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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 r

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.
iguy 7y ago
Well, I'd argue that they didn't need to travel, because their world was set up for people who couldn't. The spacing of villages most places was set by how far you could walk to the fields & still do a good day's work. Riding around on horseback was for a tiny elite, most places -- a horse eats more than a person, in a world where food was the majority of income. Once people could travel, they did, and the world got re-organized around this assumption. But still, bicycles took off as a technology when they were too expensive for farm-workers, as a sort-of upper-middle class leisure craze. Only later did they enable mass mobility. [comment moved]
- gjs278 7y ago
  can people on hacker news stop pretending they have any idea what farming was like
runarberg 7y ago
This is not entirely correct. If you are a farmer you (or a someone working with you) still need to travel for numerous reasons, including to bring your products to market, to round up your animals, to buy equipment and supplies, etc. You say they had horses for those types of traveling, except they most likely didn’t. Only a successful farmer could afford a horse. And even if they had a horse, chances were it was busy or tired for farming works to be used for transportation. Most people walked to were they needed to go, in if the modern bicycle would have existed a farmers dream would be to have a successful crop one year so they could afford a bicycle. In fact a modern bicycle would have been a good investment for many farm as they allow farmers to bring more products to a market quicker and more efficiently, in turn allowing the transporter to be back at their farming job quicker and less tired. This can be seen in today’s poorer regions where no trains nor road runs. But the occasional farm has invested in a bicycle to help with transportation.
- GlenTheMachine 7y ago
  “...including to bring your products to market, to round up your animals, to buy equipment and supplies, etc.” No... Farmers didn’t bring their products to market unless they were running a plantation, ie they were very large operators, which were few and far between and would certainly nit having been riding a bicycle - those guys would be going in a nice two horse cart. The small guys sold to a local buyer who handled the shipping. Part of the reason for this is that the products you produced for sale were very bulky. A tobacco bale could be over half a ton; similar for cotton. Bulk grains and beans weren’t as likely to be sold to distant buyers, but they too are too bulky to carry by bicycle. I round up animals on a daily basis. A bicycle is worse than useless for this purpose. Which is why farmers don’t use them for rounding up animals today. Shopping was done at most a few times a year. You rode your horse (or mule or donkey - see below) to the general store. Often, salesman came to you, specifically because you weren’t going to town much. So you’d have traveling brush salesmen - or pots and pans salesmen, traveling patent medicine salesmen, tinkers and ferriers. When you went to town, the kinds of things you were buying were usually too bulky to carry by bike. You didn’t go to town to buy a shirt or two. You went to buy a plow, or if you had a good year some china. Popping in to town on a nike would have been a very niche use case. Also, you weren’t buying very much equipment. What you couldn’t make yourself you had the local blacksmith make for you. There’s very little on an 1850s American farm that wasn’t locally produced. “Only a successful farmer could afford a horse.” Err... no... Not in the US anyway. In order to farm you had to plow and in order to plow you had to have a draft animal. That wasn’t always a horse, in some cases it was a mule or donkey, or sometimes in the west an ox. And all of those animals were also used for transport. Granted nobody rode oxen but they often pulled wagons, hence the term “oxcart”. There was a term used coined after the Civil War: “40 acres and a mule”. It comes from field orders issued by Union General William “Tecumseh” Sherman with the approval of Abraham Lincoln, and it redistributed white property to newly freed slaves. The idea was that the slaves needed at minimum those two things to be self supporting. But in any case, you’ve got the order wrong. You didn’t buy a horse (or a mule) once you became a successful farmer. You bought a horse in order to become a successful farmer, in much the same way that the successful programmer today will own a (or will have an employer-provided) computer. It was an essential piece of equipment.
hyperpallium 7y ago
Yes, and like the edison light bulb and birdseye frozen fish, you need infrastructure: smooth roads. Horse and cart are more tolerant.

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.

iguy 7y ago

Well, I'd argue that they didn't need to travel, because their world was set up for people who couldn't. The spacing of villages most places was set by how far you could walk to the fields & still do a good day's work. Riding around on horseback was for a tiny elite, most places -- a horse eats more than a person, in a world where food was the majority of income. Once people could travel, they did, and the world got re-organized around this assumption. But still, bicycles took off as a technology when they were too expensive for farm-workers, as a sort-of upper-middle class leisure craze. Only later did they enable mass mobility. [comment moved]

gjs278 7y ago
can people on hacker news stop pretending they have any idea what farming was like

runarberg 7y ago

This is not entirely correct. If you are a farmer you (or a someone working with you) still need to travel for numerous reasons, including to bring your products to market, to round up your animals, to buy equipment and supplies, etc. You say they had horses for those types of traveling, except they most likely didn’t. Only a successful farmer could afford a horse. And even if they had a horse, chances were it was busy or tired for farming works to be used for transportation. Most people walked to were they needed to go, in if the modern bicycle would have existed a farmers dream would be to have a successful crop one year so they could afford a bicycle. In fact a modern bicycle would have been a good investment for many farm as they allow farmers to bring more products to a market quicker and more efficiently, in turn allowing the transporter to be back at their farming job quicker and less tired. This can be seen in today’s poorer regions where no trains nor road runs. But the occasional farm has invested in a bicycle to help with transportation.

GlenTheMachine 7y ago
“...including to bring your products to market, to round up your animals, to buy equipment and supplies, etc.” No... Farmers didn’t bring their products to market unless they were running a plantation, ie they were very large operators, which were few and far between and would certainly nit having been riding a bicycle - those guys would be going in a nice two horse cart. The small guys sold to a local buyer who handled the shipping. Part of the reason for this is that the products you produced for sale were very bulky. A tobacco bale could be over half a ton; similar for cotton. Bulk grains and beans weren’t as likely to be sold to distant buyers, but they too are too bulky to carry by bicycle. I round up animals on a daily basis. A bicycle is worse than useless for this purpose. Which is why farmers don’t use them for rounding up animals today. Shopping was done at most a few times a year. You rode your horse (or mule or donkey - see below) to the general store. Often, salesman came to you, specifically because you weren’t going to town much. So you’d have traveling brush salesmen - or pots and pans salesmen, traveling patent medicine salesmen, tinkers and ferriers. When you went to town, the kinds of things you were buying were usually too bulky to carry by bike. You didn’t go to town to buy a shirt or two. You went to buy a plow, or if you had a good year some china. Popping in to town on a nike would have been a very niche use case. Also, you weren’t buying very much equipment. What you couldn’t make yourself you had the local blacksmith make for you. There’s very little on an 1850s American farm that wasn’t locally produced. “Only a successful farmer could afford a horse.” Err... no... Not in the US anyway. In order to farm you had to plow and in order to plow you had to have a draft animal. That wasn’t always a horse, in some cases it was a mule or donkey, or sometimes in the west an ox. And all of those animals were also used for transport. Granted nobody rode oxen but they often pulled wagons, hence the term “oxcart”. There was a term used coined after the Civil War: “40 acres and a mule”. It comes from field orders issued by Union General William “Tecumseh” Sherman with the approval of Abraham Lincoln, and it redistributed white property to newly freed slaves. The idea was that the slaves needed at minimum those two things to be self supporting. But in any case, you’ve got the order wrong. You didn’t buy a horse (or a mule) once you became a successful farmer. You bought a horse in order to become a successful farmer, in much the same way that the successful programmer today will own a (or will have an employer-provided) computer. It was an essential piece of equipment.

hyperpallium 7y ago

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