Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
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Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
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
“It wasn’t as though people, after millennia of head-scratching, suddenly “discovered” the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and the telegraph, and modernity unspooled. Rather, people’s priorities underwent a sea change with the onset of the modern age, turning to efficiency, objective measurement, and other goals that made such inventions
... See moreThe market grew slowly at first, accelerating only as experiments led to practical applications like the spreadsheet, introduced in 1979. As use grew, observation of use caused a reduction in uncertainty, leading to more adoption in a self-reinforcing cycle. This kind of gathering momentum takes time in every technological wave: It took almost 30
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