“Why Did We Wait so Long for the Bicycle?”, 2019-07-13 (; backlinks):
The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Yet it was a simple mechanical invention. It would seem to require no brilliant inventive insight, and certainly no scientific background.
…Technology factors are more convincing to me. They may have been necessary for bicycles to become practical and cheap enough to take off. But they weren’t needed for early experimentation. Frames can be built of wood. Wheels can be rimmed with metal. Gears can be omitted. Chains can be replaced with belts; some early designs even used treadles instead of pedals, and at least one design drove the wheels with levers, as on a steam locomotive. So what’s the real explanation?
First, the correct design was not obvious. For centuries, progress was stalled because inventors were all trying to create multi-person four-wheeled carriages, rather than single-person two-wheeled vehicles. It’s unclear why this was; certainly inventors were copying an existing mode of transportation, but why would they draw inspiration only from the horse-and-carriage, and not from the horse-and-rider? (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.) It’s possible (I’m purely speculating here) that early mechanical inventors had a harder time realizing the fundamental impracticability of the carriage design because they didn’t have much in the way of mathematical engineering principles to go on, but then again it’s unclear what led to Drais’s breakthrough. And even after Drais hit on the two-wheeled design, it took multiple iterations, which happened over decades, to get to a design that was efficient, comfortable, and safe.
…But we can go deeper, and ask the questions that inspired my intense interest in this question in the first place. Why was no one even experimenting with two-wheeled vehicles until the 1800s? And why was no one, as far as we know, even considering the question of human-powered vehicles until the 1400s? Why weren’t there bicycle mechanics in the 1300s, when there were clockmakers, or at least by the 1500s, when we had watches? Or among the ancient Romans, who built water mills and harvesting machines? Or the Greeks, who built the Antikythera mechanism? Even if they didn’t have tires and chains, why weren’t these societies at least experimenting with draisines? Or even the failed carriage designs?
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