I highly highly highly recommend the book “Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle.” It explores the origin, the various social implications across various cultures (it often became a symbol of perversion due to its association with women’s liberation), and even the modern day e-bike movement. 12/10 book, very well written too.
One point this article misses is the size of the cities. Until mid-1800 cities were at most 1-1.5 km long, usually just 2-3 streets. Just look at old maps of Manchester. The only exceptions were the capitals like London, which were an order of magnitude more populous, but still only 2-5 times bigger in distance.
The primary means of transportation was not horse, but feet. You could walk to a destination on the other side of an average city of those times in 15 minutes, so a bike wouldn't bring big gains in time.
Only in 2nd half of 19th century, cities began growing, and transportation became a problem.
> One point this article misses is the size of the cities. Until mid-1800 cities were at most 1-1.5 km long, usually just 2-3 streets.
See perhaps:
> Marchetti's constant is the average time spent by a person for commuting each day. Its value is approximately one hour, or half an hour for a one-way trip. It is named after Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, though Marchetti himself attributed the "one hour" finding to transportation analyst and engineer Yacov Zahavi.[1]
What about on the countryside? Villagers traveled to church and other villages regularly. That can easily take a couple of hours by foot – and by horse, at a normal pace – but would go significantly faster on bicycle.
I know there are reasons they didn't have bicycles, but I don't think "going by feet is equally good" is one of those reasons.
And while in large cities, the need for horses had subsided, anyone living a distance from a rural village on a farm would have horses in any case for work which could also be used for visiting town.
That’s really not true, you needed a pretty large farm to have both the need and income for a horse.
The horse itself cost at least a third of a labourer’s yearly income (which was not really disposable), and that does not include a sufficiently large pasture or equivalent fodder.
Not only that, but those horses would have been work implements, like a tractor today, you would usually not get those horses out to go to church or see your family a village over. If only because most of the time the horse would be at work in the fields anyway.
Yup, individuals farms far away from anything is a New World thing. In Europe villages were pretty densely populated for most of history - usually about 0.1-0.5 km2 per family. You can't afford horses with that amount of farming land (and if you're a serf you can't technically own property and you aren't allowed to leave your village anyway).
> What about on the countryside? Villagers traveled to church and other villages regularly.
"Regularly" may have been once a week (e.g., Lord's Day / Sunday). Otherwise people lived either in villages themselves, or in hamlets (collective security at night) and 'commuted' to their fields. Or on-site of the land owner if they were workers (earlier: serfs).
Living on a farmstead wasn't really a thing until relatively recently in history.
There's no point going from 1 village to another when you're a serf, and for centuries it was even illegal (at least in most of Central&Eastern Europe). Serfdom wasn't much different from slavery in practice - you couldn't own property, marry without the permission of your landlord, leave your village, etc. This only changed in 19th century.
Also villages, churches, manors, inns, markets, blacksmiths, and all the other necessary infrastructure was rarely more than 1 hour on foot away.
In my country there's 1 church per 30 km2, that's on average 6km between churches which is roughly 1 hour on foot.
Serfs were far better off than chattel slaves. A serf could not be sold away from their village, they could marry (AFAIK permission to do so was not required in most countries) and have a stable home with a spouse and kids, they had rights to the land they farmed, and could own property. It did vary between countries, and what you describe is true in some, not in others.
Serfdom declined over time in western Europe and had largely disappeared by the end of the middle ages. So it does not explain why western Europeans not invent the bicycle in that period that was at least a few centuries, sometimes longer - 800 years in some places!
The rule of thumb is that in Europe, it got worse as you went east. E.g. in Russia, the serf could be sold away from their village, and even away from their family, could effectively be stripped of any property by the owner, could be severely punished for arbitrary reasons. Just about the only thing that wasn't legal was outright murder - but even that was effectively unenforceable except in the most egregious cases involving numerous murders and torture, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darya_Nikolayevna_Saltykova.
In general, in many cases, what rights exist on paper is irrelevant; what matters is how they are applied in practice, and what avenues to enforce their rights the holders have. E.g. it is not uncommon for societies with serfdom to limit the ability of serfs to file legal petitions against their owners.
> So it does not explain why western Europeans not invent the bicycle in that period
They were too busy fighting wars, like the 100 years war. Also the Inquisition might not have seen bicycles with good eyes. The bicycle couldn't have happened without the Reinassance and the Industrial Revolution.
Why didn't we make a mass manufactured consumer product before the Industrial Revolution?
* The Industrial Revolution increased the number of people with disposable income. The potential market for a new thing was seen as much larger post Industrial Revolution.
* Inventing was seen as a much more profitable venture with the possibility of manufacturing behind it. There was a wave of entrepreneurs on the latest hype cycle.
* Urbanization helped spread ideas faster. The trains helped connect distant people. Part of the marketing of bicycles is seeing people ride them on the street. Busier streets with more visitors only help spread the word.
* Previous levels of material sciences limited the quality of the bike
I think the point is that we didn't make it for a _long_ time after the Industrial Revolution. The "safety bikes" mentioned in the article, the first really practical bikes, only really took off in _1890_.
I've recently visited the aerospace smithsonian and they had an exhibit on the wright brothers. I'd known about their prior careers as bicycle makers and repairers, but the thing that really grabbed my attention was the price. For a single speed, bare bones tube design they were charging (when adjusted for inflation) around 1500 dollars. Now a comparable bike costs maybe a 10th that.
Essentially handmade bikes cost 2-5x more than $1500 now. $150 will buy you a Wallmart piece of junk. A utility bike suitable for bombing around a city is going to cost somewhere around $1000. I own three that each have a > $2K replacement cost, even with me building the wheels and installing everything but the bottom bracket. Yep you can easily spend more than $1500 for a single speed bare bones bike, and the people that build them have waiting lists years long.
At least in the UK, you can get decent enough bikes from Decathlon for about £300 (including our 20% tax). Double that and you'll open up a lot of options, including entry-level Dutch bikes.
I rode a £250 Triban in London for 7 years until I sold it recently for an e-bike. It's not handmade, but it's a solid bicycle. I did have to upgrade the tyres to Schwalbe Marathon Plus, though, to stop the punctures.
A good bike today costs about half or maybe a third that, not a 10th. You can buy bikes for a 10th (many do), but they are low quality bikes that are 10th the price, but the quality is lacking. If you want a bike made by hand the way the wright brothers did it would be far more than that price (but the only people doing that are serious racers who demand much high quality and other custom things so I'm not sure this is fair)
I said a /comparable/ bike, single speed, steel tubing, medium precision chaining and teeth on the gear.
A similar price will get you a wildly superior bike the likes of which was well beyond their craft, quite serviceable pedal assist bikes are selling for under a thousand these days.
Penny-farthings were expensive. They were the equivalent of $3000+ bikes today which are primarily only purchased by enthusiasts with sufficient disposable income.
Also, not enough standardization of measurements to make interchangeability to work. And another point is that shipping used to be too costly over anything but water --> whole production chain had to be quite localized.
> Also, not enough standardization of measurements to make interchangeability to work.
A good book on increasing precision in history, The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World:
> The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools—machines that make machines. Eventually, the application of precision tools and methods resulted in the creation and mass production of items from guns and glass to mirrors, lenses, and cameras—and eventually gave way to further breakthroughs, including gene splicing, microchips, and the Hadron Collider.
> Simon Winchester takes us back to origins of the Industrial Age, to England where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. It was Thomas Jefferson who later exported their discoveries to the fledgling United States, setting the nation on its course to become a manufacturing titan. Winchester moves forward through time, to today’s cutting-edge developments occurring around the world, from America to Western Europe to Asia.
> As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society
Same in Europe. Steel has increasingly been phased out starting sometime around 2010, so almost 15 yrs ago now. Even budget bikes (~200-300€ new) are generally aluminum now.
Not in Holland, everyday bikes are still steel because they're just that much stronger. Especially women's bikes because they support the frame only from the bottom.
That mostly says something about the socio-economic status of the people commenting in here, going to any big Walmart-like store in the Western world most of the bikes for sale there are still made of steel, not of aluminium or other light materials. I'm talking about basic bicycles like this one [1] (I had one from the same bike manufactured), they're made out of steel.
How certain are you that bike is made of steel? That sort of flat and fat tubing is typical of aluminium, since it is a weaker material than steel in terms of cross-sectional area.
They have been shaping cheap steel bikes like that for years to make them look like aluminum. Some of the buyers aren't even looking for an aluminum bike, they just want a 'bicycle' that looks modern. It's a pity because it means the bike is much heavier than it would be if it had nice slim steel tubes.
Any discount store bicycles in Australia are made in China and all have aluminium alloy frames from what I have seen. (Most are of a mountain bike or BMX style)
If you walk into a high end bike shop you won't see many steel bikes, you'll see them mostly with higher end materials like aluminum, titanium, or carbon fiber.
Most people aren't getting their bikes from a high end bike shop though, most are getting their bikes from discount shops like Walmart, which sells mostly steel bikes.
Steel is a great material for bike frames. Cheap, strong, fairly light when in tubular form.
Now if you’re trying to save every last ounce and someone else is paying for the bike, sure go carbon, but the vast majority of people are not even at the fitness level to really “need” a carbon bike.
Agree! My current racing bike uses chromoly steel, which is somewhat stiffer and stronger than regular steel, so they can make the tubes thinner. I can attest it’s very light as a result. Maybe not as light as a modern Aluminum frame, but still, very very light, and I guess more durable.
It's my understanding that steel is one of the more repairable metals? Aluminium and carbon fibre can't be welded as easily (in the case of aluminium) or at all (in the case of carbon fibre).
Steel framed bicycles are good enough for the vast majority. I fear bike manufacturers are switching to less repairable materials and proprietary parts to increase profits.
Steel has a better failure story than carbon fiber. Many impacts that would shatter a carbon fiber frame, dangerous to the rider, will only bend a steel one. Carbon fiber makes sense for a racing bike, but for street riding I'll stick with steel.
A friend of mine was nearly killed on a carbon fibre frame that just tore itself apart while going up a hill and threw him into the road, unconscious. I would never touch one for street riding.
Carbon fiber frames can be challenging to see the cracks and damages to it before it spectacularly fails. There's a good chance you won't know it is about to break until it shatters.
Any material under stress gets fatigued. The problem with carbon fiber specifically is that there are practically no visible signs of it reaching the threshold.
I don’t know how common it is, but why would you take that risk on the road for a couple kg of weight savings? If you’re racing competitively that’s one thing, but is it worth it on the commute?
> I fear bike manufacturers are switching to less repairable
Is the frame really an issue though? I don't aluminum frames break that often, I'd bet that's probably one of the least common problem for modern bikes (gears, brakes, suspension etc. are way more fragile). Most bikes are likely to be discarded way before the frame would need to be repaired. It seems totally like a red herring to me..
> Steel framed bicycles are good enough for the vast majority
Well most people don't seem to agree. There are still plenty of steel bikes available, even relatively high-end ones, they are just not that popular.
Yes, steel, especially non heat treated 4130 crhomoly is repairable at just about any metal working shop. That's why it's the choice of bicycle tourers and custom frame builders. Also a steel frame is very dependable, bicycle enthusiasts usually rebuild thier steel frame a couple of times during its lifetime. Last year I bought a lugged steel road bike frame that has the same age as myself and build up with a mix of vintage and contemporary components with vintage looks.
Alloy, titanium and carbon fiber are lighter and that's what most consumers want, having watched Tour de France and bicycle industry marketing materials. Big brands facing increased competition from Asia started to put carbon frames of questionable quality on the market, so if you want an okay bike you are best served by alloy, because they're mass produced and the process is quite optimized and well understood. Titanium is basically unrepairable without special tooling and know how and it feels basically the same as alloy. It's stronger and more corrosion resistant.
The bike industry also puts a lot of new or proprietary standards on the market, especially when it comes to bottom backets. Other new standards include different fork spacing, head tube diameters, rear suspension couplers, proprietary frame integrated suspension and more recently integrated e-bike batteries. The worst offensers are Cannondale, Specialized, Trek and Cervelo.
If you want a bike with sensible standards you want a BSA threaded bottom bracket if it's a metal frame or BB86/92 press fit if it's a carbon frame, a fork with a 1 1/8" steerer or tappered from 1 1/8" to 1 1/2" steerer if it's a mountain bike or a high end road bike, a 34 mm or a 44 mm head tube, 135 mm O.L.D. rear and 100 mm front fork spacing for quick release skewers or 148 mm/110 mm boost spacing if it's a newer mountain bike or 142 mm/100 mm spacing if it's a newer road bike with thru axles, a seat post diameter of 27.2 if it's a road bike or 31.6 mm if it's a newer mountian bike. For brake mounts I prefer IS brake mounts because they're robust, don't have threads to cross thread and misalignment issues are not common, but modern road bikes come with the flat mount (FM) standard and newer alloy MTBs come with post mount (PM). What you probably don't want is a mountain bike with flat mount brakes, funny axle standards, direct derailleur mounts, integrated seat posts, integrated cockpits, full internal routing, lefty forks, integrated frame suspension and so on.
Carbon fibre frames can actually be repaired and there are quite a few companies that do it. In fact I'd go as far as saying that the damage that would write off an aluminium frame can be repaired with a carbon one in 9/10 cases. The problem is that you really need specialist equipment and know-how to do it, which drives the prices up, a steel frame can be welded by almost anyone with some basic knowledge and tools.
>> I fear bike manufacturers are switching to less repairable materials and proprietary parts to increase profits.
So I kinda disagree, there is greater interoperability in bikes now than there ever was(imho). Many SRAM parts can be used with Shimano parts and vice versa, nearly everything is still easily disassemblable and repairable by someone with a work stand and a set of tools.
The biggest "threat" to bike repairability is unfortunately electrification - motors and batteries are essentially black boxes that while repairable(nearly all ebike motors are right now) the skill level to do so is significantly higher. And batteries are of course disposable, no one repairs them as far as I know. Which is a shame because buying an ebike has been completely transformative for me with MTB as a hobby - it removed some mental barriers for going out on my bike out of fear I'll get too tired to continue, with an ebike I go much more often and ride for longer and further. But while I can do 90% of the maintenance on it myself(and I think anyone can with a bit of spare time), if the motor goes I'll have to rely on a third party to fix it.
Steel is less common, but not really for performance reasons. There are plenty of lovely steel bikes, and they are more durable and just as light. Feel is also nicer (although this slightly more subjective). Ali is just cheaper to manufacture.
There are plenty of lovely steel bikes but steel is definitely less common for performance reasons.
It's neither more durable or lighter than frames made of aluminium, titanium or carbon fibre.
For example, a typical frame made of steel will generally be about 1kg heavier than one made of carbon. The forks will 500g heavier. If you scratch or chip the paint steel will corrode.
The claims that steel (or titanium) "feels" better than aluminium or carbon fibre have been thoroughly debunked.
The Young's Modulus of steel tubes used in bike frames ends up almost exactly the same as aluminium or titanium and steel has no "magic" vibration absorbing qualities.
Carbon fibre is the only frame material with any real vibration damping and even that is massively over-hyped compared to an actual shock absorber or even bigger tyres.
If you want to choose a steel frame then it should be because you like the look, it's easy to weld, uses less energy to make or it's cheaper.
> "The claims that steel (or titanium) "feels" better than aluminium or carbon fibre have been thoroughly debunked."
Have they? Do you have support for that statement?
Why is it so implausible that different materials might feel different?
I did a (non-blind) comparison of steel versus carbon fiber, and they felt very different to me.
They also certainly sound wildly different if you just tap your finger on steel frame versus a carbon fiber frame, so a different "feel" that corresponds to higher frequency vibrations seems plausible.
I do not see any relation between effectively static strain gauge versus force measurements and the "feel" of riding a bike in terms of high frequency vibrations. The rest of the video is just the confidently stated opinions of a random person.
OK what do you think contributes to good "feel" of a bike frame, with regard to high frequency vibration, then?
I mean what frequency would you class as road buzz? With that we could start to analyse what's going on.
When I look at the damping ratio of steel[1] I see something around 0.01 - 0.05 which is under-damped.
Carbon fibre can be somewhat better at between around 0.1-0.3 i.e. an order of magnitude better but still not what I'd consider a shock absorber.
I'd be surprised if much high frequency vibration that's made it through the tyres is actually damped by the frame.
With regard to non-blind, anecdotal comparisons I own and regularly ride bikes made from steel, aluminium and carbon fibre. I'm in the camp that thinks a long flexible seat post will do much more for comfort than frame material.
If you know of a study showing otherwise though, I'd be really interested to see it.
1. Sorry I can't find exact figures for 4140 CroMo but I don't think it's outside of this range.
It was a long time ago that I compared bikes, but I remember really feeling the texture of all the little pebbles that makes up road pavement on a carbon fiber bike. Then with an old steel bike, it felt as if the road had been polished into smooth glass surface. This difference was especially noticeable in the feet.
At the time, I assumed the difference was the frame material, but I really do not know the cause. I do believe there is something that could be quantified as opposed to just a psychological effect, but it could be something non-obvious like the typical curved shape of old steel forks; or the frame geometry or tube diameters; or even something else that just correlates with frame material like the tendency of old steel frames to have hand-built wheels with lots of spokes as opposed to the newer (seemingly) rigid factory wheels with fewer spokes.
Your anecdote is exactly the same as all others claiming to be able to tell the difference - there's not enough information in it for anyone to be able to make a judgement either way.
I would expect that a person conscientious enough to know how shocks, wheel size, tyre type and pressure, saddle type, and speed affect ride comfort would also include that information in their post.
Therefore, these anecdotes amount to "I rode on two different bikes which happened to have different frame materials and I could tell a difference in the amount of vibration." Meaningless, even if we don't consider human biases, after all these aren't blind tests.
I would be curious to know if there is a difference that can be felt, but in the end it's of no practical use. I bet even slightly adjusting your tyre pressure will have 10x the impact of any possible difference in frame material.
My basic argument is just that it is plausible that the perceived different feel of different frame materials is real, and that there is no support for the claim of another comment that a different feel is impossible. I am surprised that no one seems to have done any convincing experiments.
I could have left out my anecdote because it is subjective and prone to bias and error, but it is how I believe I can rule out (some of) the commonly cited reasons of different bike feel -- seat posts, because that would not affect vibrations coming through the feet; and tire pressure, because different tire types and pressure have their own different and recognizable feel (e.g. responsive and jittery with high pressure, squishy and sluggish but not silky smooth with low pressure).
I did not mean to imply that I had, but with the billions spent by the fitness cycling industry pushing out "cheap" aluminium and carbon fiber frames against the popular "myth" that steel feels smoother, you would expect that someone would make the effort to do a reliable test, assuming it really is a myth.
>If you scratch or chip the paint steel will corrode
this isn't really true.
yes, exposed steel will show rust, but that's not what "corrodes" iron to the point of weakness. to corrode in a way that weakens iron, it needs to be kept wet over an extended period of time. If you've seen an old car with holes rusted through, that has occurred "from the inside" in places where water can collect and sit. The outside of objects will dry after rain, and such corrosion will never be a problem beyond aesthetics.
All my bikes are steel because I've cracked & snapped numerous frames over the years from riding them too hard. During my racing years (2005-2015) at least one rider would crack their frame at each race weekend!
I think the author should give more credence to it not being intuitive that people could easily learn to balance on a bicycle. The other examples he gave - horse, canoe - are stable without a rider. If you put a canoe in the water, it will stay upright. Horses, obviously, are stable without a rider. A bicycle without a rider will fall over.
I don't think it's obvious that putting a human on a long, two-wheeled vehicle will make it more stable than that vehicle is on its own. I think it's also not obvious that most humans can quite easily and quickly learn how to balance a bicycle.
Long before bicycles, people observed that rolling wheels (e.g. coins) are stable above a certain speed, falling over when they slow down.
(This is actually true of bicycles, for a similar reason: like a single wheel, they steer in the direction of a fall, and that counteracts the fall, because if you steer left, you fall right and vice versa.)
The possibility that a two-wheeled vehicle could be stable when moving should have manifested itself to some of the brightest minds in European science as far back as at least the Renaissance.
most of the mystery disappears as one notices the absence of good quality roads and low-friction (fine) mechanics (as both are hard requirements for an "economical" human-powered vehicles - as even untrained everyday folks are relatively good at endurance running/walking and carrying a light backpack, but carrying ourselves plus a vehicle over bad terrain makes it not worth it)
we like to think how amazing the wheel is, but ... what's amazing is a road network. and what's ridiculous is that some empires spent their might on making flat slabs and putting them in a big pile, while others used some of theirs to make roads, but it took so many years to combine the two :)
and that's why railroads appeared before bicycles basically.
> The hard, flat road surfaces we take for granted are relatively new. Asphalt surfaces weren't widespread until the 1930s. So, are motorists to thank for this smoothness?
> No. The improvement of roads was first lobbied for – and paid for – by cycling organisations.
Good roads are important to cycling, obviously, and to cycling becoming popular, but lack of smooth roads didn't impede the development of the bicycle. Rather, lack of bicycles impeded the development of smooth roads!
I'm not saying balance was a problem - quite the opposite. It turns out balance is not a problem. I'm saying that in a world without bicycles, I don't think it's obvious that balance is not a problem. My point is that I find it quite reasonable that people just didn't even think about a two-wheeled vehicle for a long time because it's not obvious that it will be stable.
What people did try to make work was a four-wheeled cart, which I think is in line with a tricycle. I also agree there were other factors - I think there is no single answer to this question, but rather a constellation of factors. My claim is that I believe it reasonable to include people's lack of imagination that two-wheels could work in that list of factors.
I don't know how prevalent tricycles were but in the article the advertisement for the "saftey bike" says "safer then any tricycles" so there were some. Not sure why they were safer then tricycles of the time. Were these tricycles tall?
I kind of wonder what it would be like to build a tricycle using pre-1800s technology. What would be the most difficult challenge? Lack of chain drive? Lack of quality bearings? Durability? Materials? Lack of rubber?
I bet a bicycle using 1700s tech would be horribly expensive considering the GDP per capita too. Not having rubber tires would make them dangerous as heck too. Traction is a huge factor in vehicles that aren't animal drawn. A horse/ox/human provides a ton of traction and stability to a vehicle when they pull it.
Riding a horse is HARD. Riding a bicycle is so much easier and safer. I gave up horse back riding after falling for the 4th time and seeing all the paralyzed people at horse shows. Being randomly yeeted 15 feet in the air by a half ton animal because it saw a weird shadow on the ground makes riding a road bike in traffic seem downright tame.
83% of horseback riders are injured while riding. It's literally an extreme sport more dangerous than skiing or motorcycle racing. It boggles my mind to see riders without helmets or other protective gear.
I suspect that nobody thought of a 2 wheel design because nobody thought it would be stable. The hinge between the front and back wheel is crucial. Even today, few bicyclists understand how a bicycle is able to turn and remain upright.
None of the early designs seemed to have any brakes, making them quite impractical.
Without modern steel and machined parts, a bicycle of wood and iron would simply be too heavy.
Maybe there would have been an opportunity for a three-wheel recumbent bike to be developed first? Seems like a lot of easier engineering if you can take stability as a given and just worry about the driver supplying direction and power.
Eh, doesn't work well with the factors that led to the penny-farthing.
The penny-farthing was a direct drive on the front wheel - no chain. It had you positioned on top of the wheel to get as much traction as possible.
A primitive recumbent trike would tend towards the same design, like a child's trike, with no chain and a direct drive on the front wheel.
And because you'd get terrible traction, with so little weight, you'd be dead in the water until the machining was available to engineer a chain system to connect pedals in front of the cyclist with wheels underneath. I don't think there's any penny-and-two-farthings intermediate to make the recumbent trike work before that.
Here is a simple simulation of a bicycle's stability [1]. The simulation more or less predicts what happens in real life, so we do understand why bicycles are stable.
As you can see from the simulation, this is a multibody dynamics problem. The bicycle and human have lots of moving parts, and as they move there are forces in 3D [2] amongst them. So there can't really be a simplified, short and mostly complete English explanation (like for why planets go around the sun). That doesn't mean we can't predict.
> Their study shows that there isn’t one simple reason for this phenomenon. A combination of factors, including gyroscopic and caster effects, bicycle geometry, speed, and mass distribution come into play to keep an uncontrolled bicycle upright.
I think we’re saying the same thing. There is no simple physical explanation that humans can intuitively understand, because the interaction of forces is so complex. I’m not claiming that it’s a mystery causing fundamental problems for physics.
Actually the intuitive human reactions on a bike are often the exact opposite of what you need to do to balance the bike. F.ex. if you look at kids learning to bike their intuitive reaction to the bike falling to one side is to lean to the opposite side, but that has the exact opposite effect of what they want to achieve. When you lean to one side you exert force force on the bike the other side and the bike will fall quicker. What you need to do is to use the handlebars to turn a little bit to the same side the bike is falling to re-balance it. Ehm, at least I think so? The more I think about it the more uncertain I become.
Let me restate. There are many natural phenomena that are complex. Say the details of interstellar nuclear reactions connected to the behavior of stars. There is no simple explanation, only complex mathematical models that predict the behavior very well.
So don't say "no astrophysicist understands stellar reactions" because that is false. They understand fully, and can write the model and simulate it to answer any question.
Ditto for bicycles. Just because there is no simple explanation for bicyles does not mean we don't fully understand the physics of bicycles. It just can't be put in English. Only in complex mathematical models.
> no astrophysicist understands stellar reactions" because that is false
Cyclists are not exactly the equivalent of "astrophysicists" in this situation though. There are of course physicists who are also cyclists, but basically no cyclist who is not (or isn't very interested in the field) would be able to explain it.
>> There are of course physicists who are also cyclists, but basically no cyclist who is not (or isn't very interested in the field) would be able to explain it.
This is probably a case where not being a scientist was an advantage. Turns out they didn't need a simulation or mathematical proof it could work in order to try it.
The amount of detail on that site is breathtaking. Beautifully done, really.
However, on the question at hand, it mostly says:
>Bicycle stability can’t be explained using just one or two mechanisms. It’s a combination of many different intertwined factors, like the mass distribution of individual components, size of the tires, geometry of the frame, and others.
[...] What keeps bicycles balanced with or without a rider is still an active area of research, and even the seemingly basic idea that, for a bicycle to be self-stable, it needs to turn the handlebars into the fall, has not yet been proven.
After looking at that page, I understand something, but I am still curious about other things.
There is no mention of air resistance at all. Does it play a role in (de)stabilizing the vehicle in higher speeds? Would a bicycle work as well in, say, lunar vacuum (I imagine that it would be hard to pedal in spacesuit, but let's assume a spherical cow and a lunar bicyclist in normal clothes). Would a lunar bicycle be more stable at lower speeds because of the lower gravity on the Moon?
Motorcycles and bicycles turn with the same principle: countersteering.
When I started riding motorcycles, I bought a well-known motorcycling book. It had a whole chapter on countersteering because there are even today many seasoned motorcyclists who don't believe or understand that you turn using countersteering.
You're answering the wrong question. The question is not "how does the rider initiate a lean" which is usually through countersteering.
The actual question is "Why, when you give a bicycle a good shove, does it stay upright on its own, continually changing its direction to balance itself?"
The counter steering answer to that question is rake, the fact that the steering axis hits the ground in front of the contact patch if the front tire, so that when a bike is leaned over it self-steers into the turn (the contact patch torques the wheel around the steering axis) and countersteers itself upright.
It's well known in motorbikes that the amount of rake is what makes a bike more stable vs more responsive to steering. Some folks lower the front of the bike - tighten the triple tree lower on the forks - to increase responsiveness on otherwise more boring bikes.
Of course there's more to it all, gyroscopic effects and so on, but this is the countersteering perspective.
Reviewing this comment I didn't get all the terminology right - when I said rake, I was conflating trail, rake and steering head angle, where the latter two combine to define the amount of the former.
It's also amazing how stable a bicycle is, that it allows you to steer with one hand or even "look ma, no hands". I only came to appreciate that after I started riding e-scooters - those are very hard to control if you don't keep both hands on the handlebars, and taking both hands off will probably throw you off instantly.
Yep, e-scooters are maybe 7 years old (I start counting from the release of the Xiaomi M365) and so it’s real a shame that e-scooters with turn signals are finally here since only one year or two.
Back when I used to do my commute with e-scooters, indicating my direction was a real pita and, most of the time, totally impossible. In fact I used to use the sidewalk and pedestrian crossings if I needed to go left through the traffic.
Probably on the same percentile as the number of people that understand how the Otto cycle works to power their car, or how differentials in the axles function to apply said power to the wheels through turns, etc.
Understanding the physics is not a requirement to operate the vehicle.
It is simple. A bike will be stable without a rider because if it tilts to the left, the front wheel will also tilt to the left (as the hinge is behind the center of gravity). This results in a left turn, and the centrifugal force of the turn will bring the bike back upright and straighten the wheel.
The rider turns the bike by moving the handle bars slightly in the opposite direction he wants to turn. Then the bike falls in the direction he wants to turn, and the handle bars are then rotated in that direction. To straighten out, the handle bars turn a little tighter, and the centrifugal force of the turn pushes the bike back upright.
Simple? No. But the universe is not a simple place.
Definitive explanation? Yes - to a significant degree of definitive. As with all science/engineering-understanding there are always further details but this we've got pretty well down at the macro level humans operate at.
Nobody would think walking is as stable as we know it is (try to put e.g. a Star Wars action figure in standing position on a table, it is not so easy and not very stable).
Also, horses are the original self-driving transportation, and anyone with the means to buy some newfangled technology like the early bicycle. It's been a hundred years and we're still not better in that regard than the finest of equine hybrid technology, so can you imagine the landed gentry giving that up to... Exert themselves to travel to town?
Yup... before the industrial revolution, those who could have theoretically afforded a bicycle (and had a need to transport only themselves to somewhere else) could also afford a horse, while all the others not only couldn't afford a bicycle, but also had no need for one. Peasants barely left their village, and if they did, it was to deliver some produce, either to their landlord or to the market, and for that a bicycle wouldn't have helped...
FWIW there are many places in Europe where pedestrian, bicycles, cars and whatnots are still using these very same roads, made of pavement, the exact same way romans were building it. I use these in the old city center nearly daily.
Right, but those roads were useful enough to be worth then effort to build for the Romans. However they were not enough more useful than a dirt track to be worth building in general. There were much less roads built after the fall of Rome, as Rome was able to find the labor to build them at get enough benefit. The rest of the world wasn't connected enough that great roads made much a difference to enough people that they were worth building. Once roads exist the rest of the world will use them, but they wouldn't build them.
In the US some roads were built in the early days, but canals and later the railroad had enough advantages over road transport (both can haul far more bulk) that for most roads were not worth building and the dirt track was fine. Towns would build roads in town because mud was annoying enough, but farmers (the majority of the population) didn't travel often enough that the cost (labor) to build a road was worth it - they just stayed on the farm when it rained.
> The rest of the world wasn't connected enough that great roads made much a difference to enough people that they were worth building.
When bicycles were young, the world was connected enough for this. But train tracks were a better technology (with better cost/benefit) at the time.
> In the US some roads were built in the early days, but canals and later the railroad had enough advantages over road transport (both can haul far more bulk) that for most roads were not worth building and the dirt track was fine.
Yes, exactly!
> [...] but farmers (the majority of the population) didn't travel often enough that the cost (labor) to build a road was worth it - they just stayed on the farm when it rained.
And they also only just needed to get to the next train station. The didn't need a county [sic!] spanning network of roads, just many individual star topologies.
Roads are immensely useful for military logistics. But you have to be a very thoroughly militarized society to benefit from and appreciate that effect, given the immense effort that goes into building them. Romans were exactly such a society - they mobilized an unusually large proportion of their population for pretty much non-stop warfare.
I agree that Rome built her roads for her military, and her military benefited from them.
However, I am not sure that Rome mobilised an unusually large proportion of their population. For the longest time, Romans were better at warfare than most of their neighbours, but I'm not sure they actually did more of it.
Their neighbours weren't as organised, and not as organised on as large a scale; but they perhaps mobilised just as much?
"So the Romans have something on the order of 750,000 adult males liable for conscription, of which some 526,000 are in the band the Romans generally think of as ‘fighting age’ (17-46). That is a staggering figure, though of course the Romans never put that many men under arms at one time: peak roman mobilizations in 212 and 211 are around 185,000 (which is still more than double peak attested Seleucid or Ptolemaic mobilizations)."
There are many places in the world today where there are no paved roads, but people ride bicycles OK. Lived in one such place as a child, rode my bicycle through the mud to the grocery store every day.
That’s only really true for bicycle with modern rubber wheels. Attempting to ride through the mud or on rough surfaces with wooden wheels would have been much more challenging (not to mention uncomfortable).
Since I started commuting by bike, I really thought that it would never work without flat roads. The value is in keeping kinetic energy as long as possible. Outside of flattened path in the wild it quickly becomes a burden. Today i could ride a primitive wooden wheel bike.
>Since I started commuting by bike, I really thought that it would never work without flat roads.
You never rode on dirt roads before? Sure, it's not as efficient as on pavement and you can't use road tires, but it's still much more efficient than walking.
yes that's what i tried to mean, if you were a carpenter in the middle ages and assembled a bike like device, you'd be cooked at the first dirt road on a hill (people may even ostracize you for trying crazy non holy things like this)
I wonder if much is know about the origins of wooden Chukudu scooters of Congo [1]?
The wikipedia article states that they date back to only the 1970s, but there does not appear to be any technology reason why they couldn't long pre-date that, and they apparently work well on dirt roads that have probably been around for a long time.
One article [2] claims they have been used "for centuries" but a quick Google did not find any evidence to back that up, but it does seem plausible.
Ball bearings were invented after the bicycle. Belive it or not, but people on a budget would still get bikes without bearings up until the interwar period.
Every pre-modern wagon had a big old bucket of grease hung at the side of it. It was needed to keep the axle continuously lubricated. (Sayings about wheels and grease are preserved to this day.)
Theoretically, a two-wheeled transportation contraption could have been made, but having to carry the grease with you would make it pointless.
It's not obvious that a bicycle would be in any way better than a carriage. So it makes sense that people tried to improve carriages instead of single riders. If you ignore the pollution aspects of cars, and the problems caused by the sheer number of them, they are a superior mode of transport to bicycles. If I were a 1400s inventor, a 4 wheel carriage with pulleys would seem much more attractive than a 2 wheeled contraption which leaves me exposed to the elements.
Bicycles require a number of technologies, mass produced steel for example, that weren't really around until the 19th century. However something like the flying shuttle probably could have been invented centuries earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_shuttle
The intriguing part about that question is that wheelbarrows are a very old technology and people would even transport one another (or their kids) on a wheelbarrow, not just goods. And neither bad roads nor primitive technology stopped them.
The idea of moving a burden or a person around using a wheel and human power (no animals) was around for centuries.
My theory: People had nowhere to go. They had a reason to transport goods, but not themselves. They lived on the farms where they worked, or within walking distance of factories, church, etc.
It's always tricky to speculate on cause vs effect. Did bicycles come about because people needed to travel longer distances, or did people start to travel longer distances because they had better modes of transportation available to them?
You build most buildings pretty close together. And then fields around them in all directions. Conceptually farm house in middle of fields was not really how it was done. Maybe for manors, but those were rich enough to drink at home. And their workers build close enough together or in walkable distance.
Sprawling industrial-scale agricultural areas seems to be mostly a product of motor vehicles.
Before that, most farms were run by a family group and the farmhouses were typically within a couple miles of a community center which provided access to a church, school, store/market, inn/tavern, etc. (There were self-sufficient estates and plantations but they seem to be more the exception than the rule.)
For example, the town I live in now was founded more than 250 years ago when the families (mostly farmers) who lived at the outer fringe of their town got tired of having to walk 2+ miles to church and school. So they petitioned the government to split off and then built their own church and school.
It’s because vulcanized rubber tires weren’t available until the 1840s. There is no sub for inflatable tubes and rubber tires. Without it the ride would be very very bumpy for a light frame with two wheels.
I think it’s an omission to not include the vast improvements that happened to the bicycle after 1888. It wasn’t finished by 1888 with the safety bicycle.
Only by the 1860s the fast iteration of bicycles (together with substantial innovations in machine production) started and then went hand in hand with cars and motorcycles.
Some huge innovations after the safety bicycle were the derailleurs which continued to be iterated upon well after WW2, when the bicycle as we know it was finished.
Indeed, and most of us focus on the adoption of the bicycle as a practical mode of transportation, but the earliest bikes were not. So the evolution of the bike had to go through a phase when it was a toy, being refined as a toy. Just the act of managing a bike was the purpose of riding the earliest ones. Then people started going on recreational rides. Then recreational riding finally created demand for a safer bike. And a safe, manufactured bike, turned it into transportation.
The uniform, smaller size of safety bike wheels also enabled adoption of pneumatic tires.
I love fucking bicycles! In the Netherlands, they make the roads safer, they make the neighbourhoods saver, they make people more healthy, they reduce crime, they make people drive more careful.
Just by having a lot of people on bicycles instead in closed cars, it creates a whole different society then if everyone would be in cars and I love it.
The author kind of glosses over the "balance" bit, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the creation of 2 wheeled vehicles coincides with the creation of the first gyroscopes:
I've heard that the gyroscopic effect in bicycles is rather small. The balance instead comes from the positive angle of the front wheel, creating feedback. If the bike leans one direction, the wheel rotates to counteract it.
I've been riding an scooter to work for a few years, and the gyroscopic effect of the wheels on a bike do make a big difference. You can't take one hand off the handle bars to use your arm to indicate on a scooter. You will lose control instantly. When I ride my bike I can ride most of the way sitting up and not holding the handle bars at all.
It doesn't matter how the bicycle balances, just that inventors thought it to be possible. Gyroscopes could have inspired that belief. Balancing was probably discovered in a "it works if we design it like this" manner, rather than from first principles.
You can measure it for yourself: balance on the bike when it is stationary, then compare the experience to when you're moving.
When you are moving, it adds in the gyroscopic balancing effect.
Gyroscopic motion means that the force applied acts about 90 degrees later, so when you turn the handlebars which are on a (roughly) vertical axis (call it the "z" axis), the force of that turn is actually applied about the axis that runs from front to back (call it the "y" axis). Gyroscopes "translate" the force.
If you're stationary, and there is no gyroscopic motion, then the only thing that turning the wheel really does is allow you to move the front of the bike to the left or right in order to change your centre of gravity.
My professor debunked this in experimental physics 101. He installed counter wheels on the wheels which spun in the opposite direction (without touching the floor obviously) and was able to still ride the bike just fine.
It may play a part in the effect, but does not explain it entirely.
Well, you can debunk that debunking easily enough if you have a bike.
Stand in front of the bike and lift up the front wheel, holding one fork in each hand.
Attempt to turn the front wheel from side to side without the seat changing position at all.
Now hold the bike up with one hand and with your other hand spin the front wheel as fast as you can.
Now with the front wheel still spinning, go back to holding one fork in each hand and attempt to turn the front wheel side to side without the seat moving at all. You will find it more challenging to do and you will notice that the tendency is for the seat to move in the opposite direction from that which you turn the front wheel.
That is, you turn the front wheel towards your right side, the seat will move towards your left side.
This is the "counter steering" effect that we use in order to balance when riding a bike, and it's entirely due to gyroscopic motion.
“It is almost certain that gyro effects are important at the initial stage of steering manoeuvres. […] My point is that gyroscopic effects are not needed to keep you from falling over when you are riding in a straight line. I am not saying anything about what happens when you actively wish to steer away from straight ahead.”
It also does some calculations that show how small the gyroscopic force is compared to the weight of (bicycle plus rider)
So the gyroscopic effect isn’t necessary to balance a bike, but likely helps in making turns.
The gyroscopic effect is not necessary, and it has been demonstrated both in reality and in simulation [0].
The central principle behind why a bicycle is self balancing while in motion is the fact that it self-steers in the same direction that it is leaning, which counteracts the fall [0][1].
Nah, that's not it. Try riding a bike in reverse (or pushing it). It's not at all stable, because the feedback is applied in the opposite direction. You'll fall right away, even though the gyroscopic effect is identical.
I'd recommend just googling how a bike works instead of pursuing this argument. There's lots of good articles, like this one: http://www.cyclelicio.us/2011/bicycle-dynamics/ It looks like my theory on wheel angle may not be entirely true either. You can also find videos on youtube.
The Veritasium video is the best one I've seen but he only describes how counter steering works at slow speeds which is more like how you balance a stationary bike. The faster you go, and the bigger the wheel, the more the counter steering is done by gyroscopic motion than moving the wheel back and forth beneath you.
Destin’s inverted steering bike is definitely an argument for that, inverting the steering does not affect the gyroscopic effect, but the bike requires re-learning how to ride.
No, it doesn't make an argument for that. It's no different from inverting your mouse wheel scroll direction. If you're used to doing it one way you have to get used to doing it another way.
> It's no different from inverting your mouse wheel scroll direction. If you're used to doing it one way you have to get used to doing it another way.
If you invert scroll direction it does not make the mouse stop working, it only hinders scrolling. But inverting steering has an immediate effect on balance, not just on your ability to take a turn.
I think the eruption of mount Tambora, in 1816 and ensuring famine was the main impetus for the creation of the bicycle. Think from the perspective of the future:
Q: "Why didn't they just use solar cells to power their cars instead of using gasoline?"
A: "They had almost unlimited access to an energy-dense fuel called petroleum they mined from the earth."
My point is we can imagine many technologies that would serve our needs with much less energy use.
>Fully elucidating these economic and cultural factors is a major future project of this blog
One rule of thumb seems to be that a new technology needs to be not merely better but ten times better than the alternative(s) for it to go viral. For instance, James Dyson built a washing machine with twin contrarotating drums. It was significantly better than conventional machines, but not ten times better when all costs were accounted for, e.g. the increased price and its unconventional larger size.
IIRC it was _not_ significantly better than conventional machines; "Which" found that it had the same performance as a mid-range Bosch.
Dyson's gadgets which really were significantly better than the contemporary competition tended to succeed, despite a cost premium. Notably the vacuum cleaners, of course.
I think this one explains why the mass adoption of the bicycle took so long. Before the era of precision manufacturing, each mechanical device had to be hand-assembled by an expert machinist who fine-tuned crude parts into a working device - meaning there were no drop-in mass-produced replacement parts. This would make maintenance and construction impractically expensive.
I would consider treadmills known to exist as early as 4000BC as an early step towards bicycles. Commonly used for grinding wheat or moving water - possibly even cranes. There both gearing and leg power interact - just gotta apply the force to a set of four wheels and you're halfway there.
Notably, cyclist associations were instrumental in advocating for road conditioning in the late 19th century and early 20th, both in the UK [0] and the USA [1], and maybe elsewhere.
But not the roads very suitable for bicycles. Even modern bikes are not exactly nice on many stone roads. Now remove air-tires and every little bumb will be felt.
I've read that penny farthings are great for bad roads though. One article mentioned they lost control and wheeled over a kerb without a murmur. you couldn't do that on a safety bicycle.
> The quality of roads is relevant, but not really the answer. Bicycles can be ridden on dirt roads or sidewalks.
I mean this is true with a modern bike, but a primitive bike with wooden wheels, no spokes, no gears, no suspension and questionable brakes would be pretty awful on a trail.
Plus, there were no sidewalks to begin with, the road in my grandma's village close to the Carpathians Mountains still hasn't got one (they've only paved over what it used to be the village road about 10 years ago).
And people tend to forget rain and hence mud when it comes to the state of pre-modern roads, there's no way one could have ridden a bicycle through a lot of mud and rain puddles. Being high up there in a horse-driven coach meant that you were also avoiding all that mud hassle.
And also to remember that roads were more of trails or something you might seen on field or in forest. Not the nice flat surfaces created with road drags we think of dirt roads as.
We just got an ebike. I rode slickrock on it last week and it was delightful.
Droppers are overrated (for me). Disk brakes are awesome. Bike weight (for mountain bikes) has probably gone up in the last 30 years. One by shifting is nice and the new front chainrings that keep chains on are cool.
Those could be seen as incremental, but from the top of my head the two biggest changes could be:
- foldables: they're a real game changer regarding where bikes fit and where they can go. Designs also tremendously improved and the cycling performance is really good nowadays.
- electric assist: it's not just adding a motor, a lot of work has happened to make the better of the it, and cargo bikes have become widespread mostly because of this.
Lots of the details have changes quite a bit. They might look somewhat similar, but a nice bike nowadays is mostly carbon fiber, and pretty aerodynamic.
This came from the depths of memory but I have no idea how it got there, oops. https://helmets.org/history.htm suggests the first standard for bike helmets was in 1970?
> The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s.
Not sure why the article starts off with an incorrect hypothesis. There is evidence of bicycles in the sculptures in at least one Indian / Hindu temple Southern India. The temple dedicated to "Panchavarna Swamy" - 5 colored god, was built at least 1500 years old. (dated to the early 7th century by historians)
That photo you have provided is from a temple in Indonesia, and the Indian temple story you have summarised is regarded to be false, the carving in question was likely added during renovation during British rule.
