Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

Horseless carriages of this form were demonstrated by inventors in London in 1774 and Paris in 1779. And in 1813 Karl von Drais, a German physicist and inventor, built a horseless carriage that could carry four people, with one of them steering using a tiller, and another providing the motive power by pedaling. The problem with all these vehicles w

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inventors continued to tinker with variants of the velocipede, some of which had three or four wheels. Finally, in the 1860s, came the breakthrough: the addition of pedals, initially fixed to the front wheel, that allowed riders to drive the wheel directly with their feet, rather than repeatedly pushing against the ground. Exactly where (and with w

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