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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.
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.
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.
Disagree, spare time's been around forever, aristocrats had it in every century. What changed was cheap steel and machining tolerances good enough to make wheels that didn't shake your teeth out. Leisure without the metallurgy gets you nothing.
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.
- [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”.
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.
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.
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!
> 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
"The Centaur Crank is first screwed up to a shoulder on the axle with right and left-handed threads, so that the pressure of the foot tends to make it all the more secure ; whilst, to prevent its loosening by “ back-pedalling,” a slightly tapered conical pin is driven through both crank and axle, and secured with a nut."
Do you know the patent number? I searched the USPTO but found no bicycle related patent by either of the Wright brothers.
When the Wright Brothers first came to Europe in 1908, their prototype could fly for several kilometers of controlled flight. The best European prototypes at that time were absolutely inferior, which is why the Wright Brothers immediately managed to sign contracts with European companies. They introduced the three-axis control system which was a major innovation, basically the opposite of a patent troll.
I think a lot of early scientists and inventors got embroiled in patent disputes and lawsuits etc. In UK, mainland Europe too. Say what you might, money is a big motivator and that is what kept US going. Altruism is all fine for occasional gestures like not patenting some medicine or stuff like that but sustained innovation is basically a profit chasing exercise. And patents are its biggest enabler.
Anyway my comment was in the context of speed of innovation. Humanity that struggled to get a cycle going for 50 years managed to fly in the next 10 years and within the next 50, intercontinental regular passenger flights were common!
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
Single center wheel sounds efficient till it hits a rut and dumps your load sideways. Two wheels give you a stable base when the ground's bad, which in medieval Europe was always. Redundancy over elegance.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?"
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another analogous musing -- why did we start with main+tail rotor helicopters?
Nowadays 4-rotor quadcopters appeared and have taken over.
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.
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.
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
Does that hold below a certain rotor count though? Autorotation works because the main rotor keeps spinning freely - but a quad's props are tiny and low-inertia, they'd spin down almost instantly. Feels like the comparison only works at helicopter scale.
Upgrade that 'maybe' to 'definitely'. The disc loading on a helicopter is typically much lower than on a quad (excepting crazy designs like the giant human-powered quad) which makes it significantly more efficient for the same overall size.
what works in 100g - 5kg drone does not work for much heavier machines.
- Small UAVs are mainly controlled by varying RPM of each rotor
- Full-scale machines keep ~constant RPM optimal for rotor aerodynamics and change angle of attack for each blade for control (collective and cyclic changes).
With big inertia and no alien materials technology, it isn't possible to apply 'quad' design for your average SAR helicopter.
>another analogous musing -- why did we start with main+tail rotor helicopters?
In fact we started with autogyros.
Also the Fw 61 ("the first successful, practical, and fully controllable helicopter" though I don't know the history in detail) has two equal-size counter-rotating rotors similar to a quadcopter.
Owned an electric unicycle for a few years. The gyro correction is wild, you can feel it fighting to keep you upright before your brain even registers you're tipping. Gotcha: it only works because the motor can react in milliseconds, a human alone could never close that loop fast enough.
Rebuilt an old high-wheeler replica once for a museum exhibit and the thing that got me was the crank position. Direct-drive pedals bolted to the front hub meant top speed capped by wheel size, so they just kept scaling wheels up until it got dangerously tall. Chain drive fixed the actual bottleneck, not the frame or tires.
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.