplier of performance vs. a brick.
https://robinsonstrapistorprod.blob.core.windows.net/uploads...
- Small UAVs are mainly controlled by varying RPM of each rotor
- Full-scale machines keep ~constant RPM optimal for rotor aerodynamics and change angle of attack for each blade for control (collective and cyclic changes).
With big inertia and no alien materials technology, it isn't possible to apply 'quad' design for your average SAR helicopter.
In fact we started with autogyros.
Also the Fw 61 ("the first successful, practical, and fully controllable helicopter" though I don't know the history in detail) has two equal-size counter-rotating rotors similar to a quadcopter.