Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

rootsofprogress.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 515 posts

Re: Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

#111

Post by aequitas »

jandrese wrote: post #58
Retra wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 intercon…

I've mention this a few times I think, but there's an old TV series about this topic, James Burke's Connections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connec... episodes can be found on Youtube.

About how one development leads to the next and so on. And how a break in the chain (eg. New York blackout of 1977) could lead to the entire collapse. The underlying topic is still, or even more, relevant with today's technological dependance.

Re: Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

#113

Post by bagacrap »

timonoko wrote: post #101

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..

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...

Re: Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

#114

Post by deathanatos »

lucideer wrote: post #26

> (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…

> 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.

Re: Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

#115

Post by iguy »

vipbababd wrote: post #95

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 alread…

[comment moved]

Re: Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

#116

Post by evilolive »

asark wrote: post #11
closeparen wrote: post #4

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?

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…

you can buy a quality bike from 10-20 years ago for ~$300 right now on a second hand website, and probably put $50 in maintenance / year. Lower quality, second hand bikes will be a lot less than that.

Re: Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

#118

Post by dsfyu404ed »

Retric wrote: post #49
henryfjordan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

Which is exactly the point. It makes a good unit for figuring out about how much animal an engine replaces.

Re: Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

#119

Post by [deleted] »

atoav wrote: post #50
Excel_Wizard wrote: post #29

>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.…

[deleted]

Re: Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

#120

Post by roywiggins »

atoav wrote: post #50
Excel_Wizard wrote: post #29

>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.…

> Ancient technology was astoundingly precise

Highly skilled artisans could make one-off pieces fit together exactly. Doing so at scale was prohibitively expensive, because machine tools hadn't been invented that let you precisely machine things identically. So, if you had a broken bicycle, you'd need a skilled artisan just to repair it- off-the-shelf parts were impossible. Every single bike would have been a unique object. This is how guns, ships, clocks, and basically everything was made before reliable methods of achieving precision were invented at the dawn of the industrial revolution.

The antikythera mechanism had inherent looseness in its hand-wrought gears which greatly limited how accurate it could have been. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Accuracy

(source: this book, which I gather is pretty accurate, if pop-history https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B072BFJB3Z )

Post reply on HN