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

81–90 of 515 posts

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

#81

Post by benj111 »

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.…

"see the famous Antikythera mechanism"

As a counterpoint see the marine chronometer for measuring longitude. Clocks had been around for centuries so easy right? [1]

Making something strong/reliable is easy, making something precise is 'easy', making something strong/reliable and precise, oh and preferably lightweight is hard.

You do have a good point about roads though. In fact in the UK the first push to tarmac the roads came from cyclists, not from motorists. And the first tyres were for a certain Mr Dunlops sons bicycle.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer

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

#82

Post by wcarron »

henryfjordan wrote: post #46
spraak wrote: post #27

> 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-...

1 HP actually equals 746 watts / second

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

#83

Post by jonsnowman »

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 were heavily used for transportation before cars at least in those countries where they were available at reasonable cost. Anecdotal, but my grandpa and his pals ride bicycles their whole youth and even later, got his driver's license when he was 50, and didn't give a about any environmental issues (though he was no fan of consumerism and made pretty much everything he needed himself and overall preferred simple life, but also deeply hated "those hippies who can't actually do anything useful with their hands", which still characterizes 99 percent of the so called environmentalists...). Back then the distances were smallish, usually under 30 km which made bike the most convenient way for travelling.

I see nobody recognizing that bikes need pretty good roads to be efficient. That was the main reason to prefer walking in some areas even if you had a bike.

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

#84

Post by Gravityloss »

mc32 wrote: post #6

So it looks like there were attempts but they had fatal design flaws and technology (metallurgy) was immature. One question raised is why didn’t we see a trike come about before the bike? It’s more stable and propulsion via direct front pedal isn’t as awkward as the front pedal bike.

It's dangerous in a curve as you can't lean.

But a trike with a big front wheel could have had a decent speed with direct drive and yet be less dangerous than a penny farthing.

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

#85

Post by ajuc »

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…

You don't need steel tubes for a bicycle, you don't even need steel at all. In fact there were (and still are) wooden bicycles and they work fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooden_bicycle

As for ball bearings these are incremental improvements not a necessity (see horse chariots and carriages with wheels used for millenia before we had ball bearings). For another example see medieval wooden windmills - all cogs and bearings made from wood with some animal fat and skin for bushings and lubrication - worked well enough for centuries.

https://ethw.org/Wheels

> Tutankhamen's chariots give us an opportunity to study the details of wheels and axles. The aspect that is most striking to a present-day engineer is that the axles were made of wood and the wheels bad wooden journals. The favored materials were elm and birch, which were imported because neither wood was native to Egypt. Anyone accustomed to modern practice finds it hard to believe that wood-on-wood could function as a bearing at all. This primitive arrangement was improved in a few cases by the addition of a leather bushing. Lubrication in the form of animal fat or tallow is known to have been used, although the exact composition has not been determined.

https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/course...

https://vimeo.com/14166672

First mass-produced bicycle (velocipede) had no ball bearings until a few years later.

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

#86

Post by mikepurvis »

loeg wrote: post #74
sk5t wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a wooden bicycle, with not-very-freely-spinning wheels, and a bone-jarring ride, be worth the considerable expense of purchasing? Would it even be better than walking and/or using a wheelbarrow? Doesn't the thing produced have to rise above a certain level of utility to merit making some copies of it? For human-scale power, I am not sure a bicycle without bearings or pneumatic tires works other than as a curios…

> For human-scale power, I am not sure a bicycle without bearings or pneumatic tires works other than as a curiosity. Pretty much all modern rideshare bicycles do not have pneumatic tires, FWIW. Ride quality suffers, but it's not an awful tradeoff for short trips with whatever squishy compound they use now.

Yeah but the alternative in antiquity wasn't "whatever squishy compound", it was wood, perhaps with a metal strap around it, like a carriage wheel.

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

#88

Post by nanomonkey »

SilasX wrote: post #19
otabdeveloper2 wrote: post #10

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…

From my understanding, the biggest reason was that most buildings were not wheel chair accessible until after the late 80's. Once this started to be mandated, wheeled luggage became useful.

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

#89

Post by iguy »

aianus wrote: post #45
otabdeveloper2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only 50% if you count walking around carrying a table as 100% the same as just walking :)

That said, my non-expert opinion is that a penny-farthing without ball-bearings would probably still work OK; a rover-style bike with a chain would be much harder. But the ability to make bicycle chain, and the ability to make spokes for wheels, I think these happened about the same time too.

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

#90

Post by henryfjordan »

asark wrote: post #47
safepants wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The cost for a Bike is all in the little things like brakes, shifters, etc. As long as we're talking Steel/Aluminum frames (not Carbon Fiber) the difference in cost between bikes is largely put into these important parts. Hence the $300 bike not being great but the $600 bike will be so much better.

I bet if you were buying 50 bikes at a time you'd get a nice bulk discount.

Post reply on HN