In Utopia, there will be bike paths galore: on the history of the bicycle

In all the excitement and commotion surrounding the green vehicles, it seems that a small and very important detail has been forgotten. There is a certain type of vehicle whose efficiency far exceeds that of the car: the bicycle is the most efficient means of transportation ever invented by man

In recent years we have witnessed a boom in the world of 'green' vehicles: this refers to the electric or hybrid cars, those that combine an internal combustion engine with an electric motor. The biggest advantage of these cars is their efficiency: they are very economical in the use of fuel, compared to normal cars.

But in all the excitement and commotion surrounding the green vehicles, it seems to me that we forget a small and very important detail. There is a certain type of vehicle whose efficiency far exceeds that of the car: the bicycle is the most efficient means of transportation ever invented by man. When the rider turns the pedal, up to ninety-eight percent of the energy he puts in becomes the movement of the bike forward. Ninety-eight percent: that's a really unimaginable number. Even electric motors, which are considered to be extremely efficient, barely scratch the eighty-five percent mark.

The first bicycle was invented in 1817 by the German noble Baron von Dries. Much of the basic components of the modern bicycle were already included in this invention: a pair of wheels of equal size, a steering handle for the front wheel and even a handbrake - only pedals for the feet were not. The 'driezin', as these bikes were called, would be pushed with the legs while riding. It was not very comfortable, as you can imagine, and the shoes would also wear out at a dizzying rate - but the Dreizin ride was faster than running and much less tiring.

In 1817, the year von Dries invented his bicycle, the weather in Europe and the entire world went completely crazy. This year is known as 'the year without summer': in May and June, spring and summer months, heavy snows fell in many countries. In August, temperatures were still below zero. The reason for this lies, almost certainly, in the eruption of a large volcano in Indonesia. The ash and smoke spewed by the volcano climbed into the upper layers of the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and causing a cold wave that swept the entire world and resulted in massive destruction of agricultural crops that were supposed to ripen in the summer. The immediate result was a severe shortage of food and as a result a dramatic increase in grain prices - up to eight times the normal price. When there is no food for humans, the condition of the animals is not much better: many horses died of starvation themselves, or were slaughtered for food.

There were areas that were not affected by the cold and that the crops there did produce grain - but since there were no longer many horses, transportation became very expensive and thus an effective distribution of the food in the more distant places was prevented. There is a very reasonable chance that the invention of the bicycle by Baron von Dries was intended to find a solution to this transportation problem.

The 'Dreisin' bikes were quite successful around the world, and many copied the Baron's original design and distributed it in different countries. This success, however, did not last long. The roads at that time were mainly suitable for horses and carts and traveling on a bicycle was a shocking experience, one might say. In the absence of road alternatives, enthusiasm for the Dreizin quickly waned.

Fifty years passed until the bicycle came back into fashion. It was the French who developed the new bike and it was called 'Lucyped'. The great refinement in the bullosiped was the pedal, which was attached directly to the wheel. This design freed the riders from having to push with their legs, but it did not improve the riding experience at all. The wheels were made of wood, the roads were made of stone - many stones, to be more precise. Holosiped was named Bone Shaker, loosely translated, and this bike didn't last long on the market either.

The solution to the ride quality problem came a few years later, in 1870, when the bicycle wheels received a full rubber coating. Bicycles were very expensive at the time, and a single pair of bicycles cost about six monthly salaries. Those who could afford to ride a bicycle, both physically and financially, were mainly young and rich men who were looking for the thrill and danger. It's no surprise, then, that riders demanded faster and faster bikes from manufacturers.

The pedals on a bullosiped, let's recall, were connected directly to the wheel, so the speed of the wheel rotation depended on the pedaling rate of the rider: for every complete revolution of the pedal, the wheel would also turn a complete revolution. The human body was not originally designed for cycling. As a result, we feel comfortable pedaling in a relatively narrow range of revolutions per minute. Turning too slow or turning too fast causes the legs to tire quickly, so Holosiped riders had difficulty riding at high speeds.

The bicycle manufacturers' solution was very clever: make the wheel bigger. As the wheel grows, so does its circumference. The practical interpretation of this fact is that the larger the wheel, the greater the distance the bicycle travels in each complete revolution. Meaning, you don't need to turn the pedal faster: for the same rotation speed, the big wheel travels a long distance and hence the bike is very fast.

In a short time, bicycles with small rear wheels and very large front wheels, with diameters of two meters or more, began to appear. This bike was called 'Penny Farthing', after two British coins: the penny and the farthing. The farthing was a very small currency compared to before and hence the inspiration for the name. The customers demanded more and more speed and the manufacturers were happy to increase the wheel for them as much as the length of the rider's legs allowed them. Another advantage of the Penny Farthing bicycles was the comfort of the ride: the large front wheel was narrow and flexible compared to the previous generation of 'bone shakers' and therefore mitigated to some extent the jolts of traveling on bumpy roads.

But there is no good without bad, there is no ying without yang and what goes up must come down - and in the case of the tall bikes, even come down hard. On the Farthing Penny bike the rider would sit high off the ground and almost right over the center of the front wheel. This seating arrangement placed the bike's center of gravity very high above the road. Now imagine the rider speeding on his fast bike when suddenly the wheel hits a stone or a small pothole in the road. The front wheel brakes suddenly, but the surprised center of gravity, somewhere high in the clouds, hears the bad news too late and continues to move forward. Like someone running fast and then suddenly being stepped on, the cyclist would fly forward in an arc. To complicate matters a little more, the legs were in the way of getting tangled in the handlebars while falling because the rider was sitting right over the wheel. The result was a high-speed, head-on crash.

These accidents were very common among the young cyclists. The bicycle manufacturers even advised their customers that while riding on a slope, they should take their feet off the pedals and lift them beyond the handle to reduce the chance of them falling on their heads. Mark Twain, the famous author, told how he tried to learn to ride the tall bike and fell off it quite a few times. He summed up the experience like this: "Buy a bicycle. You won't regret it, if you survive."

Clearly, then, the tall bike was not for everyone. The alternative, for those who were willing to give up high speed in favor of intact bones, was the tricycle. The three-wheeled bicycle, Tricycle in English, was common among two populations that until now had been denied the opportunity to enjoy the bicycle. The first were respectable middle-aged men - doctors, priests and others who, as part of their work, were required to move from place to place. The tall bikes didn't suit them because they required agility, physical fitness and good instincts - and that's just to be able to climb them.

The second population that benefited from the tricycle were the women. Their problem with the tall bike was completely different. As difficult as it was to climb and ride the Penny Farthing bicycle, imagine how much more difficult this task was for a woman embalmed in a wide-skirted dress, a ruffled blouse and delicately gloved hands in accordance with the Victorian dress code that was common in Europe at the time. The tricycle allowed women, finally, to enjoy riding a bicycle while maintaining their modesty.

Bicycle manufacturers tried to deal with the problem of accidents with tall bicycles, a problem that greatly limited the spread of bicycles and their integration into the general public. One solution, for example, was to switch between the front and rear wheels - that is, a huge rear wheel and a small front wheel. This arrangement did solve the problem of falling forward during a sudden stop, but now the riders would fall backwards when climbing uphill. It was clear that the root of the problem lay in the bike's center of gravity which was too high.

The practical solution was, therefore, to reduce the wheels to a reasonable size and this was only possible following two important technological developments. The first development was the bicycle chain, a chain made of small metal links that would be flexible enough to wrap around the axle of the pedals and at the same time be strong enough to transfer the power from the rotating pedal to the wheel. A second technological development belongs in the wheels themselves, and it comes thanks to a Scottish veterinarian named John Boyd Dunlop. Dunlop bought his son a tricycle, but the bumpy roads made the ride a real nightmare. Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire - the hollow rubber tire - to help his son, and indirectly ushered the bicycle into a new era, an era of gold. The company founded by the Scottish veterinarian, Dunlop, is one of the leaders in the tire market even today.

The low bikes, with the link chain and hollow tires, were called 'safety bikes' - in contrast to the tall bikes, which were anything but safe. The new bicycle models of the late 19th century were so comfortable and pleasant to ride that suddenly the bicycle became everyone's preferred means of transportation. The horse lost its place in favor of the bicycle and the roads in the big cities were filled with tens and hundreds of thousands of pairs of bicycles.

Cycling pushed women away from the cumbersome Victorian style of dress. The bicycle invented the new woman, the woman with the pants and even - mercifully - the shorts.

Beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, the automobile began to take its place as the dominant means of transportation and the number of cyclists steadily declined, especially in the United States. In Europe they continued to ride bicycles and the cycling culture was preserved to a certain extent, but overseas, the 'Ice Age' of bicycles began. Thirty years later, in the XNUMXs, almost no bicycles for adults were produced in the United States. The means of transportation about which the famous writer H.G. Wells once said "When I see a grown man riding a bicycle, there is hope in my heart for the future of mankind" - has become a toy for children and nothing more.

One of the reasons why bicycles have not been able to regain their place as the preferred means of transportation in Western culture is the lack of technological innovation. At the end of the nineteenth century, the golden age of the bicycle, many patents and inventions were registered for bicycles. There were so many innovations and inventions in the field, that one of the historians wrote that in the city of Washington in the United States at that time there were two buildings that were dedicated to registering patents - one for patents for bicycles, and the other for everything else.

But since that time there has been no significant technological progress in the field of bicycles. Most of the mechanisms and techniques we see in today's bicycles were invented back in the nineteenth century, and most of the innovations and improvements since then are concentrated in the field of materials engineering. In this area, the bicycle imitates the world of aviation, and the light and strong metals from which airplanes are built soon find their way to bicycles as well. By the way, someone once said that in fact the bike never gets lighter. A titanium bike that weighs five kilograms requires a fifteen kilogram lock, a ten kilogram bike will need a ten kilogram lock and a twenty kilogram bike... you don't need to lock.

Those who helped stifle the technological development of the bicycle were, ironically, the professional and competitive organizations of cycling. These organizations opposed any change in the structure of the bicycle so as not to harm the fair competition between the riders, and as a result the professional bicycle hardly changed from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1905s. The gears, for example, were developed around XNUMX but for thirty years professional riders were prohibited from using them in competitions. The competitive bike had only two gears and to change between them, the rider had to get off the bike, disassemble the rear wheel and reassemble it.

Since the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century we have witnessed a renewed boom in the field of bicycles, especially since mountain bikes appeared on the scene. The energy crisis, the awareness of a healthy lifestyle and the need to preserve the quality of the environment mean that the bicycle is returning and emerging as a preferred means of transportation. I want to believe that the future, in this respect, holds only good things for us. As our well-known H.J. Wells said - "In utopia, there will be plenty of bicycle paths."

This article is taken from the show's script.Making history!', a bi-weekly podcast about the history of science and technology.