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.
The other half is this is the efficiency of Roman steam engines where so low as to make it more novelty than useful.
Seeing an expensive device that does less than 1/100th the work of a horse does not obviously translate into a revolution.
> (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…
If you saw off a disc-shaped slice from a log of wood, and it rolls a few meters, you experience first hand that a single wheel can balance itself. Some say this is how the wheel was invented in the first place [citation needed].
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.
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
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.
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.
True for a modern bike, but a brass (whatever metal) bushing would work for a more primitive bike.
Such a primitive bike is only a novelty, not a mode of transportation. It would be less efficient and more expensive than just walking. (I.e., a toy.)
How could it be less efficient than walking? Unless your region is perfectly flat, you could walk the bike uphill and ride downhill and still save ~50% of the effort of traveling any medium distance.
> 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?
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
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…
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.
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.
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.
I went looking to see when ball bearings were invented, and came across this wildly detailed history, prepared for NASA in the 1980s:
> 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?
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-...
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.
>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 t…
Yes, but I don’t think that was the factor here. Ancient technology was astoundingly precise (see the famous Antikythera mechanism).
I think the problem was roads. If you combine bad (or nonexistent) roads with airless hard tires, the result is much much less useful than any modern bike on any modern road.
The first bikes were indeed wooden with wooden wheels. No ball bearings, no hollow steel tubes etc. But streets.
I could now say something about how engineers are so specialized in their perspective they cannot judge things without bringing current conventions into it but hey, every profession comes with it’s weakness.