Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of the Bicycle (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. It's one of the most simple machines that most people use, yet incredible amounts of engineering go into their design. They're used by billions of people around the world, and it's one of the only forms of transportation available to children. They can make humans incredibly efficient, and their development was in many ways surprising. I'm, of course, talking about bicycles. Learn more about the history of bicycles and how the modern version came to be on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

Starting point is 00:00:48 ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. There was a story that Steve Jobs frequently shared about the bicycle. A March 1973 article written in September. Scientific American, looked at how efficient different animal species were when it came to transportation. It analyzed how much energy it took animals to transport one gram of mass, a distance

Starting point is 00:01:28 of one kilometer. The most efficient animals were not surprisingly soaring birds like the condor or the albatross. Humans were sort of in the middle. They were somewhat efficient, but not as good as a horse or maybe a salmon. Humans used on average 0.75 calories to transport one gram, one kilometer. However, the researcher, SS Wilson, decided to add an extra data point. He added how efficient humans were on a bicycle. It turns out that a human on a bicycle was five times as efficient as one walking. Not only that, but it was more efficient than any other animal. So the bicycle is a really big deal in that it makes human transportation extremely efficient. The invention of the bicycle doesn't go back as far as you might think. The earliest thing

Starting point is 00:02:14 that we could identify as a bicycle only dates back to the 19th century. A German baron named Carl von Dreyas created a device he called a lauf machine, which means running machine in German. In English, it was called a hobby horse or a velocopede or a dandy horse. The device looked like a bicycle insofar as it had two wheels and the front wheel could be steered. However, there were no pedals and there were no chains or gears. Also, it was all made out of wood. You sat on it between the two wheels and then propelled yourself by using your feet to push yourself off the ground, and then you could coast for a bit. There is a theory behind why the Velocopede was developed when it was

Starting point is 00:02:52 that's actually really interesting. If you remember back to my episode on the explosion of Mount Tambora in 1815, it ejected an enormous amount of ash and particles into the atmosphere, which caused the next year, 1816, to be known as the year without a summer. As crops failed, the population of horses decreased due to the lack of food and people harvesting horses for food. The theory is that Vondryas invented the Velocopede due to the lack of horses.

Starting point is 00:03:19 The Velocopede was more of a toy for rich people, which is how it got the name Dandy Horse. The Velocopede was more of a toy for rich people, which is how it got the name Dandy Horse. It was a quickly passing fad, as there were accidents with pedestrians and people were getting fined for using them on sidewalks. While this was clearly the progenitor of the bicycle,

Starting point is 00:03:38 this version wasn't the device that was revolutionary. The first mechanical propulsion system for a bicycle was believed to be developed in 1839 by a Scottish blacksmith named Kirkpatrick McMillan. His system had two rods in the front wheel that would be pumped that were connected to rods that rotated the back wheel. Also around this time, improvements were being made regarding making wheels and frames out of metal, as well as improvements in design. The next big innovation to the bicycle was the development of the pedal.

Starting point is 00:04:07 The first bicycle with pedals was created by German inventor Philip Morris Fisher in 1840, However, his model never really caught on. The explosion in the popularity of bikes really occurred in France in the 1860s. These were metallic-framed bicycles that could be mass produced. These bikes had really poor suspension, especially on bad 19th century roads, and they had a big problem with speed. The speed problem had to do with the fact that the pedals were attached to the front wheel. One rotation of the pedals was the equivalent of one rotation of the front tire, which meant that the circumference of the front tire was the distance you could go with one pedal turn. The solution to this problem of speed was in the creation of the penny farthing bicycle in the 1870s. You've probably seen

Starting point is 00:04:50 photos of these bikes. They were the ones with the enormous front tire where the rider was way off the ground. The name Penny Farthing came from the British coins known as Penny's and Farthings. The Penny Farthing, or High Bicycle, was first invented by Eugene Meyer of Paris. It solved the speed problem by just making a bigger wheel. Because the front wheel was bigger, one turn of the pedal meant you would travel further. The downside of the penny farthing was pretty obvious. It was hard to mount and dismount, as well as being really dangerous if you fell. If you collided with something, the rider would usually be thrown over the handlebars. The one innovation of the penny farthing which is still with us today is the tension-spoked wheel. The downsides and dangerousness of the penny-farthing

Starting point is 00:05:36 led directly to things that created the modern bicycle, the chain and spoke that's attached to the rear wheel. This type of bicycle was initially called a safety bicycle. This basically solved the same problem that the penny farthing did, but in a different way. Instead of just making a bigger wheel to make everything go faster, it had a smaller gear on the back to make a normal-sized wheel make more revolutions for each turn of the pedal. The first safety bicycle was invented by the English inventor John Kemp Starley in 1885, which he called the rover. This was a bike that looked like a normal bike, and one that you could probably hop on and operate without any instruction. Just a few years later, in 1888, pneumatic tires for

Starting point is 00:06:17 bicycles were developed, which made the ride much smoother, and also increased speeds by about 30%. Bicycles became very popular in the United States in the 1890s and the first decade of the 1900s. However, their popularity began to wane when automobiles grew in popularity. They sort of filled in a gap between when horses and cars were popular. They remained more popular in Europe, however, where distances between towns were shorter and city centers were more condensed. One of the things which people realized early on was that power delivered to the rear wheel depended upon the size of the gear. The original solution to changing gears was to have a different size gear on each side of the rear tire. If you wanted to change gears, to go up a hill, for example, you had to stop, take off the chain, take off the rear tire,

Starting point is 00:07:02 flip it around and reattached the chain. The first deraler was built by the French cyclist writer Paul DeVive, who invented a two-speed derailer in 1905 so that he could more easily cycle in the Alps. The derailer was actually banned in bike racing until it was allowed in the 1937 Tour de France. Most of the innovations in bicycles since the end of the Second World War were due to better materials, layer frames, and reductions in price. Bikes in many countries became the predominant form of transportation. In China during the reign of Mao Zedong, for example, almost no one to own cars and everyone owned a bicycle. Today, over 100 million bicycles are manufactured each year, and there are over 1 billion bicycles currently in use around the world. There's one question about bicycles that has been raised by historians, and it is a really interesting question.

Starting point is 00:07:51 Why weren't bicycles invented earlier? If you think about it, the very first bicycles, before they had chains and gears, were just made of wood and had two wheels. Everything that was required to build such an early version of the bicycle was available in ancient times. The ancient Chinese, the Egyptians, Babylonians, Romans, and Indians all had wheels, chariots, and carts. It would have been trivial to repurpose two wheels to make something that would dramatically improve personal transportation. If you remember back to my episode on the Maurean reforms, a Roman soldier could hike 20 miles a day with a full pack. When Carl von Dreyas made his first machine with no pedals, he managed to go, eight miles in less than an hour, just coasting and kicking his feet. So even a simple wooden

Starting point is 00:08:36 device with two wheels could have revolutionized personal travel in the ancient world. There's a couple of theories as to why the bicycle was never invented before the 19th century. One is that it just wasn't necessary because there were horses. Horses could pull carts and carry heavy weights, so a bike couldn't necessarily compete with that. The other thing is that a bicycle necessitated good roads. There wasn't a lot of good roads in ancient times. Even good Roman roads might not have been good for a bicycle. Finally, the real reason is probably that you just can't force or predict inventions. If you're old enough, you probably remember a time when suitcases didn't have wheels. Suitcases could have had wheels at pretty much any time, but they didn't. Then, at some point in the

Starting point is 00:09:22 1980s, suitcases started having wheels, and everyone in the world simultaneously thought to themselves, why didn't I think of that? Well, the same is true of the bicycle. All the pieces were there, but no one ever really thought to put the pieces together. Nonetheless, bicycles are one of the most significant innovations with regards to human transportation. And the weird thing is that it all might have come about from a shortage of horses due to a volcano in Indonesia. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever.

Starting point is 00:10:00 I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of the Bicycle (Encore)

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