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. B

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.