5 ms·

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

82 points by frozenseven 3mo ago

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
lunatuna 3mo ago
Cool to see a history of engineering development of something I take for granted. The present game of engineered complexity and incompatibility would make an interesting second part.
avidiax 3mo ago
I think the author is missing another major factor: the early bicycle doesn't solve any problem satisfactorily. A velocipede at best saves you a bit of energy going flat or downhill, with relatively little increase in speed, with a relatively high capital expense. Compared with walking and horses, it doesn't help much. You have to get all the way to the safety bicycle (with pneumatic tires) before you have something that beats walking for someone that is not a cycling enthusiast. It's a bit like the question of why the steam engine wasn't invented earlier. It was invented to pump water out of coal mines. Being 2% efficient (for the original model) didn't matter, since it was only used to mine its own fuel. I don't think we'd ever get to modern steam and later internal combustion engines without coal deposits making the initial prototype feasible, and then funding continual improvements. By that sort of logic, we are lucky that European aristocrats were bored and enjoyed scary proto-bicycles, or we'd still not have them today. The final safety bicycle is practically a Segway by comparison with four wheel carriages.
- asdfsa32 3mo ago
  There is even a bigger factor, the environment, Bicycles are only as good as the roads you're riding them on. Off-road bicycle is a far more sophisticated and modern invention that builds on massive supply chain and production capabilities to be produced competitively compared to price of horse of yester-years.
  - sysguest 3mo ago
    for rough roads, fat-tires are the way to go
    - ben_w 3mo ago
      How rough before even that's not enough, and were typical roads at the time of this quality? Also, consider when vulcanised rubber and inflatable tires were invented.
    - yencabulator 2mo ago
      I lived near a church from 1200s surrounded by cobblestone, and owned a decent mountain bike at the time. Just no.
  - ferfumarma 2mo ago
    The issue of roads is addressed in the article.
- socalgal2 3mo ago
  Apparently buttons in buttonholes as a clothing fastener were not a thing until 1300 ce. Maybe that fact is false but, if true, it's crazy to me it took until 1300 ce to think of putting a "button" through a hole. Maybe the issue is the defintion of "button" but still. There's this non-serious book, "How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler", which describes things you could introduce if you were beamed back in time. Things you could actually make and just took people to think of (vs like a smartphone that requires high-tech). "Buttons" was one of them.
  - crooked-v 3mo ago
    The problem is the seams. Seam durability has been the driving force in a lot of "obvious" clothing inventions over the ages, and is why things like medieval crotchless hose were around for so long.
- jdmitch 3mo ago
  I think you are partly right, but I also think the mechanical advantage of the bicycle, even the velocipede, was significantly underestimated. You say it saves "a bit of energy going flat or downhill" but some quick calculations suggest it is twice as energy efficient just balancing along, and 3 to 4 times more efficient pedalling. These advantages aren't always realised, especially over shorter distances, but I would have thought they would be quite clear over any longer distances, or when carrying a heavy load. Perhaps this is where initial unreliability became an issue though, as the advantage of saving energy on a long journey bt bicycle would be outweighed if it was prone to breaking down, given it would be unlikely to find someone who could repair in those early days. I think a fundamental inability to intuitively grasp the potential mechanical efficiency of the concept must have been a major barrier though.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    That sentence was about the pedal-less velocipede. It basically holds up your butt while you walk, and can coast a bit.
    - mmooss 3mo ago
      > It basically holds up your butt while you walk There's also a second major benefit. Some amateur theory: There are two main advantages to wheels generally: A) Hold up your butt (support weight), and B) reduce friction with the ground, preserving momentum. Wheels move weight. Walking A) puts weight on your legs, and B) is series of high-friction interactions with ground - on each step you would almost stop if you didn't expend energy to propel yourself forward to the next step (depending on how fast you're walking). You forward momentum is mostly wasted on each step. Compare carrying something heavy walking and in a wheelbarrow: The wheelbarrow bears the weight and also uses forward momentum much more efficiently. The wheelbarrow was a high-impact innovation. But the wheelbarrow still requires you to walk! So put your own butt in the wheelbarrow and using a crankshaft, pedals, and some gearing (and maybe a second wheel), propel your own weight forward too. Now you have a cargo bike. :)
- Theodores 3mo ago
  Transport museums in the UK are fascinating because they are full of machines that didn't solve any problem satisfactorily. My local museum has the bicycle well represented along with much else of the times, early lawn mowers, sewing machines and everything else. The boss of Trek says the product (the bicycle) has been fit for purpose for a century. I think he is right, even though I am not riding anything before 1989, when indexed gears, decent brakes and many user improvements came along thanks to Shimano, a favourable Yen and the mountain bike 'fad'. As for 'beats walking', the pre-war roadsters with nickel plated steel, hub gears, lights, a pump, mudguards and big springs in the seat, on OG Dunlop cotton sidewall tyres, I would take the bicycle any day over walking, particularly if the streets are full of horse manure. This was the biggest time for cycling in the UK, the car took over after the war. Meanwhile, in the USA, the car had ousted the bicycle, street car and train to a huge extent, putting them on life support. Back to the transport museum, the amount of experimentation for things like brakes is wild, with many unlikely designs after WW2, when I expected something more recognisable. Then there was no innovation from Europe apart from minor iterative improvement until the Japanese showed everyone how it is done, with Shimano being the dominant player, with Suntour as the plucky underdog. Innovation was then like the latte 90s for PC's, everything would be out of date within six months and you would need to upgrade. There was nobody with a master plan, guiding the cycling boom along, it was just a convergence of shared interests, with 'mountain biking' being a response to bicycles no longer being welcome on the roads. BMX also played a part, as that 'fad' resulted in chro-moly 4130 steel frames, welded in the Taiwanese Province (tm) rather the usual lugs and brazing used in the West. The BMX factories provided the capacity and they had the tooling for mountain bikes, so that played a part in the 'secret plan' to engineer a boom (as if). In the context of mountains of machinery and incredible innovation of peak Industrial Revolution, and my personal recollection of the MTB boom, I don't believe there is a 'lived silver thread' that explains all, only historians can weave together a narrative that sort of makes sense. Incidentally, the bicycle is still the cradle of innovation. Clothing is an interesting area, typically, in a given era, cycle clothing, including shoes, helmet, sun glasses, gloves and 'lycra' is on a different technology level to anything the likes of Nike or Adidas are doing. Hydro-formed aluminium, carbon fibre and much else is far more advanced on two wheels than on four, where the vehicle weight is 100x lighter.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  > we are lucky that European aristocrats were bored and enjoyed scary proto-bicycles There is a lesson there that is relevant today because our economy has forgotten it: to have innovation you need people to have spare time.
- xtiansimon 3mo ago
  Inflection point of technologies: - [pneumatic tire] -> bicycle. - [battery, touch screens, high bandwidth networks] -> mobile phones - [transformer architectures, massive datasets] —> “ai” as we know it today Such an interesting topic. I remember a lecture of an English literature course. The course theme was how creative writing can be inspired by different disciplines such as biblical studies, philosophy, language studies, anthropology (a broad list). In the last example the professor describes how language might have evolved in an “eruption” or “tear” (itself a figurative expression). One discipline (volcanography) captures a difficult idea in another discipline (anthropology). An example of the course’s theory that multidisciplinary study informs creative writing—and there is an eruption producing something new. Maybe something like David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”.
m463 3mo ago
I wonder if the idea of the balance required for two wheels was an impediment to invention and use. for example, I think one-wheeled devices / unicycles are crazy and only someone with a lot of time, energy and motivation will to learn to balance and use one. But nowadays computers make it possible for normal people to use them without as much skill. We might have a "why did we wait so long for simple one-wheeled transportation?" --- another analogous musing -- why did we start with main+tail rotor helicopters? Nowadays 4-rotor quadcopters appeared and have taken over.
- LandStander 3mo ago
  why did we start with main+tail rotor helicopters? Nowadays 4-rotor quadcopters appeared and have taken over The quadcopter advantage is in it's mechanical simplicity, but having fewer longer blades is better for aerodynamic efficiency(at the expense of max airspeed). This matters less at RC scale, but at full size, even an all-electric helicopter will likely have more range than a quadcopter with the same batteries.
  - nerdsniper 3mo ago
    4 rotors is also a much more difficult “controls” problem. Helicopters actually glide reasonably well if their engine cuts off. They’re not super insanely unstable. Quadcopters are basically obligate fly-by-wire vehicles which necessitate at least pneumatic PID controllers if not computer chips to fly. You can make a helicopter work reasonably well a lot earlier in a pre-computer “tech tree” than you can a quadcopter.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      A helicopter with a broken engine glides well enough to avoid instantly killing everyone on board if the pilot knows what he's doing. I wouldn't call it "reasonably well". Here you go - drops slightly slower than a brick. The pilot has to speed up the descent on purpose so that he can use that stored energy to slow it down just before the crash, thus converting the crash into merely a hard landing. https://youtu.be/05_WFvh9ISk https://youtu.be/05_WFvh9ISk
tetrisgm 3mo ago
I would imagine the lack of good road infrastructure, and a society built around the idea of being hyper local were large factors contributing to not having much of a need
belZaah 3mo ago
It’s not at all immediately obvious as to why the bicycle stands upright or turns. The physics is non-trivial and, based on the drawings, offsetting the center of the wheel from the axis of thw wheel being turned was not a thing. But it is this feature, that allows the modern bike to maneuver. Counter-steering is very unintuitive. If you lack the underlying physics or, in fact, personal experience, the bicycle sounds utterly mad. It doesn’t make sense. Which is why people did not work on it.
- thomassmith65 3mo ago
  Yes. If one had never seen a bicycle, and were not told in advance that it works, one naturally would expect balancing upon its seat to be no easier in motion than at rest.
- xiaoni-liahuas 3mo ago
  [flagged]
- undebuggable 3mo ago
  > The physics is non-trivial and, based on the drawings, offsetting the center of the wheel from the axis of thw wheel being turned was not a thing. There is whole physics around it and even legal regulations [1]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_geometry#Trail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_geometr... Looking at the state of stomatology and medicine back then early velocipedes and bicycles were indeed mad. I wouldn't get on any of it earlier that sometime 1910s, once the safety bicycle was somehow perfected.
Quothling 3mo ago
> I think the deepest explanation is in general economic and cultural factors. I would say that this is very on point. Even during the renaissance "inventing" was a hobby for the aristocracy, as the author gets around with Giovanni Fontana. I'm not sure if a bicycle would've been a "cool" invention at the time. Because what would you do with it? For the majority of people there was very little need for personal mobility in society. I know we have this nice fantasy idea of towns having taverns and getting visitors, but in reality, most towns didn't even get what we'd consider a modern pub until the industrial revolution. Sure there were ale houses, but an ale house wasn't a permanent establishment, it was simply whomever had most recentely brewed beer. You'd bring your own chair, and your own cup. So even if you had a bicycle you would frankly have nowhere to go.
- mrob 3mo ago
  >there was very little need for personal mobility in society People regularly traveled to nearby market towns. There's still a strange omission: why didn't anybody in Europe invent the Chinese-style wheelbarrow, with the single central wheel? This seems to be the closest equivalent to a cargo bike that works well without modern materials. It's well suited to moving modest quantities of goods over poor roads, unlike the European wheelbarrow which is optimized for quick loading/unloading, and best suited to moving things short distances.
  - anthk 3mo ago
    Merchants, sheperds, peasants and the like travelled for sure to nearby towns to sell their goods.
- Melatonic 3mo ago
  If mobility was not a thing then why were horses so popular ? Why is the bicycle credited with helping to give women so much more agency then ?
tomhow 3mo ago
Previously... Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39774253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39774253 - March 2024 (238 comments) Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25331858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25331858 - Dec 2020 (83 comments) Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20443822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20443822 - July 2019 (492 comments)
d_silin 3mo ago
High-quality (higher carbon) steel required for frame, chain and gears was not abundant enough and cheap enough until late XIX century.
- taneq 3mo ago
  Agreed, and also chain and fasteners specifically require the ability to mass produce very small, very strong, very consistent parts. This necessarily needs production lines with consistent tooling and quality assurance.
- bjackman 3mo ago
  You know if you tap on the text at the top, it takes you to an article that expands upon the question. In this case you'll find that article discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the materials bottleneck!
- fulafel 2mo ago
  There's a lot of wooden bike frame designs that apparently work fine, the frame is one of the easier places to replace steel in.
0xbadcafebee 3mo ago
A more stark example: why did we wait 2,000 years for the elevator? Archimedes had invented every component necessary in the 200s BC. It took til the 1800s for a dude named Otis to add one extra part that made it practical and safe, and soon they were everywhere.
- crooked-v 3mo ago
  Electric motors so every building didn't need its own steam engine, and cheap interchangeable parts manufacturing for the mechanisms that needed to be perfectly consistent in every installation to be reliable.
  - Brian_K_White 3mo ago
    I think it was the automatic emergency brake.
    - crooked-v 3mo ago
      Those are the mechanisms I'm talking about.
kopirgan 3mo ago
Incredible to think that barely ten years after bicycles were somewhat perfected as useful, Wright brothers started testing their early plane designs.
- Ekaros 3mo ago
  It might be that both really needed similar level of metallurgy and precision machining. After all limiting thing about aeroplanes was the power to weight ratio of engines. So more so that enablers of both were only available at that time.
- Theodores 3mo ago
  I hate to burst your bubble, but... The Wright Brothers started in a bicycle workshop, as did practically every auto maker, in Europe, in the early days. The bicycle workshop was the cradle for many things. The Wright Brothers were not good for progress. Their game was patents. They were rent seekers, as in 'patent trolls', not innovators. This is why so much early aviation switched to Europe. With the bicycle the Wright Brothers patented the left-hand thread. This is needed on a bicycle to prevent one of the pedals working its way lose over time and is how it works today. This was 'target practice' for the Wright Brothers, their innovation was in slowing down technological progress by patenting solutions that were not entirely innovative. Yet we have invented this story where the Wright Brothers are the heroes, and anyone that questions that might as well be communist, or whatever the slur of the times may be, 'Spanish' maybe. Please mod me down in flames for being un-American, without hesitation!
  - light_hue_1 3mo ago
    > The Wright Brothers were not good for progress. Their game was patents. They were rent seekers, as in 'patent trolls', not innovators. This is why so much early aviation switched to Europe. This just isn't true. The Wright Brothers solved fundamental problems in aviation that no one else did. The three axis control mechanism is still what every plane uses today. They literally had to invent that notion. Adverse yaw is something that every single pilot learns about and handles. They discovered the notion of stalling (literally they were the first to identify the notion and use the term) and the relationship between angle of attack and stalling. This is the sort of thing that will 100% kill you immediately when you fly, but if you know what to do it's part of routine training. And that's just the start of it. You should read "What the Wright Brothers Did and Did Not Understand About Flight Mechanics—In Modern Terms" by Fred E.C. Culick https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/What-the-Wright-Brothers-did-and-did-not-understand-Culick/034edeee466c2af6a83f5b09cf164d12339bdeae https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/What-the-Wright-Brothe... This has nothing to do with being American or not.
dllu 3mo ago
The Smithsonian has a great book called "Wheels and Wheeling" that covers the early history of bicycles. Fascinating stuff. https://repository.si.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/02b8e945-62d6-42d6-be79-4d25ab10242d/content https://repository.si.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/02b8e94...
gaoheyang 3mo ago
excellent
benj111 3mo ago
>And historically, roads didn’t improve until after bicycles became common—indeed it seems that it was in part the cyclists who called for the improvement of roads. I don't know about other countries, but in the UK it was the cyclistists that led the call for tarmaced roads.
- Theodores 3mo ago
  It wasn't so much tarmac, it was just anything passable between towns. When the trains came along (to replace the canals), people just took the magic teleportal that was the train, same for goods traffic. This led to there being nobody using the 'road', with the road becoming reclaimed by nature. The way between towns was the train, with road not being an option, except to get you to the train station.
  - benj111 3mo ago
    I don't think there was ever a situation of roads getting overgrown. The canals and trains were part an parcel of the industrial revolution. That if anything led to more road traffic. Yes it may not be long distance, but it's still to the nearest town/train station. It's like suggesting that a local road next to a motorway suddenly doesn't get used. It won't get used by long distance traffic. But it attracts traffic from people wanting to get to the motorway etc.
    - Theodores 3mo ago
      Carlton Reid, the guy who started the trade website BikeBiz, is my source for this, and his is a name to look out for, his writing is consistently good and his advocacy based on a knowledge of history. I am just paraphrasing what I have learned from his telling of the early days of the CTC (Cycle Touring Club). There were many cycle touring clubs, and this was how men met women without their mothers being around! The trains connected communities as never before and what we call the 'A roads' that connect towns had nobody using them, simple as that. Why would you go on an arduous journey that would take all day when the train would get you there in twenty minutes? At the time there were no local authorities to look after the roads, it was each parish to its own, with the locals doing the work. Toll roads were the solution to the problem of maintenance, and toll roads were the 'A roads'. When they no longer had customers, due to the trains, they were done. As for the bicycle and the reopening of roads, this had a lot to do with men chasing women, before the bicycle you were somewhat restricted to the gene pool in your village, with the bicycle there were neighbouring villages. It wasn't all about getting to the factory for work, there was this huge leisure/dating aspect to early cycling culture. Trains were 10x faster than horses and men - at walking speed - on rough roads. The toll roads just withered and died. Confronted with a mountain, the train would just blast through, whereas the road would be a treacherous mountain pass, no tunnel, cutting or massive bridge provided. Trains were rocket ships. Before that, canals had their own quirks of geography, with much of it to do with feeding or resting horses. The signs are for the next horse stop, not the nearby town. With many a British town the town centre can be dated by when the canal arrived and when the railway arrived, since the buildings in the town centre start in local stone, then you get slate from the canal arriving and then brick, because the train made it to town. It is incredible that so much of the final mile was by horse and cart. Only with 21st century goggles on does your idea of induced vehicular traffic make sense, trains were just too good.
hutattedonmyarm 3mo ago
Jenny Draper has a good video on the history of the bike as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7C9YUwPtGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7C9YUwPtGk
justincormack 3mo ago
I think the interesting thing is that within 25 years or so of the invention of the "bicycle proper" the bike engineers (the Wright brothers) had already invented the airplane.
edbaskerville 3mo ago
Can someone answer this for wheels on luggage?
- t0mpr1c3 2mo ago
  Wheel barrows were known to the Han Chinese 2000 years ago. It's not bicycle science!
whoamii 2mo ago
The more interesting question is, why did it take even longer for the unicycle. Doesn’t have many of the issues bicycles had to solve.
pajko 2mo ago
> Chains, gears, and ball bearings are all crucial parts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stringbike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stringbike

82 points by frozenseven 3mo ago

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

Cool to see a history of engineering development of something I take for granted. The present game of engineered complexity and incompatibility would make an interesting second part.

avidiax 3mo ago

I think the author is missing another major factor: the early bicycle doesn't solve any problem satisfactorily. A velocipede at best saves you a bit of energy going flat or downhill, with relatively little increase in speed, with a relatively high capital expense. Compared with walking and horses, it doesn't help much. You have to get all the way to the safety bicycle (with pneumatic tires) before you have something that beats walking for someone that is not a cycling enthusiast. It's a bit like the question of why the steam engine wasn't invented earlier. It was invented to pump water out of coal mines. Being 2% efficient (for the original model) didn't matter, since it was only used to mine its own fuel. I don't think we'd ever get to modern steam and later internal combustion engines without coal deposits making the initial prototype feasible, and then funding continual improvements. By that sort of logic, we are lucky that European aristocrats were bored and enjoyed scary proto-bicycles, or we'd still not have them today. The final safety bicycle is practically a Segway by comparison with four wheel carriages.

asdfsa32 3mo ago
There is even a bigger factor, the environment, Bicycles are only as good as the roads you're riding them on. Off-road bicycle is a far more sophisticated and modern invention that builds on massive supply chain and production capabilities to be produced competitively compared to price of horse of yester-years.
- sysguest 3mo ago
  for rough roads, fat-tires are the way to go
  - ben_w 3mo ago
    How rough before even that's not enough, and were typical roads at the time of this quality? Also, consider when vulcanised rubber and inflatable tires were invented.
  - yencabulator 2mo ago
    I lived near a church from 1200s surrounded by cobblestone, and owned a decent mountain bike at the time. Just no.
- ferfumarma 2mo ago
  The issue of roads is addressed in the article.
socalgal2 3mo ago
Apparently buttons in buttonholes as a clothing fastener were not a thing until 1300 ce. Maybe that fact is false but, if true, it's crazy to me it took until 1300 ce to think of putting a "button" through a hole. Maybe the issue is the defintion of "button" but still. There's this non-serious book, "How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler", which describes things you could introduce if you were beamed back in time. Things you could actually make and just took people to think of (vs like a smartphone that requires high-tech). "Buttons" was one of them.
- crooked-v 3mo ago
  The problem is the seams. Seam durability has been the driving force in a lot of "obvious" clothing inventions over the ages, and is why things like medieval crotchless hose were around for so long.
jdmitch 3mo ago
I think you are partly right, but I also think the mechanical advantage of the bicycle, even the velocipede, was significantly underestimated. You say it saves "a bit of energy going flat or downhill" but some quick calculations suggest it is twice as energy efficient just balancing along, and 3 to 4 times more efficient pedalling. These advantages aren't always realised, especially over shorter distances, but I would have thought they would be quite clear over any longer distances, or when carrying a heavy load. Perhaps this is where initial unreliability became an issue though, as the advantage of saving energy on a long journey bt bicycle would be outweighed if it was prone to breaking down, given it would be unlikely to find someone who could repair in those early days. I think a fundamental inability to intuitively grasp the potential mechanical efficiency of the concept must have been a major barrier though.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  That sentence was about the pedal-less velocipede. It basically holds up your butt while you walk, and can coast a bit.
  - mmooss 3mo ago
    > It basically holds up your butt while you walk There's also a second major benefit. Some amateur theory: There are two main advantages to wheels generally: A) Hold up your butt (support weight), and B) reduce friction with the ground, preserving momentum. Wheels move weight. Walking A) puts weight on your legs, and B) is series of high-friction interactions with ground - on each step you would almost stop if you didn't expend energy to propel yourself forward to the next step (depending on how fast you're walking). You forward momentum is mostly wasted on each step. Compare carrying something heavy walking and in a wheelbarrow: The wheelbarrow bears the weight and also uses forward momentum much more efficiently. The wheelbarrow was a high-impact innovation. But the wheelbarrow still requires you to walk! So put your own butt in the wheelbarrow and using a crankshaft, pedals, and some gearing (and maybe a second wheel), propel your own weight forward too. Now you have a cargo bike. :)
Theodores 3mo ago
Transport museums in the UK are fascinating because they are full of machines that didn't solve any problem satisfactorily. My local museum has the bicycle well represented along with much else of the times, early lawn mowers, sewing machines and everything else. The boss of Trek says the product (the bicycle) has been fit for purpose for a century. I think he is right, even though I am not riding anything before 1989, when indexed gears, decent brakes and many user improvements came along thanks to Shimano, a favourable Yen and the mountain bike 'fad'. As for 'beats walking', the pre-war roadsters with nickel plated steel, hub gears, lights, a pump, mudguards and big springs in the seat, on OG Dunlop cotton sidewall tyres, I would take the bicycle any day over walking, particularly if the streets are full of horse manure. This was the biggest time for cycling in the UK, the car took over after the war. Meanwhile, in the USA, the car had ousted the bicycle, street car and train to a huge extent, putting them on life support. Back to the transport museum, the amount of experimentation for things like brakes is wild, with many unlikely designs after WW2, when I expected something more recognisable. Then there was no innovation from Europe apart from minor iterative improvement until the Japanese showed everyone how it is done, with Shimano being the dominant player, with Suntour as the plucky underdog. Innovation was then like the latte 90s for PC's, everything would be out of date within six months and you would need to upgrade. There was nobody with a master plan, guiding the cycling boom along, it was just a convergence of shared interests, with 'mountain biking' being a response to bicycles no longer being welcome on the roads. BMX also played a part, as that 'fad' resulted in chro-moly 4130 steel frames, welded in the Taiwanese Province (tm) rather the usual lugs and brazing used in the West. The BMX factories provided the capacity and they had the tooling for mountain bikes, so that played a part in the 'secret plan' to engineer a boom (as if). In the context of mountains of machinery and incredible innovation of peak Industrial Revolution, and my personal recollection of the MTB boom, I don't believe there is a 'lived silver thread' that explains all, only historians can weave together a narrative that sort of makes sense. Incidentally, the bicycle is still the cradle of innovation. Clothing is an interesting area, typically, in a given era, cycle clothing, including shoes, helmet, sun glasses, gloves and 'lycra' is on a different technology level to anything the likes of Nike or Adidas are doing. Hydro-formed aluminium, carbon fibre and much else is far more advanced on two wheels than on four, where the vehicle weight is 100x lighter.
inigyou 3mo ago
> we are lucky that European aristocrats were bored and enjoyed scary proto-bicycles There is a lesson there that is relevant today because our economy has forgotten it: to have innovation you need people to have spare time.
xtiansimon 3mo ago
Inflection point of technologies: - [pneumatic tire] -> bicycle. - [battery, touch screens, high bandwidth networks] -> mobile phones - [transformer architectures, massive datasets] —> “ai” as we know it today Such an interesting topic. I remember a lecture of an English literature course. The course theme was how creative writing can be inspired by different disciplines such as biblical studies, philosophy, language studies, anthropology (a broad list). In the last example the professor describes how language might have evolved in an “eruption” or “tear” (itself a figurative expression). One discipline (volcanography) captures a difficult idea in another discipline (anthropology). An example of the course’s theory that multidisciplinary study informs creative writing—and there is an eruption producing something new. Maybe something like David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”.

m463 3mo ago

I wonder if the idea of the balance required for two wheels was an impediment to invention and use. for example, I think one-wheeled devices / unicycles are crazy and only someone with a lot of time, energy and motivation will to learn to balance and use one. But nowadays computers make it possible for normal people to use them without as much skill. We might have a "why did we wait so long for simple one-wheeled transportation?" --- another analogous musing -- why did we start with main+tail rotor helicopters? Nowadays 4-rotor quadcopters appeared and have taken over.

LandStander 3mo ago
why did we start with main+tail rotor helicopters? Nowadays 4-rotor quadcopters appeared and have taken over The quadcopter advantage is in it's mechanical simplicity, but having fewer longer blades is better for aerodynamic efficiency(at the expense of max airspeed). This matters less at RC scale, but at full size, even an all-electric helicopter will likely have more range than a quadcopter with the same batteries.
- nerdsniper 3mo ago
  4 rotors is also a much more difficult “controls” problem. Helicopters actually glide reasonably well if their engine cuts off. They’re not super insanely unstable. Quadcopters are basically obligate fly-by-wire vehicles which necessitate at least pneumatic PID controllers if not computer chips to fly. You can make a helicopter work reasonably well a lot earlier in a pre-computer “tech tree” than you can a quadcopter.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    A helicopter with a broken engine glides well enough to avoid instantly killing everyone on board if the pilot knows what he's doing. I wouldn't call it "reasonably well". Here you go - drops slightly slower than a brick. The pilot has to speed up the descent on purpose so that he can use that stored energy to slow it down just before the crash, thus converting the crash into merely a hard landing. https://youtu.be/05_WFvh9ISk https://youtu.be/05_WFvh9ISk

tetrisgm 3mo ago

I would imagine the lack of good road infrastructure, and a society built around the idea of being hyper local were large factors contributing to not having much of a need

belZaah 3mo ago

It’s not at all immediately obvious as to why the bicycle stands upright or turns. The physics is non-trivial and, based on the drawings, offsetting the center of the wheel from the axis of thw wheel being turned was not a thing. But it is this feature, that allows the modern bike to maneuver. Counter-steering is very unintuitive. If you lack the underlying physics or, in fact, personal experience, the bicycle sounds utterly mad. It doesn’t make sense. Which is why people did not work on it.

thomassmith65 3mo ago
Yes. If one had never seen a bicycle, and were not told in advance that it works, one naturally would expect balancing upon its seat to be no easier in motion than at rest.
xiaoni-liahuas 3mo ago
[flagged]
undebuggable 3mo ago
> The physics is non-trivial and, based on the drawings, offsetting the center of the wheel from the axis of thw wheel being turned was not a thing. There is whole physics around it and even legal regulations [1]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_geometry#Trail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_geometr... Looking at the state of stomatology and medicine back then early velocipedes and bicycles were indeed mad. I wouldn't get on any of it earlier that sometime 1910s, once the safety bicycle was somehow perfected.

Quothling 3mo ago

> I think the deepest explanation is in general economic and cultural factors. I would say that this is very on point. Even during the renaissance "inventing" was a hobby for the aristocracy, as the author gets around with Giovanni Fontana. I'm not sure if a bicycle would've been a "cool" invention at the time. Because what would you do with it? For the majority of people there was very little need for personal mobility in society. I know we have this nice fantasy idea of towns having taverns and getting visitors, but in reality, most towns didn't even get what we'd consider a modern pub until the industrial revolution. Sure there were ale houses, but an ale house wasn't a permanent establishment, it was simply whomever had most recentely brewed beer. You'd bring your own chair, and your own cup. So even if you had a bicycle you would frankly have nowhere to go.

mrob 3mo ago
>there was very little need for personal mobility in society People regularly traveled to nearby market towns. There's still a strange omission: why didn't anybody in Europe invent the Chinese-style wheelbarrow, with the single central wheel? This seems to be the closest equivalent to a cargo bike that works well without modern materials. It's well suited to moving modest quantities of goods over poor roads, unlike the European wheelbarrow which is optimized for quick loading/unloading, and best suited to moving things short distances.
- anthk 3mo ago
  Merchants, sheperds, peasants and the like travelled for sure to nearby towns to sell their goods.
Melatonic 3mo ago
If mobility was not a thing then why were horses so popular ? Why is the bicycle credited with helping to give women so much more agency then ?

tomhow 3mo ago

Previously... Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39774253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39774253 - March 2024 (238 comments) Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25331858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25331858 - Dec 2020 (83 comments) Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20443822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20443822 - July 2019 (492 comments)

d_silin 3mo ago

High-quality (higher carbon) steel required for frame, chain and gears was not abundant enough and cheap enough until late XIX century.

taneq 3mo ago
Agreed, and also chain and fasteners specifically require the ability to mass produce very small, very strong, very consistent parts. This necessarily needs production lines with consistent tooling and quality assurance.
bjackman 3mo ago
You know if you tap on the text at the top, it takes you to an article that expands upon the question. In this case you'll find that article discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the materials bottleneck!
fulafel 2mo ago
There's a lot of wooden bike frame designs that apparently work fine, the frame is one of the easier places to replace steel in.

0xbadcafebee 3mo ago

A more stark example: why did we wait 2,000 years for the elevator? Archimedes had invented every component necessary in the 200s BC. It took til the 1800s for a dude named Otis to add one extra part that made it practical and safe, and soon they were everywhere.

crooked-v 3mo ago
Electric motors so every building didn't need its own steam engine, and cheap interchangeable parts manufacturing for the mechanisms that needed to be perfectly consistent in every installation to be reliable.
- Brian_K_White 3mo ago
  I think it was the automatic emergency brake.
  - crooked-v 3mo ago
    Those are the mechanisms I'm talking about.

kopirgan 3mo ago

Incredible to think that barely ten years after bicycles were somewhat perfected as useful, Wright brothers started testing their early plane designs.

Ekaros 3mo ago
It might be that both really needed similar level of metallurgy and precision machining. After all limiting thing about aeroplanes was the power to weight ratio of engines. So more so that enablers of both were only available at that time.
Theodores 3mo ago
I hate to burst your bubble, but... The Wright Brothers started in a bicycle workshop, as did practically every auto maker, in Europe, in the early days. The bicycle workshop was the cradle for many things. The Wright Brothers were not good for progress. Their game was patents. They were rent seekers, as in 'patent trolls', not innovators. This is why so much early aviation switched to Europe. With the bicycle the Wright Brothers patented the left-hand thread. This is needed on a bicycle to prevent one of the pedals working its way lose over time and is how it works today. This was 'target practice' for the Wright Brothers, their innovation was in slowing down technological progress by patenting solutions that were not entirely innovative. Yet we have invented this story where the Wright Brothers are the heroes, and anyone that questions that might as well be communist, or whatever the slur of the times may be, 'Spanish' maybe. Please mod me down in flames for being un-American, without hesitation!
- light_hue_1 3mo ago
  > The Wright Brothers were not good for progress. Their game was patents. They were rent seekers, as in 'patent trolls', not innovators. This is why so much early aviation switched to Europe. This just isn't true. The Wright Brothers solved fundamental problems in aviation that no one else did. The three axis control mechanism is still what every plane uses today. They literally had to invent that notion. Adverse yaw is something that every single pilot learns about and handles. They discovered the notion of stalling (literally they were the first to identify the notion and use the term) and the relationship between angle of attack and stalling. This is the sort of thing that will 100% kill you immediately when you fly, but if you know what to do it's part of routine training. And that's just the start of it. You should read "What the Wright Brothers Did and Did Not Understand About Flight Mechanics—In Modern Terms" by Fred E.C. Culick https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/What-the-Wright-Brothers-did-and-did-not-understand-Culick/034edeee466c2af6a83f5b09cf164d12339bdeae https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/What-the-Wright-Brothe... This has nothing to do with being American or not.

dllu 3mo ago

The Smithsonian has a great book called "Wheels and Wheeling" that covers the early history of bicycles. Fascinating stuff. https://repository.si.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/02b8e945-62d6-42d6-be79-4d25ab10242d/content https://repository.si.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/02b8e94...

gaoheyang 3mo ago

excellent

benj111 3mo ago

>And historically, roads didn’t improve until after bicycles became common—indeed it seems that it was in part the cyclists who called for the improvement of roads. I don't know about other countries, but in the UK it was the cyclistists that led the call for tarmaced roads.

Theodores 3mo ago
It wasn't so much tarmac, it was just anything passable between towns. When the trains came along (to replace the canals), people just took the magic teleportal that was the train, same for goods traffic. This led to there being nobody using the 'road', with the road becoming reclaimed by nature. The way between towns was the train, with road not being an option, except to get you to the train station.
- benj111 3mo ago
  I don't think there was ever a situation of roads getting overgrown. The canals and trains were part an parcel of the industrial revolution. That if anything led to more road traffic. Yes it may not be long distance, but it's still to the nearest town/train station. It's like suggesting that a local road next to a motorway suddenly doesn't get used. It won't get used by long distance traffic. But it attracts traffic from people wanting to get to the motorway etc.
  - Theodores 3mo ago
    Carlton Reid, the guy who started the trade website BikeBiz, is my source for this, and his is a name to look out for, his writing is consistently good and his advocacy based on a knowledge of history. I am just paraphrasing what I have learned from his telling of the early days of the CTC (Cycle Touring Club). There were many cycle touring clubs, and this was how men met women without their mothers being around! The trains connected communities as never before and what we call the 'A roads' that connect towns had nobody using them, simple as that. Why would you go on an arduous journey that would take all day when the train would get you there in twenty minutes? At the time there were no local authorities to look after the roads, it was each parish to its own, with the locals doing the work. Toll roads were the solution to the problem of maintenance, and toll roads were the 'A roads'. When they no longer had customers, due to the trains, they were done. As for the bicycle and the reopening of roads, this had a lot to do with men chasing women, before the bicycle you were somewhat restricted to the gene pool in your village, with the bicycle there were neighbouring villages. It wasn't all about getting to the factory for work, there was this huge leisure/dating aspect to early cycling culture. Trains were 10x faster than horses and men - at walking speed - on rough roads. The toll roads just withered and died. Confronted with a mountain, the train would just blast through, whereas the road would be a treacherous mountain pass, no tunnel, cutting or massive bridge provided. Trains were rocket ships. Before that, canals had their own quirks of geography, with much of it to do with feeding or resting horses. The signs are for the next horse stop, not the nearby town. With many a British town the town centre can be dated by when the canal arrived and when the railway arrived, since the buildings in the town centre start in local stone, then you get slate from the canal arriving and then brick, because the train made it to town. It is incredible that so much of the final mile was by horse and cart. Only with 21st century goggles on does your idea of induced vehicular traffic make sense, trains were just too good.

hutattedonmyarm 3mo ago

Jenny Draper has a good video on the history of the bike as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7C9YUwPtGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7C9YUwPtGk

justincormack 3mo ago

I think the interesting thing is that within 25 years or so of the invention of the "bicycle proper" the bike engineers (the Wright brothers) had already invented the airplane.

edbaskerville 3mo ago

Can someone answer this for wheels on luggage?

t0mpr1c3 2mo ago
Wheel barrows were known to the Han Chinese 2000 years ago. It's not bicycle science!

whoamii 2mo ago

The more interesting question is, why did it take even longer for the unicycle. Doesn’t have many of the issues bicycles had to solve.

pajko 2mo ago

> Chains, gears, and ball bearings are all crucial parts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stringbike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stringbike