37 ms·

Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

• dboreham 7y ago
  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.
  • SilasX 7y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255
    • Retra 7y ago
      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.
      • jandrese 7y ago
        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.
        • SilasX 7y ago
          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 https://www.quotes.net/mquote/2325
          • TeMPOraL 7y ago
            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.
        • aequitas 7y ago
          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)#Connections_(1978) 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.
      • kwindla 7y ago
        Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” remains my favorite (and very funny) exploration of this.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • Dumblydorr 7y ago
    He also innovated the engines processes, using heat efficiently and reducing waste. Effective machining and manufacturing then scaled his innovations.
  • Retric 7y ago
    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.
• hprotagonist 7y ago
  If i had to point to a specific technical factor, it's pneumatic tires.
  • asark 7y ago
    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).
  • weberc2 7y ago
    I recall hearing that it's tube steel. The previous iterations used solid steel (maybe cast iron?) and were super heavy.
• closeparen 7y ago
  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?
  • asark 7y ago
    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.
    • jdfellow 7y ago
      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.
    • safepants 7y ago
      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.
      • 7y ago
• jasode 7y ago
  >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+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.)
• mc32 7y ago
  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.
  • Gravityloss 7y ago
    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.
  • giobox 7y ago
    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.
    • robin_reala 7y ago
      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.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • giobox 7y ago
        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.
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  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.
  • wmf 7y ago
    And there wasn't enough water pressure for the upper floors.
  • iguy 7y ago
    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.
• otabdeveloper2 7y ago
  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.
  • mc32 7y ago
    True for a modern bike, but a brass (whatever metal) bushing would work for a more primitive bike.
    • otabdeveloper2 7y ago
      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.)
      • aianus 7y ago
        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.
        • iguy 7y ago
          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.
  • SilasX 7y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster
• jaclaz 7y ago
  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 http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html
  • snazz 7y ago
    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.
    • jaclaz 7y ago
      There is a video here: https://www.facebook.com/GianlucaGiminiLTD/videos/1419410561446884/ 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-Designer-That-Rendered-Laypeoples-Bike-Sketches 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.
  • dec0dedab0de 7y ago
    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.
    • my_username_is_ 7y ago
      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.
• goldcd 7y ago
  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)
• lucideer 7y ago
  > (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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yJdz-kjfLk
  • tcmb 7y ago
    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].
    • SiempreViernes 7y ago
      Right, now stand on said disk. Turns out the you+disk system doesn’t trivially balance...
      • tcmb 7y ago
        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.
• spraak 7y ago
  > 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?
  • henryfjordan 7y ago
    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-cycling-power-output-compare https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/blog/2018/06/how-does-your-...
    • Retric 7y ago
      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.
      • jandrese 7y ago
        The story I heard was that a horse is good for about 0.5-0.6HP continuously. The farmer lied about his horse.
        • anticensor 7y ago
          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.
• Excel_Wizard 7y ago
  >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.
  • sinker 7y ago
    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.
    • scrooched_moose 7y ago
      The Toaster Project is a good example of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODzO7Lz_pw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODzO7Lz_pw https://www.amazon.com/Toaster-Project-Attempt-Electric-Appliance/dp/1568989970/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=THOMAS+THWAITES&qid=1563222301&s=gateway&sr=8-2 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.
• smacktoward 7y ago
  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.
• alfonsodev 7y ago
  If you are building a startup, knowing how answer to the "Why now?" question is quite important, this article might be a good inspiration.
• MayeulC 7y ago
  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-wheelbarrow.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbar...
• nitwit005 7y ago
  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 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.
• simulate 7y ago
  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-bible-david-gordon-wilson-on-bicycles-0725 http://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-designer-inventor-author-bike-b... and https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bicycling-science-third-edition https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bicycling-science-third-editi...
  • davesmith1983 7y ago
    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.
    • UI_at_80x24 7y ago
      >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/ http://www.ihpva.org/home/ It's ok if you don't like them. But please don't pass off your opinion as fact.
• brookhaven_dude 7y ago
  Not really: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zHHPCAao4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zHHPCAao4k
  • evilolive 7y ago
    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?
• GlenTheMachine 7y ago
  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.
  • joe_the_user 7y ago
    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.
    • usrusr 7y ago
      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.
  • roywiggins 7y ago
    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.
• alexhutcheson 7y ago
  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.
• atoav 7y ago
  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
  • loeg 7y ago
    > 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.
    • ashtonbaker 7y ago
      This is true! A good article about this: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/bicycles-bad-roads-detroit https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/bicycles-bad-roads-det...
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• loeg 7y ago
  Bicycle chains are really complicated and have tons of moving parts.
  • hadlock 7y ago
    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.
    • jdfellow 7y ago
      Leather belt drives were used for early motorcycles (1890s-1910s) even while the roller-chain was already in wide use for bicycles.
• joe_the_user 7y ago
  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.
• vipbababd 7y ago
  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.
• ggm 7y ago
  Prague museum of technology has a huge collection of early bicycles. Side by siders, rod drive, front wheel drive, bamboo...
• AngryData 7y ago
  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.
• vipbababd 7y ago
  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, it 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.
  • iguy 7y ago
    [comment moved]
  • GlenTheMachine 7y ago
    Plagiarism. Thanks dude.
    • geoka9 7y ago
      It's a bot that hijacks comments, see this (and upvote, I guess, for the moderators to take notice): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20445029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20445029
      • GlenTheMachine 7y ago
        Thanks.
• wahlrus 7y ago
  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.
  • jasoncrawford 7y ago
    Thank you! I have actually spent a good amount of time getting the image layout just right
• timonoko 7y ago
  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..
  • bagacrap 7y ago
    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...
    • timonoko 7y ago
      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.
      • ben7799 7y ago
        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.
        • timonoko 7y ago
          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.
• hyperion2010 7y ago
  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.
• bagacrap 7y ago
  Pneumatic rubber tires
• amelius 7y ago
  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.
• thedogeye 7y ago
  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.
  • quickthrower2 7y ago
    Then I hope you would clean up it's poo.
• superpermutat0r 7y ago
  Another good question in similar Spirit, why did we wait so long for wheels on suitcases?
• mntmoss 7y ago
  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.
• ivanhoe 7y ago
  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
• jdfellow 7y ago
  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.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• trhway 7y ago
  the Ancient Greeks and Romans could have attached paddles to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile and basically get something like that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_steamer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_steamer That is why i wondering what should i attach to what to get a [preferably cold] fusion :)
• f_allwein 7y ago
  Same can be said, perhaps more accurately, about the wheelbarrow. From https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/312366/the-knowledge-by-lewis-dartnell/9780143127048/excerpt 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).
  • brohee 7y ago
    And the European wheelbarrow is vastly inferior to the Chinese one (see https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarrow.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbar...)
• tlb 7y ago
  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 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.
  • jessaustin 7y ago
    If unicycles had come first, would bicycles have ever surpassed them?
    • antoineMoPa 7y ago
      I don't think so. I use both and there are use cases for both, but the bicycle is generally safer and faster.
      • aembleton 7y ago
        What is the use case for a Unicycle?
• ebj73 7y ago
  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.
• choiway 7y ago
  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.
  • jessaustin 7y ago
    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.
• cparsons3000 7y ago
  The appropriate metal and quality of roads seem like the biggest factors to me.
• zuhayeer 7y ago
  It's always obvious after the fact
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• TomMckenny 7y ago
  >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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers
• double0jimb0 7y ago
  I’m pretty sure this author is trolling the reader.
• Robotbeat 7y ago
  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.
  • jessaustin 7y ago
    At the very least it would be a fun way to descend steep hills.
• RocketSyntax 7y ago
  Because without an 18 speed bike you might as well be walking.
• pgreenwood 7y ago
  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 https://sheldonbrown.com/gain.html
• aaron695 7y ago
  I find it interesting in developing countries the motobike is far more used than the bicycle. It hasn't won, even amongst the real poor a motorbike is far more common. Bikes are simply not much use. Either you walk or you need motorised bike or in the other situations were a bike is of use you can also afford a motobike.
• Sephr 7y ago
  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.
• modzu 7y ago
  while the premise of this entire article makes no sense, it is full of interesting history of the bicycle
• hermitdev 7y ago
  > 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).
  • garethrees 7y ago
    > 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/ https://inrng.com/2016/04/rain-for-roubaix/
    • hermitdev 7y ago
      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 https://images.app.goo.gl/K8CHHQMGA245iZt48
• briandoll 7y ago
  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/ https://mmbhof.org/
• ezoe 7y ago
  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.
• jl2718 7y ago
  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.
• obulreddycbse 7y ago
  https://www.worksheetsbuddy.com/ https://www.worksheetsbuddy.com/ for ur exams
• garyclarke27 7y ago
  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.anniversary/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/10/04/wheeled.luggage.ann...
• nkoren 7y ago
  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?
  • sobani 7y ago
    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.
• the2and7 7y ago
  > 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.
• kingludite 7y ago
  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-recumbent-bicycles-and-velomobiles-illegal-in-uci-bicycle-racing https://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/59406/why-are-r...
  • j-conn 7y ago
    Would love to hear more about your mods! Have any photos? Just curious as a layman who rides one nearly every day.
• ToddBonzalez 7y ago
  "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.
• akrymski 7y ago
  Because asphalt/concrete roads have only been around since 1920s. Biking on dirt or gravel isn’t fun, horses do better on such surfaces.
• itsbruce 7y ago
  "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.
• juanpicardo 7y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI6lgUlEUFU
• rawland 7y ago
  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 https://img42.com/sAN_u
• ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago
  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.
• vinayms 7y ago
  > 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.
• radar 7y ago
  Bicycles were one of the first items that an individual acquired through disposable income.
• tabtab 7y ago
  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.
• a0-prw 7y ago
  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.
• anthony_barker 7y ago
  Why are we waiting so long for cheap and everywhere electric bikes?