Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
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Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
The answer, I think, is what it almost always is: that inventors are simply extremely rare. People can have all the incentives, all the materials, all the mechanical skills, and even all the right general notions of how things work. As we’ve seen, even Savery himself was apparently inspired by the same ancient experiment as everyone else who worked... See more
Anton Howes • Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part III
Thus it was the bicycle, rather than the steam engine, that paved the way for the automobile. And the bicycle paved the way in a more literal sense, too. Starting in the…
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Tom Standage • A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
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
... See moreTom Standage • A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
The new design ushered in a golden age, during which cycling flourished as a leisure activity and a means of truly personal locomotion. It let people travel as quickly as they could on horseback, but without the expense of buying, feeding, and maintaining a horse. And unlike trains, which offered high-speed travel subject to a strict timetable and
... See moreTom Standage • A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
in April 1866 a French newspaper, Le Journal de l’Ain, unambiguously described a vélocipède bicycle (i.e., a two-wheeled velocipede) with pedals on its front wheel. Various people claimed to have pioneered this arrangement, chief among them two Frenchmen, Pierre Lallement and Pierre Michaux, and the fight over patent rights went on for decades. But
... See more