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>Yet it was a simple mechanical invention As a mechanical engineer, this statement baffled me. All manufactured technology exists in the context of the manufac

>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.
  - Balgair 7y ago
    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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE
    - michaelt 7y ago
      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?
      - joefourier 7y ago
        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.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  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.
  - mveety 7y ago
    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.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      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?
      - andrewflnr 7y ago
        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".
      - kqr 7y ago
        But why specifically manufacture of consumer goods, when there are so many other disciplines, like horseback riding, nursing, human resources, and so on.
  - kqr 7y ago
    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."
jedimastert 7y ago
Yeah, whoever said that should try to make one without being able to go the the hardware store
- hinkley 7y ago
  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.
  - im3w1l 7y ago
    > Assembling a wheel from parts is beyond most people, Just how shitty wheel would be admissible here? A wooden octagon?
    - zrobotics 7y ago
      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.
    - 7y ago
atoav 7y ago
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.
- ghaff 7y ago
  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.
- sk5t 7y ago
  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.
  - loeg 7y ago
    > 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.
    - mikepurvis 7y ago
      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.
Animats 7y ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  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.)
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    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".
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
ajuc 7y ago
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 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 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/courses/fightingpharaohs10/9985.html https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/course... https://vimeo.com/14166672 https://vimeo.com/14166672 First mass-produced bicycle (velocipede) had no ball bearings until a few years later.
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > 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.
dalbasal 7y ago
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.
chrisdhoover 7y ago
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.
- magduf 7y ago
  >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.
TheGRS 7y ago
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.
- dasil003 7y ago
  What were the hub and drivetrain made out of?
c3534l 7y ago
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.
astine 7y ago
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)."
bambax 7y ago
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.
MadWombat 7y ago
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.
admax88q 7y ago
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
dockd 7y ago
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?
derefr 7y ago
> 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?
- stan_rogers 7y ago
  "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.)
mercules 7y ago
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.
duxup 7y ago
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.
lazyant 7y ago
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).
WalterBright 7y ago
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.
- bookofjoe 7y ago
  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.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    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?
eveningcoffee 7y ago
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.
alex_young 7y ago
Wooden bikes seem like an obvious materials argument. Here's one I saw in a shop recently: https://photos.app.goo.gl/7mzTsrKgUgENoDkQ9 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.
oarabbus_ 7y ago
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.
Gibbon1 7y ago
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.
- icelancer 7y ago
  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?
hyperpallium 7y ago
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.
dfeojm-zlib 7y ago
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
- magduf 7y ago
  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.
track_me_now 7y ago
This entire post sounds like it was written by an alien trying to compress a full theoretical understanding of the bicycle into an essay without ever having ridden one. super-weird tone to the whole thing; they discount many researched aspects of bicycles and present the information like it's brand new.
rlue 7y ago
Your points are all literally stated in the article's first bullet point.
WalterBright 7y ago
> 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".
- monktastic1 7y ago
  You tried to make an element from... nothing?
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    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.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      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)
ChrisRR 7y ago
Chains and gears are especially not simple
dotancohen 7y ago
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?
gniv 7y ago
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.
noneeeed 7y ago
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.
aqsalose 7y ago
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.
fastaguy88 7y ago
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.

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.
- Balgair 7y ago
  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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE
  - michaelt 7y ago
    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?
    - joefourier 7y ago
      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.
agumonkey 7y ago
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.
- mveety 7y ago
  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.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    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?
    - andrewflnr 7y ago
      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".
    - kqr 7y ago
      But why specifically manufacture of consumer goods, when there are so many other disciplines, like horseback riding, nursing, human resources, and so on.
- kqr 7y ago
  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."

jedimastert 7y ago

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

hinkley 7y ago
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.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  > Assembling a wheel from parts is beyond most people, Just how shitty wheel would be admissible here? A wooden octagon?
  - zrobotics 7y ago
    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.
  - 7y ago

atoav 7y ago

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.

ghaff 7y ago
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.
sk5t 7y ago
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.
- loeg 7y ago
  > 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.
  - mikepurvis 7y ago
    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.

Animats 7y ago

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.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
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.)
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  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".
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - thaumasiotes 7y ago

ajuc 7y ago

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 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 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/courses/fightingpharaohs10/9985.html https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/course... https://vimeo.com/14166672 https://vimeo.com/14166672 First mass-produced bicycle (velocipede) had no ball bearings until a few years later.

nordsieck 7y ago
> 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.

dalbasal 7y ago

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.

chrisdhoover 7y ago

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.

magduf 7y ago
>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.

TheGRS 7y ago

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.

dasil003 7y ago
What were the hub and drivetrain made out of?

c3534l 7y ago

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.

astine 7y ago

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)."

bambax 7y ago

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.

MadWombat 7y ago

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.

admax88q 7y ago

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

dockd 7y ago

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?

derefr 7y ago

> 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?

stan_rogers 7y ago
"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.)

mercules 7y ago

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.

duxup 7y ago

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.

lazyant 7y ago

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).

WalterBright 7y ago

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.

bookofjoe 7y ago
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.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  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?

eveningcoffee 7y ago

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.

alex_young 7y ago

Wooden bikes seem like an obvious materials argument. Here's one I saw in a shop recently: https://photos.app.goo.gl/7mzTsrKgUgENoDkQ9 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.

oarabbus_ 7y ago

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.

Gibbon1 7y ago

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.

icelancer 7y ago
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?

hyperpallium 7y ago

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.

dfeojm-zlib 7y ago

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

magduf 7y ago
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.

track_me_now 7y ago

This entire post sounds like it was written by an alien trying to compress a full theoretical understanding of the bicycle into an essay without ever having ridden one. super-weird tone to the whole thing; they discount many researched aspects of bicycles and present the information like it's brand new.

rlue 7y ago

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

WalterBright 7y ago

> 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".

monktastic1 7y ago
You tried to make an element from... nothing?
- WalterBright 7y ago
  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.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    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)

ChrisRR 7y ago

Chains and gears are especially not simple

dotancohen 7y ago

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?

gniv 7y ago

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.

noneeeed 7y ago

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.

aqsalose 7y ago

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.

fastaguy88 7y ago

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.