10 ms·

Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? (2019)

51 points by herbertl 6y ago

Ancalagon 6y ago
Correct me if I’m wrong but the materials science and the actual design of a bicycle aren’t actually that simple, right? That’s why there were so many zany iterations of bicycles until we landed on the most common form we see today?
- cogman10 6y ago
  Yup. https://www.liveabout.com/bikes-an-illustrated-history-365776 https://www.liveabout.com/bikes-an-illustrated-history-36577... For one thing, iron is pretty much a minimum requirement for bikes. Iron was really expensive right up till the point where we learned out to use coal forges. That meant that early bikes were going to be made out of wood. That's pretty much a non-starter. You can't have wooden peddles. But then, if you want to talk about really modern bikes, you need chains. Chains aren't simple to manufacture, particularly by hand. You need uniformity and consistency. For that, you need manufacturing machines. And let's not forget the tires. Wooden tires simply don't work well or last for too terribly long (no good having tires that rot. Not to mention how incredibly rough that ride must have been). Rubber is a relatively late invention that was needed to make inflatable tires.
  - flubert 6y ago
    Some historian somewhere must have come across records of how long a chariot wheel lasted. It seems like that would have as close to a similar loading as a bicycle. 100 miles? 1,000?
  - jrwoodruff 6y ago
    Also, wooden tires wouldn't have much traction. Most (all?) vehicles at this time were not in any way self-propelled. They were pulled or pushed along by an horse, human or other power source. Anyone that's ridden a big wheel can attest that traction is difficult using hard materials for tires.
- kevinpet 6y ago
  I think the article glosses over a few critical points. Pedals and cranks break today on cheap bicycles. The cost of good steel decreased by a factor of 6 between about 1855 and 1875.
jwilk 6y ago
Discussed in 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20443822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20443822 (498 comments)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Roads were absolutely, definitely the issue, and the article slides that in while pretending to refute it - bicycles 'called for improved roads' not because they didn't need them, but because they did. Ever try to take a beater bike out on a rough trail with washouts and rocks? Its murder on the rider and the bike. You end up carrying it half the time while hopping from rock to rock or trudging through washouts. Here's a more interesting question: why are bicycles nonexistant on post-apocalyptic stories? Its like, nuclear war vaporizes all the bicycles. Where in reality in a fuel-exhausted world they would last for generations and provide rapid transport and communications for decades.
- jklehm 6y ago
  Tires don't last forever...I could see this being an issue.
  - mcv 6y ago
    True, but I'd expect them to last longer than gasoline, yet that's something some post-apocalyptic hellscapes seem to have plenty of.
    - taneq 6y ago
      It depends how fast the planet depopulated. In Mad Max the original problem was water shortages. If most of the population was wiped out in the water wars, it’s reasonable that the dregs of fuel in the system could last the few survivors a long time.
    - Lutzb 6y ago
      In case of dragons there might also be helicopters around. I guess the idea that cars would be around after the apocalypse comes from the diesel engine, which can basically run on vegetable oil.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    You can make tires quite easily with simple tools. You can't make gasoline as easily - or extract oil.
lucideer 6y ago
To summarise the previous 498-comment-long discussion of this article on HN: this is a bad article. I'd normally try to give the benefit of the doubt and not open with such a negative assessment, but the opening paragraph of the article is so unbelievably arrogant in tone that I really find it difficult.
VLM 6y ago
Can't have bicycles without either a railroad or truck nationwide logistics system. They simply require too many specialized and exotic parts. VERY high maintenance demands per mile compared to shoes or automobiles, or even old automobiles. A decent carpenter working with a decent blacksmith can produce and maintain a horse cart in a village with minimal external commerce; some iron ore imports would be nice, but can be worked around at great effort. But composition rubber brake pads and steel cables to run the brakes and rubber pneumatic wheels and ball bearings everywhere will require at minimum a nationwide rail network. Even the very concept of national or world standardized screw sizes is a very modern phenonomena. Also a pretty solid argument for a lack of destinations. For centuries if something was not sustainable with the population inside a walking radius, it would rapidly disappear. Today I can ride to a big box store, a shopping mall, a library... there was nowhere to go for the vast majority of the population in, perhaps 1021 AD. The next village over isn't all that more exciting than mine. Pre-pubescent kids seem to enjoy bicycle riding for no purpose other than the sensation of movement, although in 1021 AD a bicycle would be an unaffordable toy for a child.
- 1over137 6y ago
  You're describing a 21st century bicycle. A 19th century bicycle wasn't so complicated a machine. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle
  - VLM 6y ago
    "Rail Mania" era in the UK preceded the bicycle development article. Before that, the canals and shipping networks were pretty elaborate. I think it likely that the majority of 1870s factory made penny-farthing's were shipped worldwide to their customers via steam power. Admittedly the transcontinental railroad took until about 1870 in the USA, then again the entire bicycle article is eurocentric. Which is also interesting, how come only Europeans ever got involved in bicycle invention? The rest of the world at least occasionally had two wheeled chariots and carts so ... WRT the transcontinental railroad taking decades longer to cover the USA than it took to cover the UK, its worth considering that the state of Texas is about 4.5 "Irelands" wide, and we have 49 other states to cover, so covering the UK with nationwide rail service decades before the USA had transcontinental service is pretty easy. I'm told by a former native that no part of the UK is more than 75 miles from the sea.
standardUser 6y ago
I was riding a horse the other day and wondered to myself, why was there never a bicycle era between the horse and automobile eras? Now I realize I only wondered this because I've only lived in a world with really good bicycles!
- adamjb 6y ago
  There was! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_boom#1890s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_boom#1890s
matthewowen 6y ago
The balance idea is raised and rejected, but as I understand it it's a huge part. The issue isn't about humans balancing on the thing (as with the examples of canoes or horses that are already stable at rest), but rather that a bicycle _does not balance unless it is moving_, and moreover making it balance depends on the fact that it has steering – fix the front wheel in place and you can't ride it. This is not intuitive, except with the benefit of hindsight.
analog31 6y ago
I'm speculating here, but I wonder if cargo is another factor. None of the early cycles had any obvious place for carrying anything. Regular people didn't have much reason to go anywhere by themselves. They lived at or near their workplace. Their social circles were small. Church happened once a week, if they attended that often. If you needed a vehicle, it wasn't to transport yourself, but to transport stuff. I just read a couple of novels by Jane Austen. She describes the activities of the upper class, I believe in the 18th century. Now those people did transport themselves to visit other people, but her text makes it sound like a mile was a long journey -- if a woman walked that far by herself, it was talked about. Of course that doesn't tell us much about the lower classes. Dickens sheds more light on the common people, at least in cities. Again, a person needed a reason to go further than their own neighborhood, and transportation in London seemed to have been seen as a service, rather than a product. If you rode in a cab, its technological drawbacks were someone else's problem. Perhaps a reason to own and ride a bike would be if you worked in a factory that was some distance from where you lived, or for recreation. I've seen pictures of workers coming and going from factories, from early 20th century, and it's a sea of bikes.
kazinator 6y ago
Yes, it really is about the tech. Firstly, bicycles need pneumatic tires. They need serious pneumatic tires that hold pressure, and withstand temperature changes. Not having good roads is a factor; but you can address that with good, wide, durable tires. The inner tubes have to be reliable, and reparable. Tires are not feasible without vulcanized rubber. Rubber that is not vulcanized turns soft when hot, and when it's cold, it hardens and cracks. It is not durable for road use; it will quickly abrade and peel away under braking. A bicycle made using wooden wagon wheels with steel rims is not feasible. It's not just the atrocious ride quality. It would not be safe. A bicycle tilts when it turns; it needs a wheel with a rounded profile, not square. The wheel must provide traction, otherwise the unit will skid easily. Hard wheels are suitable only for vehicles with axles: carriages and trains. A bike without tires could not only not be used on a dirt road; it wouldn't even work on a varnished wooden deck. The drive train of a bicycle, such as the chain, requires considerable skill and tooling in machining. This was not available until well into the industrial revolution. Ball bearings used in bicycle bearings, such as the bottom bracket hub, have to be manufactured to ridiculous precision. You might as well ask why did we wait for so long for zipper fasteners---those teeth are so darned accurately shaped and clamped onto the cloth tape. For a good part of the bicycle era, bicycles were commonly used on dirt roads. Their tech had to be good enough for it, though. Before you can even solve the tech issues, someone has to get the idea: the idea that it's feasible for a human to ride a single-track vehicle. It's obvious now; almost anyone can learn to ride a bicycle, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. You would not suspect such a thing, in a world in which bicycles don't exist. (Physicists likely knew that a rolling wheel is stable, with equations to prove it, but that doesn't translate to an intuition that people could easily become riders of a contraption based on that stability.) However, the idea didn't take long to arrive after the technological feasibility. It's not the case that we had a feasible design for bicycles in place for hundreds of years, which only waited for the industrial revolution to arrive. The ideas come from experiments which are enabled by the tech.
musicale 6y ago
And why did we wait 6,000 years for wheeled luggage? (note: wheeled handcarts seem to date back some 4,000 years but putting wheels directly on a case or basket seems like a great idea.) (TIL some ancient wheelbarrows in China had a center-placed wheel and could carry 6 passengers.)[1] [1] https://www.thoughtco.com/who-invented-the-wheelbarrow-1991685 https://www.thoughtco.com/who-invented-the-wheelbarrow-19916...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

51 points by herbertl 6y ago

Correct me if I’m wrong but the materials science and the actual design of a bicycle aren’t actually that simple, right? That’s why there were so many zany iterations of bicycles until we landed on the most common form we see today?

cogman10 6y ago
Yup. https://www.liveabout.com/bikes-an-illustrated-history-365776 https://www.liveabout.com/bikes-an-illustrated-history-36577... For one thing, iron is pretty much a minimum requirement for bikes. Iron was really expensive right up till the point where we learned out to use coal forges. That meant that early bikes were going to be made out of wood. That's pretty much a non-starter. You can't have wooden peddles. But then, if you want to talk about really modern bikes, you need chains. Chains aren't simple to manufacture, particularly by hand. You need uniformity and consistency. For that, you need manufacturing machines. And let's not forget the tires. Wooden tires simply don't work well or last for too terribly long (no good having tires that rot. Not to mention how incredibly rough that ride must have been). Rubber is a relatively late invention that was needed to make inflatable tires.
- flubert 6y ago
  Some historian somewhere must have come across records of how long a chariot wheel lasted. It seems like that would have as close to a similar loading as a bicycle. 100 miles? 1,000?
- jrwoodruff 6y ago
  Also, wooden tires wouldn't have much traction. Most (all?) vehicles at this time were not in any way self-propelled. They were pulled or pushed along by an horse, human or other power source. Anyone that's ridden a big wheel can attest that traction is difficult using hard materials for tires.
kevinpet 6y ago
I think the article glosses over a few critical points. Pedals and cranks break today on cheap bicycles. The cost of good steel decreased by a factor of 6 between about 1855 and 1875.

jwilk 6y ago

Discussed in 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20443822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20443822 (498 comments)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Roads were absolutely, definitely the issue, and the article slides that in while pretending to refute it - bicycles 'called for improved roads' not because they didn't need them, but because they did. Ever try to take a beater bike out on a rough trail with washouts and rocks? Its murder on the rider and the bike. You end up carrying it half the time while hopping from rock to rock or trudging through washouts. Here's a more interesting question: why are bicycles nonexistant on post-apocalyptic stories? Its like, nuclear war vaporizes all the bicycles. Where in reality in a fuel-exhausted world they would last for generations and provide rapid transport and communications for decades.

jklehm 6y ago
Tires don't last forever...I could see this being an issue.
- mcv 6y ago
  True, but I'd expect them to last longer than gasoline, yet that's something some post-apocalyptic hellscapes seem to have plenty of.
  - taneq 6y ago
    It depends how fast the planet depopulated. In Mad Max the original problem was water shortages. If most of the population was wiped out in the water wars, it’s reasonable that the dregs of fuel in the system could last the few survivors a long time.
  - Lutzb 6y ago
    In case of dragons there might also be helicopters around. I guess the idea that cars would be around after the apocalypse comes from the diesel engine, which can basically run on vegetable oil.
- coldtea 6y ago
  You can make tires quite easily with simple tools. You can't make gasoline as easily - or extract oil.

lucideer 6y ago

To summarise the previous 498-comment-long discussion of this article on HN: this is a bad article. I'd normally try to give the benefit of the doubt and not open with such a negative assessment, but the opening paragraph of the article is so unbelievably arrogant in tone that I really find it difficult.

VLM 6y ago

Can't have bicycles without either a railroad or truck nationwide logistics system. They simply require too many specialized and exotic parts. VERY high maintenance demands per mile compared to shoes or automobiles, or even old automobiles. A decent carpenter working with a decent blacksmith can produce and maintain a horse cart in a village with minimal external commerce; some iron ore imports would be nice, but can be worked around at great effort. But composition rubber brake pads and steel cables to run the brakes and rubber pneumatic wheels and ball bearings everywhere will require at minimum a nationwide rail network. Even the very concept of national or world standardized screw sizes is a very modern phenonomena. Also a pretty solid argument for a lack of destinations. For centuries if something was not sustainable with the population inside a walking radius, it would rapidly disappear. Today I can ride to a big box store, a shopping mall, a library... there was nowhere to go for the vast majority of the population in, perhaps 1021 AD. The next village over isn't all that more exciting than mine. Pre-pubescent kids seem to enjoy bicycle riding for no purpose other than the sensation of movement, although in 1021 AD a bicycle would be an unaffordable toy for a child.

1over137 6y ago
You're describing a 21st century bicycle. A 19th century bicycle wasn't so complicated a machine. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle
- VLM 6y ago
  "Rail Mania" era in the UK preceded the bicycle development article. Before that, the canals and shipping networks were pretty elaborate. I think it likely that the majority of 1870s factory made penny-farthing's were shipped worldwide to their customers via steam power. Admittedly the transcontinental railroad took until about 1870 in the USA, then again the entire bicycle article is eurocentric. Which is also interesting, how come only Europeans ever got involved in bicycle invention? The rest of the world at least occasionally had two wheeled chariots and carts so ... WRT the transcontinental railroad taking decades longer to cover the USA than it took to cover the UK, its worth considering that the state of Texas is about 4.5 "Irelands" wide, and we have 49 other states to cover, so covering the UK with nationwide rail service decades before the USA had transcontinental service is pretty easy. I'm told by a former native that no part of the UK is more than 75 miles from the sea.

standardUser 6y ago

I was riding a horse the other day and wondered to myself, why was there never a bicycle era between the horse and automobile eras? Now I realize I only wondered this because I've only lived in a world with really good bicycles!

adamjb 6y ago
There was! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_boom#1890s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_boom#1890s

matthewowen 6y ago

The balance idea is raised and rejected, but as I understand it it's a huge part. The issue isn't about humans balancing on the thing (as with the examples of canoes or horses that are already stable at rest), but rather that a bicycle _does not balance unless it is moving_, and moreover making it balance depends on the fact that it has steering – fix the front wheel in place and you can't ride it. This is not intuitive, except with the benefit of hindsight.

analog31 6y ago

I'm speculating here, but I wonder if cargo is another factor. None of the early cycles had any obvious place for carrying anything. Regular people didn't have much reason to go anywhere by themselves. They lived at or near their workplace. Their social circles were small. Church happened once a week, if they attended that often. If you needed a vehicle, it wasn't to transport yourself, but to transport stuff. I just read a couple of novels by Jane Austen. She describes the activities of the upper class, I believe in the 18th century. Now those people did transport themselves to visit other people, but her text makes it sound like a mile was a long journey -- if a woman walked that far by herself, it was talked about. Of course that doesn't tell us much about the lower classes. Dickens sheds more light on the common people, at least in cities. Again, a person needed a reason to go further than their own neighborhood, and transportation in London seemed to have been seen as a service, rather than a product. If you rode in a cab, its technological drawbacks were someone else's problem. Perhaps a reason to own and ride a bike would be if you worked in a factory that was some distance from where you lived, or for recreation. I've seen pictures of workers coming and going from factories, from early 20th century, and it's a sea of bikes.

kazinator 6y ago

Yes, it really is about the tech. Firstly, bicycles need pneumatic tires. They need serious pneumatic tires that hold pressure, and withstand temperature changes. Not having good roads is a factor; but you can address that with good, wide, durable tires. The inner tubes have to be reliable, and reparable. Tires are not feasible without vulcanized rubber. Rubber that is not vulcanized turns soft when hot, and when it's cold, it hardens and cracks. It is not durable for road use; it will quickly abrade and peel away under braking. A bicycle made using wooden wagon wheels with steel rims is not feasible. It's not just the atrocious ride quality. It would not be safe. A bicycle tilts when it turns; it needs a wheel with a rounded profile, not square. The wheel must provide traction, otherwise the unit will skid easily. Hard wheels are suitable only for vehicles with axles: carriages and trains. A bike without tires could not only not be used on a dirt road; it wouldn't even work on a varnished wooden deck. The drive train of a bicycle, such as the chain, requires considerable skill and tooling in machining. This was not available until well into the industrial revolution. Ball bearings used in bicycle bearings, such as the bottom bracket hub, have to be manufactured to ridiculous precision. You might as well ask why did we wait for so long for zipper fasteners---those teeth are so darned accurately shaped and clamped onto the cloth tape. For a good part of the bicycle era, bicycles were commonly used on dirt roads. Their tech had to be good enough for it, though. Before you can even solve the tech issues, someone has to get the idea: the idea that it's feasible for a human to ride a single-track vehicle. It's obvious now; almost anyone can learn to ride a bicycle, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. You would not suspect such a thing, in a world in which bicycles don't exist. (Physicists likely knew that a rolling wheel is stable, with equations to prove it, but that doesn't translate to an intuition that people could easily become riders of a contraption based on that stability.) However, the idea didn't take long to arrive after the technological feasibility. It's not the case that we had a feasible design for bicycles in place for hundreds of years, which only waited for the industrial revolution to arrive. The ideas come from experiments which are enabled by the tech.

musicale 6y ago

And why did we wait 6,000 years for wheeled luggage? (note: wheeled handcarts seem to date back some 4,000 years but putting wheels directly on a case or basket seems like a great idea.) (TIL some ancient wheelbarrows in China had a center-placed wheel and could carry 6 passengers.)[1] [1] https://www.thoughtco.com/who-invented-the-wheelbarrow-1991685 https://www.thoughtco.com/who-invented-the-wheelbarrow-19916...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]