Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by runarberg » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #188

Animats wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

But you don't need advanced materials and technologies. You don't need steel. You don't need ball bearings. Archimedes could have built a velocipede, using mostly wood, same tech as ox-driven carts, just the wheels being lighter and more narrow since the load is much less, and it would have worked fine. I'm just not sure about road surface quality back then. I suspect that was a bigger limiting factor. Also, bikes ar…

I think even horses was more of an upper class thing. Most humans throughout our modern history have used their own muscle power for work and transportation. In poorer rural communities a bicycle is immensely helpful in getting your products to a market more quickly and economically then walking. This is as true today as it was in the early 19th century.

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

#212

Post by f_allwein » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 9:53 PM UTC

Same can be said, perhaps more accurately, about the wheelbarrow. From https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/312366/the-knowledge... :

> 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).

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

#213

Post by knodi123 » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 9:53 PM UTC

smileysteve wrote: post #166

dTal wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bamboo-frame bicycles exist today as a fashionable item, and as far as I can tell without having ridden one, they work for practical purposes just as well as metal-frame ones. I suspect you could make a perfectly acceptable modern bicycle with 18th century technology, albeit not as durable. Metal axles aren't much of a problem. Light and strong wheels are trickier, but you could get away with solid wooden ones, or em…

> expensive, flimsy bicycles are completely useless in a world with poor roads and deep wealth inequality. You make a last great point with this. Without paved roads, rubber, decent springs; all of the shortcomings are amplified. The gear drive works, but if you have a wood wheel, with a wood axle, w/ wood cogs, the tolerances to be both comfortable and effective on cobblestone or dirt would be troublesome.

> Without ... rubber,

as a one-word piece of supporting evidence, let me just say - Boneshakers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocipede#Boneshaker

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

#214

Post by derefr » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

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…

> Ball bearings

Couldn't you just use anything sufficiently round and uniform and Mohs-hard, given a lubricant oil to protect it from wear? Glass marbles? Pearls? Rocks after a ridiculous amount of tumbling?

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

#215

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #93

Animats wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

What killed the Chinese iron industry wasn't the lack of a Bessemer converter. What killed them was the mandarin bureaucracy. The mandarins saw that some commoners were getting rich in the iron industry, declared it to be contrary to the proper order, and shut it down. (Source: "The Victory of Reason" by Rodney Stark.)

Strong reverberations of this in Western history as well, and it's quite possibly the strongest argument against monopoly:

Bernhard J. Stern, "Resistances to the adoption of Technological Innovations" (1937)

https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...

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

#216

Post by derefr » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #66

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…

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 m…

> 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.

Haven't they made working bicycles with wooden frames?

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

#217

Post by KozmoNau7 » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #149

nine_k wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good steel would only be strictly needed for axles. Bearings could have been polished and oiled wood. The frame, wood. The hinge of the front wheel, brass or another small bit of steel. Transmission could be a leather belt. Wheels, wood again. Would such a device somehow emulate a modern bicycle? Very likely. Would such a device be practical, reliable, fast, to say nothing of comfort? I greatly doubt it.

Bamboo-frame bicycles exist today as a fashionable item, and as far as I can tell without having ridden one, they work for practical purposes just as well as metal-frame ones. I suspect you could make a perfectly acceptable modern bicycle with 18th century technology, albeit not as durable. Metal axles aren't much of a problem. Light and strong wheels are trickier, but you could get away with solid wooden ones, or em…

Leather "chains" were used on bicycles for a while, made from several small pieces of leather riveted together, in order to form ridges that gears could grab onto.

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

#218

Post by mantap » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

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…

It does seem utterly counterintuitive that a vehicle that cannot balance by itself would be able to balance with the addition of a heavy rider elevating its center of gravity. Usually making an object top-heavy renders it even more unstable, and bicycles are not stable to begin with.

And adding a rider on top of a bicycle does make it more unstable, but the amazing flexibility of the human brain allows us to transform that instability into stability, kind of like how modern fighter jets are intentionally unstable to make them more manoeuvrable.

Bicycles are a marvel of physics and biology working together.

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

#219

Post by davidw » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #216

Animats wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> 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. Haven't they made working bicycles with wooden frames?

Yeah - https://celilocycles.com/ for instance. But it's not easy and I don't think they can mass produce them.

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

#220

Post by thaumasiotes » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

tlear wrote: post #207

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What killed the Chinese iron industry wasn't the lack of a Bessemer converter. What killed them was the mandarin bureaucracy. The mandarins saw that some commoners were getting rich in the iron industry, declared it to be contrary to the proper order, and shut it down. (Source: "The Victory of Reason" by Rodney Stark.)

That does not sound like a good argument at all. Metal for vast majority of human history gave you massive edge in weapon technology. Some Mandarin just shut something like that down? Seems super unlikely Vikings transported Crucible steel all the way from Afghanistan to make high end swords. Damascus steel(actually manufactured in India) and then forged into weapon in Damascus.. etc There got to be other reasons. Be…

This kind of thing isn't totally out of the question. The mandarins famously shut down China's budding sea voyages because they were run by a eunuch, and the mandarins and the eunuchs were opposed factions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He

But there was never a Chinese ideological opposition to peasants becoming rich; the theory advanced by AnimalMuppet makes no sense.