51–60 of 515 posts
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
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.
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…
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.
> (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].
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.
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... and https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bicycling-science-third-editi...
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
> 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?
100W on a bike is easy to maintain for several hours, even for non-trained humans. An output of 1hp (750W) only lasts a few seconds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.