
Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? - exolymph
https://rootsofprogress.org/why-did-we-wait-so-long-for-the-bicycle
======
Excel_Wizard
>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.

~~~
Animats
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.

~~~
entee
I often wonder as I am building/fixing something (often my bicycle as it
happens) and I happen to toss an extra screw in the trash how miraculous a
simple screw of this type would have been to a middle-ages craftsman. The
precision of keeping all those threads perfectly spaced is one thing, but the
technology to make them in such volume at these sizes (often quite tiny), and
in volumes so as to make them essentially disposable is a true marvel.

We think a computer is an impressive piece of technology, but many of the
things around us that we consider less than mundane are just as incredible if
we look just a couple hundred years back.

~~~
Gustomaximus
Or consider how useless you would be if transported back 400 years.

You would be able to offer great advice about washing hands or the solar
system generalisations. But actually create something to show people....even
the simplest things would be beyond most of us.

~~~
WalterBright
If you could figure out how to make wire, you could make a working electric
motor.

~~~
pushpop
You’d also need to make magnets, know their polarisation, create bearings, and
have the skill to assemble all of that as well.

~~~
WalterBright
None of that is necessary. I built a working electric motor in cub scouts
using several feet of wire, tape, some iron nails, some sheet metal cut from
tin cans, a wood board to mount it on, and a battery.

Tools required: tin snips and a hammer.

A battery can be made from a jar, lemon juice, and two electrodes.

Believe me, as an 8 year old, my skills were limited to using a hammer to mash
my thumb with. :-)

Electromagnets substituted for magnets, and bearings were a dent in the sheet
metal that the point of a nail sat in and turned. Simple and effective.

Once you showed this to a medieval craftsman, they could reproduce it and
start improving it.

~~~
pushpop
I’m both impressed and have learned something new. Thank you :)

~~~
WalterBright
I found a variant that uses magnets:

[https://www.bu.edu/gk12/tommy/Electric_motors.pdf](https://www.bu.edu/gk12/tommy/Electric_motors.pdf)

The version I built was far simpler, and used electromagnets instead of the
magnets, but you can see the general idea.

I didn't design it, I don't know where the Den Mothers got the design from.
But I found it fascinating, as you could see and feel how it worked.

I built several of them. One day, I got a little bolder and replaced the
battery with an A/C cord. The motor buzzed loudly and burst into flames. I
learned about alternating current that day :-)

------
lucideer
> _(Some commenters have suggested that it was not obvious that a two-wheeled
> vehicle would balance, but I find this unconvincing given how many other
> things people have learned to balance on, from dugout canoes to horses
> themselves.)_

I'll be one of those commenters I guess.... What!??

Balancing in a canoe is in no way similar to a bicycle. I can jump in a canoe
having never been in one, and it will balance itself. I can probably even
manage a few trepidous rows of an oar (or hand, or arbitrary object) without
tipping it. Without me, the canoe will stand on its own. If I fall, it will
often right itself without me.

On top of that, a canoe is both an evolution on previous working designs
(rafts), and analogous to nature (whether it be a fish, crocodile or a
floating log).

The horse, with its four (not two!) legs is an even more ridiculous
comparison.

It seems pretty clear that the development of the bicycle would've been
significantly hampered by the fact that balancing on two wheels was:

(a) unintuitive as an idea with no analogue in nature or previous innovations

(b) had a marked learning curve

(c) that learning curve was separate and independent for _each_ design. Riding
a modern bicycle doesn't automatically make you an adept penny farthing,
unicycle, nor tandem rider. Nor any of the umpteen other technological
iterations.

I wouldn't be surprised if this trumped material/manufacturing limitations as
a hurdle. See this whimsical video for "evidence" of this [0]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yJdz-
kjfLk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yJdz-kjfLk)

~~~
deathanatos
> _The horse, with its four (not two!) legs is an even more ridiculous
> comparison._

The comparison is, as I understood it, the rider balancing on the horse
itself. I've only ever done this myself with saddle and stirrups, so I don't
know if this is significantly more difficult without those.

I think you're being a little generous with the canoe. Boarding a canoe
without a dock (that is, climbing in from the water) is tricky, and requires
some thought about where your weight is. (Since the lip of the canoe, in my
experience, sits well above the water line, and you're about to pull down on
the edge to attempt to board, but that same motion is the motion that moves
the edge closer to the water which will flood it.) I've seen plenty of people
flip and subsequently flood a canoe after an unsuccessful attempt to board.

~~~
JackFr
But a canoe floats, as a horse stands.

A bicycle simply does not stand up on its own.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Surely it can, it's just a case of finding the balance point? [Ignoring
macroscopic effects of the Earth rotating, etc.]

------
GlenTheMachine
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.

~~~
runarberg
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
“...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.

~~~
runarberg
We might both be guilty of over generalizing. Farming practices differ very
widely across cultures and time. Farming in post colonial America was often
done on big areas of land that was often handed out for free (or very cheap)
and the markets were far away. This is in contrast to farming where land was
scarce and small and a the markets relatively close (2 hours walking).

In the latter case bringing a freshly slaughtered goat, a couple of basket
worth of grain, or textiles, to town three days a week, and sell in a public
market is not uncommon. In the former case it is unthinkable.

In the case of rounding up animals I can see bicycle being quite useful if you
have a small stock that you grace in large swaths of shared uninhabited lands.
At the start of the gracing season you might not use the bicycle, but during
the gracing season you might need to move them from one area to another, then
it is definitely handy to be able to bike to the first area, herd them to the
next one, walk back, and bike home.

Note that neither of my examples were ever common in post colonial America,
but quite common throughout Europe and are still common in sub Saharan Africa.

~~~
GlenTheMachine
I fully concede that conditions were very different depending on time and
place, and I was talking specifically about the US (mostly the eastern US,
where I’m from) in the period after independence up to World War I.

------
jaclaz
As a side-side note, ever asked someone (friends, family, etc.) to draw a
bycicle by heart?

This guy did:

[http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html](http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html)

~~~
dec0dedab0de
This is cool. Except it's driving me nuts that I can't figure out what's wrong
with the first picture, or at least why it would immediately break.

~~~
mayoff
It's missing the chainstays, which are the tubes from the bottom bracket
(where the pedals attach) to the rear axle.

The seatstays (the tubes from under the seat to the rear axle) are only
connected to the seat tube with a small weld. When you pedal, you're using the
top part of the chain to pull the rear axle toward the pedals. This force is
going to break the weld connecting the seatstays to the seat tube.

Note that a chain can't push, only pull, so the bottom part of the chain
cannot counterbalance this force.

~~~
bjackman
I think the fact that the crossbar is not connected directly to the headtube
(part where the fork & handlebar assemblies pivot) would also cause a problem!

------
f_allwein
Same can be said, perhaps more accurately, about the wheelbarrow. From
[https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/312366/the-
knowledge...](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/312366/the-knowledge-by-
lewis-dartnell/9780143127048/excerpt) :

> The wheelbarrow, for instance, could have occurred centuries before it
> actually did—if only someone had thought of it. This may seem like a trivial
> example, combining the operating principles of the wheel and the lever, but
> it represents an enormous labor saver, and it didn’t appear in Europe until
> millennia after the wheel (the first depiction of a wheelbarrow appears in
> an English manuscript written about 1250 AD).

~~~
brohee
And the European wheelbarrow is vastly inferior to the Chinese one (see
[https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-
wheelbar...](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-
wheelbarrow.html))

------
mntmoss
Many of these kinds of industrial-history questions can be answered along a
few different angles:

* Trade and access to raw materials. This is often one that limits development and diffusion even if the concept is known, and for the bicycle, it's one of the biggest immediate factors. Trade _deprivation_ can often be a factor in historical innovations as the market starts searching for substitutes.

* Education and basic research. The 19th century saw a second "printing revolution" because paper was getting cheaper, enabling the likes of dime novels and penny dreadfuls, but also making literacy a widespread phenomenon, with public schools appearing throughout the industrial world and academia gaining larger libraries and greater capability to specialize on logical-positivist STEM topics, rather than the classical education of nobility and clergy. Less reinvention means more effort towards innovation.

* Market readiness. You can't sell software if nobody has computers; and for manufactured goods the development of an urban lifestyle has to take place. None of the early bicycles do well on unpaved roads. Bicycle adoption trailed automobile adoption, since the latter gave the motivation to pave every street. In the late 19th century, systematic city sanitation policy was still a new innovation and large cities suffered from stinking rivers, open sewerage, and disposal methods that consisted of emptying a bucket out of a window. People were dressing for this reality in heavy suits or dresses and boots, while bicycle usage relies on being less encumbered(and that is still a factor even today).

Today the hype for rental e-scooters can be followed througn a similar series
of developments: while scooters as toys have been around for about as long as
bicycles, the early 70's saw polyurethane wheels introduced, and this made
skating(on boards and in shoes) almost a new sport, since they were
inexpensive and could reliably compress and keep rolling without stopping or
shattering like clay or metal wheels; scooter wheels are bigger, but also
benefited from this change. A few decades passed and Razor introduced the
folding kick scooter concept to mass markets, making the scooter as easy to
carry as a skateboard. With the last two decades we got better battery power
density and smartphone diffusion, making the "dockless" rental scooter
commercially viable, along with electric-powered versions of shoes,
skateboards, bikes, etc. But there is somewhat of a market readiness issue,
since while the potential is obvious, it's hard to use these devices safely on
current streets, and there is no established etiquette to their use.

------
dboreham
Same for steam engines: it turns out Watt spent most of his effort on getting
components manufactured and having the associated manufacturing processes
developed. The basic idea of the steam engine had been around for a long time
prior. You can ask the same question of Romans and electricity. They had all
the necessary tech: glass for insulators, acid for batteries, metallurgy for
wire etc.

~~~
SilasX
Reminds me of John Salvatier's point about the "surprising level of detail" in
reality, i.e. yes, the idea that "steam can drive a wheel" is simple enough,
but you have to get a lot of small details right that don't make it into
textbooks like reliable manufacturing tolerances.

HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255)

~~~
Retra
I'm regularly imagining what I would actually be able to accomplish if I went
back in time 200-2000 years. Details are always the problem. It reminds you
how little you know, but also helps you to form a background interest in
engineering, metallurgy, geology, chemistry, etc.

~~~
jandrese
You have to make the machine to make the machine that allows you to make your
final product.

You would still have the advantage of being able to beeline past technological
dead ends, but you still have to build up the industrial base. Even then you
run into problems with chemicals simply not being available on an industrial
scale because previously there was no need for them. The world is a massively
complex interconnected system.

~~~
SilasX
Related quote from the computer game Alpha Centauri:

"Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply
take sand from the beach and produce a [computer chip]. We use crude tools to
fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools,
and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the
steps must be taken."

[https://www.quotes.net/mquote/2325](https://www.quotes.net/mquote/2325)

~~~
TeMPOraL
The people who authored quotes for Alpha Centauri deserve some sort of award.
It's probably the most quoted game I've seen, and those quotes are all pretty
insightful.

------
smacktoward
I wonder if the 19th-century emergence of mass urbanism wasn't a factor. If
you're a farmer living in the countryside you already have the space and
supplies necessary to keep animals, so keeping a horse along with all the
others isn't a problem. But if you're an industrial worker living in a city
where space is at a premium, keeping a horse becomes complicated and expensive
-- you have to maintain a place to stable it, have to find a way to keep it
fed and watered, etc.

Even if you could afford all that it's still a pain to deal with, and outside
the aristocratic class I doubt most people could afford it. So urbanization
meant there was a steadily growing market for some non-horse alternative that
fit the facts of urban life better.

------
jdfellow
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.

------
atoav
Roads were a necessety for the invention of bicycles. And by roads I mean
roads with a certain standard.

Another necessety was a certain type of middle class which would actually
desire individual transport. If you are a worker why would you prefer a
bicycle over a wagon that transports all tools? If you are an aristocrat, why
prefering a bicycle over some comfortable carriage, especially when you don’t
even know the way?

It is no accident, that the bike was invented by a certain type of rich middle
class in cities with good infrastructure. More as a toy first (basically a
horizontal bar with two wheels and you had to push with the feet), but more
serious later

~~~
loeg
> Roads were a necessety for the invention of bicycles. And by roads I mean
> roads with a certain standard.

The chicken and egg actually went in the other direction. Bicycles became
popular and bicyclists lobbied for better roads.

~~~
ashtonbaker
This is true! A good article about this:

[https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/bicycles-bad-roads-
det...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/bicycles-bad-roads-detroit)

------
hermitdev
> City roads at the time were paved with cobblestones, which were good for
> horses but too bumpy for bicycles.

This is one of the draws for the Paris-Roubaix spring classic race, a +200
mile, single day race with dozens of sections of rural cobble stones. Though,
generally well maintained, the roads are narrow and brutal on modern road
racing carbon-fiber bikes on 23mm wide tires. Lots of attrition from
accidents. Typically pretty wet weather for the (spring) race and the cobbles
are slippery and also get muddy. Riders tend to ride on the dirt shoulderer
when they can, because it's smoother, but this can lead to tire punctures. The
sections of cobbles are also narrow, so getting around 200 riders through is
harrowing by itself. Smallest mistake by one rider compounds quickly.

Also mechanicals such as punctured tires and tossed chains are common. Rough
corners/edges on the stones and gaps between cobbles easily puncture tires.
The bikes have no suspension, so the chains bounce quite a bit, easily being
tossed and in extreme cases, can be bent or broken if they jump a chain ring,
requiring a replacement.

For their efforts, the trophy? A cobble stone with adornment.

The race is a spectacle. Probably one of the greatest one day spring classics
of the UCSI Pro Tour. 6 hours or more of grueling, punishing cycling in crappy
weather while being vibrated like crazy from the cobbles (the whole race isnt
cobbles, but significant sections are, usually +20 sections, ranging in length
of around a few kilometers each).

~~~
garethrees
> Typically pretty wet weather for the (spring) race

Paris–Roubaix is certainly memorable when it's wet and muddy, but the last
time it happened was in 2002! Early spring is the driest part of the year in
north-eastern France, and so the usual conditions for the race are dry and
dusty. See the Inner Ring: [https://inrng.com/2016/04/rain-for-
roubaix/](https://inrng.com/2016/04/rain-for-roubaix/)

~~~
hermitdev
Sadly, I've not been able to see the race in quite a while. At least in my
region, NBC sports doesn't seem to carry it anymore. Previously, Universal
sports did, which I somehow lost after comcast aquired them.

One of my favorite images of the race is Bob Roll literally riding in the
ditch, covered in mud [0]. Think it epitomizes the race.

[0]
[https://images.app.goo.gl/K8CHHQMGA245iZt48](https://images.app.goo.gl/K8CHHQMGA245iZt48)

------
simulate
In 100 years will we wonder why recumbent bicycles took so long to catch on?
MIT's David Gordon Wilson, the writer of the excellent book Bicycling Science,
had been advocating for recumbents as a more efficient design to replace
traditional modern bicycles for decades.

[http://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-designer-inventor-author-
bike-b...](http://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-designer-inventor-author-bike-bible-
david-gordon-wilson-on-bicycles-0725) and
[https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bicycling-science-third-
editi...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bicycling-science-third-edition)

~~~
davesmith1983
I've ridden many different types of bicycle from fixed gears, single speed
mountain bikes and more traditional mountain bikes and racing bikes. Recumbent
is horrible to ride in traffic (you are below the height of most traffic) and
the handling is atrocious.

Yes they are maybe more efficient but they are not pleasant to ride.

TBH the current design is efficient enough, is well understood both in terms
of the technology. Almost all improvements now are iterative.

Also more modern materials (carbon fibre, aluminium) are either expensive,
brittle (carbon fibre is easily damaged in a crash) or both. A lot of riders
(especially the fixed crowd) have a saying of "Steel is Real", frames are
normally cheap, easy to come by and even after crashes easily repaired (you
can just bend it back most of the time).

The same can be said about many of the more modern gearing systems. Anything
past 2 up front, 8 speed at the back is again typically more expensive to fix,
parts are less easy to come by and is prone to failure.

Shimano's hub gears need regular maintenance where traditional derailleur
setup will go on for thousands of miles with only basic maintenance.
Maintenance on a derailleur system is typically cleaning (fairy liquid is
fine) and using cheap lubrication that can be bought for a few pounds/dollars
will suffice in most cases.

~~~
lmm
> Recumbent is horrible to ride in traffic (you are below the height of most
> traffic)

Depends on the recumbent. Mine (an Azub Six) isn't - I commute through London
on it every day. And cities are (slowly) getting better at keeping traffic out
of the way.

> and the handling is atrocious.

How so? You have to take a different line through corners, but you turn later
(front wheel is further back) so it's if anything easier to go through the
kind of right-angle turns that are expected in cities.

> Yes they are maybe more efficient but they are not pleasant to ride.

That's the opposite of my experience - upright bikes put so much weight on the
wrists and, uh, taint, that they simply can't be pleasant for any length of
time (particularly for those of us of an, ah, less athletic physique). A
certain proportion of the population is able to sit comfortably on a
traditional bike saddle, but many people aren't. As scooters and e-bikes open
up more of an on-ramp into cycling for a wider demographic, I'd expect more
and more people to find that saddles aren't working for them.

> Shimano's hub gears need regular maintenance where traditional derailleur
> setup will go on for thousands of miles with only basic maintenance.
> Maintenance on a derailleur system is typically cleaning (fairy liquid is
> fine) and using cheap lubrication that can be bought for a few
> pounds/dollars will suffice in most cases.

Ordinary consumers aren't up to even basic maintenance - cars went through the
very same progression, in the '50s or '60s it was normal for a car to require
basic maintenance by its owner. Low-maintenance hub gears will continue to get
cheaper (an expensive model like the Rohloff already goes for thousands of kms
without maintenance) and commuter bikes are increasingly switching. I'm sure
that racing bikes for enthusiasts will use derailleurs for many years to come,
but for commuters who just want to get to work the hub gears are already
taking over.

~~~
davesmith1983
> Depends on the recumbent. Mine (an Azub Six) isn't - I commute through
> London on it every day. And cities are (slowly) getting better at keeping
> traffic out of the way.

I cycle through through and around traffic. I don't keep myself out of traffic
I am part of it.

I personally hate being in a cycle lane, because I know that many other
cyclists normally aren't paying attention, don't know how to ride (they never
check over the shoulder, poor handling skills etc). Also separating cars from
cyclists just make car drivers less aware that cyclists exist. Not everywhere
has cycle lanes.

Then again I don't live in London which has to be now the worst city in the
UK.

> How so? You have to take a different line through corners, but you turn
> later (front wheel is further back) so it's if anything easier to go through
> the kind of right-angle turns that are expected in cities.

Handling isn't just about going round corners. I can track stand at lights,
ride down stairs and going round a 90 degree bend is easy. I can almost turn
in the bicycles own circle on my old mountain bike. If I need to bail of the
bike, I can just drop the bike and roll off.

> That's the opposite of my experience - upright bikes put so much weight on
> the wrists and, uh, taint, that they simply can't be pleasant for any length
> of time (particularly for those of us of an, ah, less athletic physique). A
> certain proportion of the population is able to sit comfortably on a
> traditional bike saddle, but many people aren't. As scooters and e-bikes
> open up more of an on-ramp into cycling for a wider demographic, I'd expect
> more and more people to find that saddles aren't working for them.

You need to get the right saddle and yeh if you try riding 60 odd miles on a
new saddle and you don't cycle regularly you are going to have a bad time. It
would be like trying to run a marathon in a pair of new trainers, not a good
idea. As for cycling putting pressure on wrists or too much weight on your
arse then the bike probably isn't the right size.

As for the wider demographic. I don care what they do. There was a fad in the
late 90s early 2000s for mountain bikes, mountain bikes are rubbish on road
unless you kit them out with touring tyres, there is simply too much road
drag. Also suspension looks flashy but is pointless on a tarmac road.

A lot of people follow fads. I don't.

> Ordinary consumers aren't up to even basic maintenance - cars went through
> the very same progression, in the '50s or '60s it was normal for a car to
> require basic maintenance by its owner. Low-maintenance hub gears will
> continue to get cheaper (an expensive model like the Rohloff already goes
> for thousands of kms without maintenance) and commuter bikes are
> increasingly switching. I'm sure that racing bikes for enthusiasts will use
> derailleurs for many years to come, but for commuters who just want to get
> to work the hub gears are already taking over.

It is still simpler to repair derailleur setup than any hub. Any bike ship can
fix your derailleur gears (unless it is a BMX shop). I doubt the same is true
about hubs. Also derailleur gears will work still without maintenance, almost
none for years on end. Modern 8 or 9 speed chain is very reliable.

Hubs normally require specialised tooling parts and are always more prone to
failure due to the nature of a hub. The only hubs that do work well are the
really old sturmy archer hubs because they are again much more mechanically
simple than anything else.

~~~
jessaustin
_There was a fad in the late 90s early 2000s for mountain bikes, mountain
bikes are rubbish on road unless you kit them out with touring tyres, there is
simply too much road drag. Also suspension looks flashy but is pointless on a
tarmac road._

A rear suspension is stupid on any road better than cobblestone, but the
shocked front fork on a hardtail is nice in many situations. If the commute is
less than five miles or so, wider tires won't hurt anyone. I agree that I
don't want knobby tires on the road, but it's easy to change tires. (All
mountain bikes have easier-to-change tires than several road bikes I've
serviced.)

~~~
davesmith1983
On even gravel tracks having wider tyres will help you more than a front
shock. Cobblestone or similar is easy to ride on a racing bike, a shock is
totally unnecessary.

------
itsbruce
"The quality of roads is relevant, but not really the answer. Bicycles can be
ridden on dirt roads or sidewalks"

Bicycles can only be ridden safely on rough surfaces with good pneumatic
tyres. As for the sidewalks, 1) their quality was also very variable, 2) they
didn't offer a continuous path anywhere unless you only wanted to cycle around
a single block (often not even then), 3) they were full of pedestrians trying
to avoid the rough, filthy road surface, 4) hopping on and off kerbs is not a
good idea without pneumatic tyres and a lightweight frame (early bicycles were
ponderous and heavy).

The description of the technical progression needed to make the bicycle
practical is fine, but the author seems to need to dismiss all previous
thought on bicycles simply to justify their argument. Firstly, that's not a
motivation I admire, secondly the dismissal of those obstacles and the other
cited disincentives is just wrong: those obstacles were definitely there,
something technical and social progress had to address before a bicycle was a
reasonable and useful idea.

------
MayeulC
That's an interesting piece, which reminded me of another interesting article
on the wheelbarrow that surfaced on HN as well some time ago:

[https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-
wheelbar...](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-
wheelbarrow.html)

------
goldcd
I think the article misses:

1) Those 'hypotheses' seem like a perfectly good starting point for a very
long list of cumulative reasons as to "Why not to get a bike".

2) It doesn't separate bicycle 'the tool' from bicycle 'the toy'. All those
original machines were fashionable playthings for the wealthy. Bicycles the
tool took off they were demonstrably better than walking (which is then the
combination of improved tech and reduced cost overtook walking and alternative
transports)

------
mc32
So it looks like there were attempts but they had fatal design flaws and
technology (metallurgy) was immature.

One question raised is why didn’t we see a trike come about before the bike?

It’s more stable and propulsion via direct front pedal isn’t as awkward as the
front pedal bike.

~~~
giobox
While it’s maybe surprising, have you ever tried riding something with a 1:1
drive ratio? There’s a reason even bikes with a fixed gear still have gears...

Pedals connected directly to the front wheel would be truly awful for
virtually all adult bicycle use cases.

~~~
robin_reala
Well, the obvious contender for that is the penny farthing. It’s not
_dreadful_ (it was good enough to be commercialised with vague success at
least), but it’s inconvenienced by the necessary size of the front wheel to
make any progress, and the fact that you can’t have a front-wheel brake as you
just rotate over the top of the bicycle when applied.

~~~
giobox
Have you seen a human ride a penny farthing? I don’t think dreadful is
overstating it. Sure it made the most of available technology at the time, but
one doesn’t need to be expert in bikes to see why this design died.

Just getting on a Penny Farthing can be problematic, given it tries to
compensate for 1:1 drive by using an enormous front wheel.

~~~
robin_reala
Yep, there’s a bunch of late-Victorian enthusiasts who ride them around London
every year: [https://pennyfarthingclub.com/](https://pennyfarthingclub.com/)

They have obvious faults of course, but they were around for 15-20 years, were
better than their predecessors, and didn’t kill off the concept of the bicycle
in general to stop future development. That’s enough to give them some credit
at least!

~~~
afterburner
I mean, people ride unicycles too. But there's a reason most don't.

------
tlb
The unicycle was invented shortly afterwards. Here's a patent from 1869, for
an over-complicated unicycle with a treadle mechanism instead of pedals on
cranks.
[https://patents.google.com/patent/US87355](https://patents.google.com/patent/US87355)

Many of the objections about how complicated the bicycle is don't apply to the
unicycle. The Romans could have made a perfectly good one out of wood with
brass cranks. But maybe it was even less obvious than the bicycle that it was
possible to ride.

~~~
jessaustin
If unicycles had come first, would bicycles have ever surpassed them?

~~~
antoineMoPa
I don't think so. I use both and there are use cases for both, but the bicycle
is generally safer and faster.

~~~
aembleton
What is the use case for a Unicycle?

------
jl2718
The author briefly outlined the incredibly tortuous path of inventors adding
every possible technology together over centuries to create a human-powered-
vehicle that was even marginally safe and useful on the roads of their time,
and then once they finally crack it, the author chalks it up to cultural and
social factors. Trust me, as someone who tried to build a ride sharing service
before the smartphone, it only seems “cultural and social” in hindsight. Its
not. There are a million tiny technological barriers that nobody remembers.

------
timonoko
Bicycle was useless without paved roads. Horse was much more convenient. I
have personal anecdote about these issues. As a kid in 1967 I made 250 km
bicycle trip in two days. My father was amazed: "How this is possible? I made
exactly the same trip in 1929 also in two days, but I had a very good horse
galloping half the time." We were both camping at the same forest at halfway
point too..

~~~
bagacrap
I think it's less about the road quality and more about pneumatic tires. Same
for cars. Would you rather drive a car on a dirt road with modern tires, or on
a highway, directly on metal rims? The answer seems obvious to me...

~~~
timonoko
You do not understand. These was no road perse in 1929, just two deep grooves
for carriages and cars. It was impossible to bike on that. The first coast-to-
coast american biked on railroad tracks. They were bumpy obviously but
evidently much better than any roads.

~~~
ben7799
This is ridiculous. Bicycles were near 50 years old by 1930. There was a ton
of riding done before nicely paved roads were everywhere. The Tour De France
is happening right now, it was first run in 1903 and covered 1500 miles, with
riders doing up to 250 miles in one day.

Bicycles do fine on dirt roads & trails, pavement is absolutely not required.
Bicycles have adapted to better roads over time but they never required glass
smooth modern paved roads.

~~~
timonoko
Horse-and-carriage type roads were very particular. The middle was very soft
and the grooves were quite narrow. You just cannot see them anywhere nowadays.
I bicycled from Finland to Yugoslavia in 1971 often trying to ride on those
kind of roads. Occasionally I used old Roman Empire roads. They were "paved"
but made of big slippery plates and even more difficult to ride on.

------
joe_the_user
The arguments given all seem reasonably convincing.

The interesting thing is the kind of argument this blog and some here engage
in. That is, one looks at argument X, decides it's not convincing and then
pushes argument Y.

It's sort of a single-cause fallacy. Maybe bad roads weren't enough but they
contributed. Maybe technological limitations weren't enough but they
contributed, etc.

The problem is that combining factors are hard to see and hard to argue for. A
factor here (a meta-factor, haha), modeling how all the different factors came
together or didn't come together is hard. You'd need a historical look at how
the bicycle was invented and a look at how at how could have been invented
earlier but wasn't. This goes into how people think, how people design
machines, how people allocate resources, etc. Which is to say we'll likely
never know how the associated factor contributed and how much.

But we can tell that the vagueness of the situation doesn't stop people
arguing.

------
spraak
> I don’t think horses explain it either. A bicycle, from what I’ve read, was
> cheaper to buy than a horse, and it was certainly cheaper to maintain (if
> nothing else, you don’t have to feed a bicycle).

I don't think this is so simple. A horse can haul a lot more than a human can.
How much human bicycle power is equal to one horse power?

~~~
henryfjordan
An average human can peak above 1HP for short amounts of time (think
sprinting). They definitely cannot maintain that. I think the Horse Power was
defined at a sustainable rate for the horse.

1 HP = 746 watts and most people on a bike would cruise in 100-250 watts
range. The top cyclists can maintain more like 400 watts

[https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/blog/2018/06/how-does-
your-...](https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/blog/2018/06/how-does-your-cycling-
power-output-compare)

~~~
Retric
A horse peaks around 15+ horsepower depending on age and breed they can
significantly exceed it. They also generally average above 1HP for long
stretches.

1hp is at best one measure of the average consistent power output of an
average horse doing a full day of work every day for months. Or about the
equivalent of a person doing 0.05 to 0.1 hp.

~~~
acqq
It all comes from Watt trying to calculate how to sell his machines to the
owners of the mines, who depended before on ponies:

[http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/103_fall2003.web.dir/Chris_Peter...](http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/103_fall2003.web.dir/Chris_Peterson/horsepowerandtorque.htm)

"Watt was working with ponies lifting coal at a coal mine, and he wanted a way
to talk about the power available from one of these animals. He found that, on
average, a mine pony could do 22,000 foot-pounds of work in a minute. He then
increased that number by 50 percent and pegged the measurement of horsepower
at 33,000 foot-pounds of work in one minute."

"A horse exerting 1 horsepower can raise 330 pounds of coal 100 feet in a
minute"

[https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a26074/hors...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a26074/horsepower-
explainer/)

"his business partner Matthew Boulton standardized the figure at 33,000.

The number wasn't quite scientific: Watt looked for horses at peak
performance, and for his purposes, it didn't truly matter how accurate his
measurement of a horse's power was as long as it was close enough to be
believable. Much like his engine, the metric struck."

~~~
Retric
Yea, it was a ballpark estimate not really a major study.

[https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1466&...](https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1466&context=bulletin)

Shows several other HP estimates for horses at up to 1.5 HP per hours and even
one at 125lb * 3mph over 6 hours = 1 hp. Also includes a peak from a contest
at 14.88 HP.

------
nkoren
Innovation takes an unreasonably twisty path. An even more stark example:
suitcases with wheels. If you have the technology to build a siege engine or a
crossbow, then surely you can build a suitcase with wheels. And yet they post-
date the Saturn V rocket. How reasonable is that?

~~~
sobani
Why would you need a suitcase with wheels when you have a porter who carries
your cases for you? Remember that if you could afford to fly in the sixties,
you could easily afford it to have someone else deal with your luggage.

------
alfonsodev
If you are building a startup, knowing how answer to the "Why now?" question
is quite important, this article might be a good inspiration.

------
peterwwillis
Why did we wait so long for the elevator? Circular dependency and incentive.
Combining a ratchet with a pulley is incredibly simple and both have been
around since the ancient Greeks. But with a few exceptions, it didn't make
sense to build buildings big enough to need elevators. I mean, how would you
get up and down the buildings? Answer: an elevator... but it didn't exist
yet... hence, nobody could imagine how to get up and down tall buildings
efficiently. That, and steel-framed buildings that could support themselves
over 10 or so floors didn't come into vogue until after the renaissance.

~~~
iguy
There's about five centuries in there between the renaissance and steel-framed
buildings!

But of course cranes existed (on building sites, and in factories) since
approximately the day after we invented the rope. But an elevator safe and
reliable enough to make rich people buy an apartment above the 2nd floor? And
cities dense enough that they were tempted to do so? Those took longer.

------
thedogeye
I think the post downplays the value of a horse. Horses are incredible. Not
only do they provide transport that is even better than bicycle (you don't
have to pedal, and they can go over almost any terrain) but they also provide
labor. Indeed, horses actually generate a net surplus of labor above the labor
required to grow food to feed them. That is, a farmer with a horse can grow
far more food than a farmer without a horse, even after all the food the horse
eats.

If I could safely and legally keep a horse in front of my house and office I
would totally get rid of my bike.

~~~
quickthrower2
Then I hope you would clean up it's poo.

------
pgreenwood
Great article, but I would like to point out a common misconception regarding
mechanical advantage that featured in the article. Mechanical advantage is not
completely determined by the gear ratio. You also have to take into account
crank length and the wheel size. Total mechanical advantage is determined by
these three factors together. See
[https://sheldonbrown.com/gain.html](https://sheldonbrown.com/gain.html)

------
garyclarke27
Great article. Yes is amazing how humans are often blind to obvious (with
hindsight) and relatively simple innovative ideas. Another good example of
this is the - wheeled suitcase - not invented till 1970!!
[http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/10/04/wheeled.luggage.ann...](http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/10/04/wheeled.luggage.anniversary/index.html)

------
nitwit005
There was still active research into why bicycles are stable as recently as
2011. Here's a talk about that research:
[https://youtu.be/YdtE3aIUhbU](https://youtu.be/YdtE3aIUhbU)

If the bicycle was some sort of "obvious" machine, people wouldn't still be
studying the basic stability mechanics 200 years later. Very few things are as
simple as they seem. Even levers can get a bit complicated.

------
vinayms
> Yet it was a simple mechanical invention. It would seem to require no
> brilliant inventive insight, and certainly no scientific background.

That's a seriously weak premise. A bicycle is more than a metal rod with
wheels; it needs a good steering mechanism and driving mechanism, not to
mention ergonomic seating mechanism. Humans have certainly had a lot of things
in their blind spot which makes us wonder why it took so long, but bicycle
isn't one of them. Eraser-butt-pencil, may be. Bicycle, certainly not.

Also, the sheer number of crazy models that happened in its evolution is a
testament to the fact that a bicycle is anything but intuitive. Remember, it
was an age where mechanical devices was a rage. It was sort of like the AI-ML
of that era. There was a lot of activity by people of varying levels of
expertise - from tinkerers to people who knew what they were doing to people
who thought they knew what they were doing. Despite this it took that long.

So its absurd to start off with the said premise.

Points like material and manufacturing process are red herring IMO. This
argument is backwards. What needed to be made was a prototype. The things
mentioned would follow naturally. No one had to invent a "professional grade"
machine at the word go. An example from software: HLL were not invented first
and then OS were written in it, but OS were written first, and in the process
people realized HLL would be more productive, and OS were rewritten in them.

The conclusion about cultural and economic factors also seems unconvincing.
The only plausible reason could be the clout of horse carriage mafia or
something like that which influenced the powers that be and stifled rival
technologies.

------
alexhutcheson
If you don't already have good roads, then you need a very rugged and durable
bike, which wasn't possible at a reasonable price with the materials and tools
available at the time. Even with today's technology, a cheap "mountain bike"
from Walmart would be unrideable after just a day or two of true off-road use.

------
ggm
Prague museum of technology has a huge collection of early bicycles. Side by
siders, rod drive, front wheel drive, bamboo...

------
Robotbeat
By the way, push bikes (i.e. the hobby horse) are very common among toddler
and preschool age children in my circles. I don't see why a wooden version of
this couldn't have been common much earlier than 1817. Wood is sufficient for
its construction, although I do suppose a metal bearing would be superior.

~~~
jessaustin
At the very least it would be a fun way to descend steep hills.

------
TomMckenny
>In light of this, I think the deepest explanation is in general economic and
cultural factors.

Indeed, with enough people with enough spare wealth, you can have significant
progress even when technology remains flat.

There is an immense difference between the Greek dark age and classical
Athens, but not technologically. And intellectually curious people can figure
out how to fly just using paper.[1]

Apparently, the first iteration of the bike in the early 1800s was a briefly
popular toy: the very epitome of unguided discovery is play. Only later was it
made practical by inventors working from that exiting idea.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers)

------
jasode
_> In light of this, I think the deepest explanation is in general economic
and cultural factors. Regarding economic factors, it seems that there needs to
be a certain level of surplus to support the culture-wide research and
development effort that creates inventions. _

A related concept is the _" adjacent possible"_ coined by Steven Johnson:

[https://www.google.com/search?q="adjacent+possible"+steven+j...](https://www.google.com/search?q="adjacent+possible"+steven+johnson)

(Linked a google search query because many "adjacent possible" articles are
behind a paywall and can't tell which will be visible to you.)

------
hprotagonist
If i had to point to a specific _technical_ factor, it's pneumatic tires.

~~~
asark
I've, in some past article linked on (I think) HN read the answer to this very
question as advanced, efficient bearings (so, the ability to produce finely
accurate small metal objects).

------
ivanhoe
I'd say horses are the most important factor here, as why would anyone bother
with bad roads and easy to break (due to the lack of tech) machine when horses
and donkeys were so much superior way of transportation

------
tabtab
When the materials and manufacturing options (MMO) are dodgy and limited, you
have to come up with almost a perfect design to take advantage of what's
available. There's less room for error.

When MMO got better, you could get a lot "wrong" and still have a useful
device.

In other words, early on you have _two_ obstacles: MMO and finding a good
enough design. As time goes on and MMO improves you only have one obstacle:
design, meaning progress is faster or at least shows enough promise to
motivate further experiments.

------
ToddBonzalez
"Bicycles can be ridden on dirt roads or sidewalks (although the latter led to
run-ins with pedestrians and made bicycles unpopular among the public at
first)."

Little has changed.

------
wahlrus
I really enjoyed the markup/css styling on this piece. While the content is
certainly up for debate, it was presented in a very visually clear and
informative manner.

~~~
jasoncrawford
Thank you! I have actually spent a good amount of time getting the image
layout just right

------
ebj73
I think the author is trying too hard to think outside the box here. Sometimes
the answer is the obvious answer, inside the box, whether you want it or not.

------
juanpicardo
This seems to assume that the current bicycle design is obvious and
inevitable, but that is not true. The bicycle went through a lot of different
designs before we got the "safety bicycle" in the 1880s. Here is a small video
showing some previous designs
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI6lgUlEUFU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI6lgUlEUFU)

------
kingludite
Its a lovely article, I much enjoyed reading it. I now think of it as part of
a long list of scattered around publications that tried to describe the same
process. Each with their own flower bed of opinions I don´t agree with and
soiled with technical misconceptions.

Having red a good number of patents and an interest in the innovation process
I had to giggle a bit how the 100 year old design was described as THE
bicycle. As if we've reached the final destination. Iḿ sure they thought the
same about the bone breaker and the face smasher designs long after better
ones were made.

We use to have a local bicycle shop ran by a guy who financially really didn't
need to, it was his passion (and rumor had it it that he did it to get away
from his wife.) I went there one day to ask him why he only sold normal bikes,
you have a huge store but all the bikes are pretty much the same? He explained
that he use to have 1 or 2 special designs but that people looking to buy a
bicycle changed their behavior from circling the shop 2 or 3 times then buying
something to making half a lap then standing there gazing at that "weird" bike
for a minute... and then they just left! He apparently put a good bit of
thought into it since the loss of sales didn't bother him. His eventual
decision was that he didn't want to disrupt peoples train of thought. They are
here to look for a new bike, I should facilitate that to the best of my
abilities.

Most bicycle mods or improvements are not useful but they are all weird to
people. I invented 2 myself that increase efficiency and the quality of the
work out by a truly unbelievable amount. The process was wonderful, I made
rusty old clunkers that felt like high end bikes. While there was some
encouragement from cycling enthusiasts I didn't care much for other peoples
opinions, the manufacturing and marketing was already boring to me but the
moaning was truly something else. The funniest part was when I left a rusty
old test bike parked among hundreds of other bikes, something I never did,
then someone let the air out of both tires. It was poetry to me, I wasn't even
mad. How dare I have something weird on my bike.

more on the normality enforcement:
[https://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/59406/why-
are-r...](https://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/59406/why-are-
recumbent-bicycles-and-velomobiles-illegal-in-uci-bicycle-racing)

~~~
j-conn
Would love to hear more about your mods! Have any photos? Just curious as a
layman who rides one nearly every day.

~~~
kingludite
If I ever chose to do something commercial it will be a race against the
replicators. Ideally they only take notice when a concept takes off. You could
even get the patents?

Not to offend you at all but its an interesting cultural phenomenon to just
ask for the fruits of ones labor when it comes to innovation. If you would
bring a large bag of money to the conversation I would still be reluctant to
share. I'm not at all sure what role I could play in manufacturing.

It sort of reveals what happens with most inventions from raw to polished. I
probably wont produce or share anything. There must be millions of iterations
of this formula ranging from not very good to stuff that blows the mind. All
taken to the grave.

I suppose the inventor catch 22 joke is that one could potentially make a lot
of money with ideas if one had the funds to gamble. Inventors are of course
dreamers so don't expect anything to happen. We are all missing out on much
more than we could possibly imagine.

In all fairness, if you look at what is out there my ideas do not make for a
much better vehicle. If you simply add an aerodynamic body to a recumbent
bicycle then put some electrical assist on it there is very little need for
further efficiency.

------
the2and7
> First, the correct design was not obvious. For centuries, progress was
> stalled because inventors were all trying to create multi-person four-
> wheeled carriages, rather than single-person two-wheeled vehicles. It’s
> unclear why this was.

In the 1800, most people were poor, and any transportation should be aimed for
people with some level of wealth, who would not like to labor to drive
themselves around.

------
amelius
It takes a while to convince oneself that a bicycle actually works, i.e. is
stable and does not fall over. Perhaps that is the reason.

------
hyperion2010
My answer to this question these days is: "What good is a bycicle if there is
nothing you can ride it on?" Sure bycicles may be hard to engineer, but the
environment in which a bycicle could be useful only existed in a select few
places on earth.

I think the author is to quick to dismiss road quality as a primary issue.

------
ZoomZoomZoom
It's funny that what I expected this article to be is to explain the seemingly
rising interested in bicycle as an urban transport _today_

I don't have any data, but I definitely feel a trend for moving to more
compact and energy efficient personal vehicles and I really wish it gathers
more and more momentum.

------
a0-prw
I think he underestimates the horse. If you live in a mostly horse and human
powered society where the infrastructure to support your means of transport is
ubiquitous (ie, stables, smiths, feed supply, etc), there would be zero reason
to consider a clumsy first iteration of the bicycle as promising.

------
choiway
I don't think the modern two wheeled in-line design is an obvious starting
point or design iteration. It's not obviously user friendly either. Proof: 90%
of the people reading this thread probably had to be "taught" how to ride a
two wheeled bicycle.

~~~
jessaustin
This might be a function of age and development? I couldn't learn to bicycle
at the "proper" age. (7? 9? I don't know exactly when it was but I could tell
my parents were frustrated.) I just couldn't do it. Later as a teenager I
tried it and it was easy.

------
ezoe
Another interesting invention we had to wait so long is ski/snowboard.

Modern ski tools were commercially available after 1970s and some of them
aren't affordable until late 1990s: Steel edge, binding with release system,
polyethylene sole, fluorine wax and curving ski.

------
briandoll
Anyone interested in the evolution of bicycle technology who is also in the
bay area should visit the Marin Museum of Bicycling and Mountain Biking Hall
of Fame: [https://mmbhof.org/](https://mmbhof.org/)

------
rawland
In the frame of my PhD defense talk I once created a

    
    
        Rough timeline for the development of the bicycle:
    

[https://img42.com/sAN_u](https://img42.com/sAN_u)

------
loeg
Bicycle chains are really complicated and have tons of moving parts.

~~~
hadlock
Bicycle chains are pretty complicated, but steam powered devices (mills, saws,
etc) were using flat leather belts for decades, and rope drive existed as
well. Many modern bicycles come with belt drives. Also periodically people
produce shaft drive bicycles which require a bit more machining, but have few
moving parts and are quite reliable.

~~~
jdfellow
Leather belt drives were used for early motorcycles (1890s-1910s) even while
the roller-chain was already in wide use for bicycles.

------
trhway
the Ancient Greeks and Romans could have attached paddles to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile)
and basically get something like that
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_steamer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_steamer)

That is why i wondering what should i attach to what to get a [preferably
cold] fusion :)

------
Sephr
I'd probably ask the same about self-balancing electric transportation.

If the original Segway was more like a Uniscoot Hovercycle[1] I could see it
selling quite a lot more.

------
brookhaven_dude
Not really:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zHHPCAao4k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zHHPCAao4k)

~~~
evilolive
could there be any simpler explanations like a modern renovation of the temple
where this was added?

are there other recorded appearances of this modern-looking but very-early
bicycle in the region? why was there a gap in its existence until it was re-
introduced in the 20th century?

------
akrymski
Because asphalt/concrete roads have only been around since 1920s. Biking on
dirt or gravel isn’t fun, horses do better on such surfaces.

------
radar
Bicycles were one of the first items that an individual acquired through
disposable income.

------
superpermutat0r
Another good question in similar Spirit, why did we wait so long for wheels on
suitcases?

------
cparsons3000
The appropriate metal and quality of roads seem like the biggest factors to
me.

------
anthony_barker
Why are we waiting so long for cheap and everywhere electric bikes?

------
RocketSyntax
Because without an 18 speed bike you might as well be walking.

------
modzu
while the premise of this entire article makes no sense, it is full of
interesting history of the bicycle

------
zuhayeer
It's always obvious after the fact

------
bagacrap
Pneumatic rubber tires

------
double0jimb0
I’m pretty sure this author is trolling the reader.

------
AngryData
1\. Wheel technology: Hard tires instead of pneumatic tires are absolutely
horrendous, especially on any vehicle without suspension. Wheel technology of
the time usually consisted of solid wood or wood spoked tire with an
iron/steel rim, it is heavy as balls and you have garbage traction.

2\. Gearing: You need a reliable chain and reliable gears to get reasonable
speeds out of anything with a wheel under a 4 foot diameter. While such
technology did exist, it was similarly heavy, required constant maintenance
and lubrication, and is prone to jumping a tooth and falling off. Without
being able to change gears you got a single gear ratio which makes anything
but flat terrain garbage. Also like a fixy you can't stop pedaling.

3\. Material science: Available materials where much shittier and far more
expensive which not only made the bikes easier to damage and more prone to
flexing and warping, but it also made a bike even heavier than it already was.
The labor costs of making tube steel is also pretty damn high as it required
skilled labor and additional tools and modern welding didn't exist to attach
two pieces of pipe together without weaker flat brackets at rivets or pins.

4\. Storage and hauling capabilities: Bikes, especially really heavy bikes and
fixys, can't hold a whole lot, due to both space and weight limitations. Throw
an extra 50 pounds on your bike and go up some of the same hills as usual and
you will be whipped. People didn't just travel 20+ miles to have a cup of tea
on a whim, if you are going that far or farther you are going to be bringing
supplies or goods, and if you are carrying more than just a few pounds it
would be easier to walk.

5\. Maintenance: Without ball bearings you need to constantly oil your
bearings, which also means bringing oil with you. Drive chains are not
standard and have to be built, repaired, and fitted on a custom basis and
thanks to substandard materials and a flexible bike it would be prone to
damage. Tires require a wheelwright to build and repair custom wheels fairly
often for a luxury vehicle.

5: Fitness: People of those times weren't just a bunch of lard asses so
walking 20 miles isn't a daunting or, in numerous cases these days, an
impossibility. People might even run most of it at the time and get a faster
average speed than a fixy bike anyways. If you can't walk, you definitely
aren't biking that far.

6\. Terrain: While modern mountain bikers can go offroad, a fixy heavy bike
with no tread/traction and hard wheels would not make it half way through a
mud puddle and going down any incline offroad with one is a quick way to
crashing and dieing. You would be forced to forge new paths for your bike
since existing roads are mostly rutted dirt and mud over uneven ground and are
also already occupying the most convenient paths.

The only places a bike in the past would be useful is a well maintained and
paved stone or wooden road, however any place with flat wooden or stone roads
is also going to have everything you would want within walking distance. And
if you both lived in a place with such roads and also wanted to go a
significant distance, there would be plenty of wagon traffic that you could
simply ride on and stay relatively clean and rested rather than getting
yourself covered with horse shit flying off your wheels or slipping in some
horse shit and crashing your bike and ruining your extremely expensive
clothes.

So basically, it is expensive as hell for an inferior product with marginal
benefits in extreme edge case uses. Image having to pay $8,000 for a walmart
bike, not gunna find many takers.

------
otabdeveloper2
Bad quality article.

There's a simple answer: ball bearings are relatively high tech that requires
lots of innovation to come together at the same time.

~~~
SilasX
Relatedly, my favorite example of "why didn't this get invented before" is
wheeled luggage which (from what I've read) wasn't sold until 1989, even
though the wheelbarrow (the same basic idea) has been around since prehistoric
times.

IIRC, the reason it didn't appear sooner was a combination of a) getting
reliable castors[1] for wheels that small is a non-trivial problem, and b)
there wasn't much demand for it until the 80s.

[1] These things:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster)

~~~
goldcd
I got fascinated by this when I saw mention of this elsewhere. I'll agree that
getting sturdy casters at a reasonable price was definitely part of the
problem. As the linked wikipedia article reminded me, 20-odd years ago you'd
still come across wonky casters on very expensive supermarket trolleys.

I think like the bicycle, it was just combination of factors preventing
adoption - and once these had all moved, it was an obvious improvement.

e.g. The luggage you put the wheel on. My distant memories of family suitcases
weren't rigid. Deformable cloth over a flexible outer band of some type. First
ones with wheels I saw just had them on one bottom corner and a drag handle on
the opposite top corner. Where f'in vile to use, as the whole thing would flex
as you pulled (Toppling and attempting to break your wrist). They only really
became 'good' when we got rigid luggage (carry on bag with extendable handle
or rigid-shell case like Samsonite).

But another reason is that previously "You didn't have to move it yourself" In
'the golden age' a porter would put your trunk/case on a wheelbarrow for you.
Then these transformed into 'rows of luggage carts in the airport'. Then as
the decline continued 'rent-able luggage carts, you didn't have local-change
for'... and at this point lack of service for your bag, crossed our ability to
make wheeled luggage - and we all bought it.

~~~
iguy
But early wheeled luggage didn't have casters, just straight wheels. And those
wheeled carts that you see old people dragging home from the supermarket (in
some cities) existed long before -- metal frame, sagging canvas bag, works
great.

There are lots of other factors though. One was buildings with lots of smooth
floors & no stairs, which IIRC was partly about designing to be wheelchair-
friendly, and partly about luggage carts.

Another as you say was flying becoming less of an elite thing -- the private
jet people today sure as hell don't muscle their own luggage anywhere, so
theirs just has to look good in the hotel room.

Another was just savvy marketing: again IIRC, the breakthrough came from
marketing them heavily to pilots first, cool people in smart uniforms (who did
not have porters) breezing along with smart leather bags. Precisely to break
the image of old people dragging their potatoes home.

~~~
goldcd
I agree with every single one of those points.

Other thing I'd meant to mention, was that the territory of "wheeled luggage"
has expanded. Previously maybe at an airport you'd haul your luggage to a car
at the kerb that will take you to your destination.

Modern airport usually has some public transport that takes you into town, and
from there you get further transport to where you wish to go. i.e. Having your
luggage be less of a burden opens up your choices.

I live in a university town with a lot of foreign students. It's now entirely
normal for me to see one 'herding' (for want of a better word) a flock of
cases quite successfully down the pavement infront of me.

------
closeparen
Why did we wait so long after the modern bicycle to see it as transportation
rather than recreation? Awareness of climate change maybe? It seems that a)
bicycles were not primary transportation even before cars, and b) the push to
replace cars with bikes could have happened at any point, even before cars
took off. So why now?

~~~
asark
Bicycles seem really expensive to me, relative to cars, considering how much
simpler they are and how much less total material's involved. Plus they're a
whole lot easier to ship. Not TCO, sure, but sheer cost of the manufactured
object at retail. And on the cheaper end they often barely work correctly at
all anyway, and all of them seem to require a lot more maintenance than a car,
per hour of use or (especially, by long shot) per KM travelled. I assume these
are economy of scale issues that may be sorted out if bicycle use grows
significantly—though I'm not sure about the reliability.

~~~
safepants
i think this is off base. Don't forget the cost to own a car with
depreciation, insurance, fuel, maintenance etc etc. Not even mentioning the
cost of infrastructure required to drive said car.

I don't recommend it, but you can buy a bike from Walmart for $78.

~~~
asark
I'm from the middle of the US so all my experience is with $200 and cheaper
bicycles (maybe $300 adjusted for inflation) since I'm not in the racing
"scene" and bike commuting's infeasible outside very small areas (though I was
able to, and did, do it for a while), but bikes never seem to quite work
right—one set of brakes keeps slipping no matter how many times you fix it, a
couple gears that you just _cannot_ get to hold, tires lose enough air every
48 hours you have to add more to ride yet don't seem to actually have a leak
and anyway you changed them once (and god is _that_ a pain) and they still do
it, chain keeps getting loose, that kind of thing. The best bicycle I've used
I'd have raised hell and tried to return it under lemon laws if it were a car
and had that many little problems. Meanwhile $300 is still, what, 1/50th the
cost of an entry level new car? That's why it seems high. It seems like you
should be able to get 50 _very good and reliable_ bicycles for the same cost
as a car. Not 50 that suck. There seem to be improved bits of hardware that
fix some of the problems but then you're talking more like 1/20 of an entry
level car, which, yikes.

~~~
safepants
I'm fortunate to have a bicycle Co-op in my city. It's a do it yourself
workshop to fix your bike and upgrade parts when the time comes. The staff are
volunteers and the bikes they sell are all donated. Great tuned up second hand
bikes can be purchased for $50. I enjoy using top of the line 1990s technology
in my commuter bikes which can be had for a fraction for the price of new
bikes.

We are also lucky to have youtube with lots of tutorials which I wish I had
when I was first learning.

I agree the relative maintenance of cars is much lower, but I equate the time
it takes to clean my chain to be the same as stopping to get fuel for my car.

I'm not against cars, I just feel the cost of ownership is underestimated.

~~~
silversconfused
Cost of ownership is nuts. My car basically just sits, but I have to pay $1000
a year just to keep it legal. My bike was $50. And that was it.

