Possibly a silly question, but the people I've asked really haven't given answers that satisfied me yet.
Why wasn't the bicycle developed until the 19th century?
Vehicles with wooden wheels have been around just about forever (except in the Americas), so the concept of stringing a couple of wheels out onto a central structure isn't news. Mills and water clocks and other millennia-old devices have depended on the meshing of gears; using one small, powered rotating device to turn larger wheels should be comprehensible.
Sure, mass production would be difficult if not impossible, and the reliability factor isn't outstanding: wood can chip or break, metal can rust. But carts and carriages/chariots/coaches would be just as troublesome, and animals (or slaves) that propel them need to be fed and tended.
I'm looking at a "rational fantasy" in one of those the-magic-fades-away societies, where industry hasn't yet picked up the slack. The hero/ine is a young teen who is trying to catch up with a girlfriend who has been chosen to join the Queen's Corps in the imperial capital perhaps four hundred miles away.
The logistics of riding a horse would be too much for the story to handle. He's had to abandon the trade caravan that got him out of town because it'll be trading in the hinterlands for months before it gets where he's going, and meeting up with a more convenient one could take forever. Unauthorized movement between towns is frowned upon to the point where he can't take public transportation (horse-drawn coaches) without drawing the wrong kind of attention. Magic's not really an option, since what little of it is left is strictly in government hands.
I think that walking would take too long, though I may have to revisit that. But using a bicycle seems promising, if I can convince people that they're not totally out of place.
Eric
Ancient bikes
No, not mine!
I think you'll have to go back to at least Kirkpatrick MacMillan, who rode something resembling a bicycle for the first time. Even so, this had cart-style wheels and was propelled by treadles, not a chain and/or gears or pulleys.
- Until mass production of steel tubes, bikes would have been far too heavy to go any great distance.
- Making and repairing the thing would require the services of a carpenter/joiner and a smith - at various points along the journey. And doing so would undoubtedly draw unwanted attention to the lad.
- The roads of the time were terrible. Not until horse-drawn travel became ubiquitous in towns and cities did we get decent road surfaces. Even so, this probably would have taken even longer to happen if not for the advent of train travel, and the consequent increase in the movement of goods around the country. Rural and distance roads would have taken much longer to improve.
You'd be better off starting him off walking, and then meeting a sequence of travelers along the same route who would offer him a lift. This was a fairly common occurrence before regular public transport began from place to place, and still exists in a form today - hitchhiking. He's still going to need to invent a reason why he's traveling from each place to the next...
Penny
wooden bikes
It has shown up before in SF. Caesar's Bicycle by John Barnes has an alternate world take on the idea. As for it showing earlier in history, I can't say. Heron of Alexandria first came up with a lot of the concepts you mentioned and more. It should be noted that much of his work was lost with only some preserved in Arab manuscripts. So it is possible that something like a bicycle was invented only to be lost in the sands of time.
Grover
Early bicycles
From what I've always understood early bicycles were extremely prone to break and were initially more of a novelty. Perhaps there were attempts to make 'bicycle-like' vehicles, but they were never practical. There is so much of our own history we don't know.
Have a delightfully devious day,
In this context...
A dog cart might be more feasible but it would still require running repairs.
Keep in mind that the
Keep in mind that the earliest bicycles were _direct drive_. Meaning, you turned the pedals that turned the big wheel directly. The small wheel was simply to keep you from falling over.
Here's some rough information.
http://inventors.about.com/od/bstartinventions/a/History-Of-...
For even a basic bicycle, you'd need two wheels, a rigid framework, two cranks, two pedals, a seat on the frame, and some way to turn the front or rear wheel for steering.
Flat wooden wheels would be possible, but they'd wear irregularly, and would quickly become an egg shape, rather than a circle (this is why they rimmed the wheels with iron). They'd also have to be somewhere around three feet in diameter, in order for the feet to reach the center pedals from the frame without having knees around the ears.
Chain drive bicycles (we'll ignore gearing for now. We're just at one step away from direct drive) would require a metal plate with cogs (teeth) to catch in the loops of a _flat_ chain (which took a while to develop) both at the pedal cranks and at the wheel itself.
So, no. Maybe a big skateboard, but not a bicycle. (Look at the original velocipede, which was a glider pushed by the feet. Think the Flintstones car)
The other really big problem is road conditions. Solid wheels really require a road in reasonably good shape. Even the early rubber tires weren't great on cobbles, let alone dirt roads. It wasn't until pneumatic tires were developed that it became truly worthwhile riding a bicycle rather than walking or a riding a horse.
Does that help?
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
The earliest "bicycle" was a two-wheeled riding scooter...
...identified in the reference as a Celerifere, and independently invented in many countries as a way for those with access to paved roads, or at least well-graded dirt, to comfortably walk long distances carrying heavy loads. Although I can't remember the exact reference, I once saw a picture of one used by a mail carrier from around the time of the American revolution.
Here's a very late variation called a Ladies Hobby Horse
Note that it requires little in the way of advanced metallurgy or exotic alloys.
I myself own a Xooter kick scooter that I used when I worked for a smallish corporation with wide-separated offices in one of those "industrial park" office complexes. They're surprisingly fast and handy in a flat environment, and the Xooter folds up.
http://www.nycewheels.com/xootr-scooters.html
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
transportation
If you build some sort of primitive wooden bicycle without rubber tires or a spring-loaded suspension, it would only be useful on paved roads, and even then it would be a very bumpy ride. If your protagonist is trying to avoid being noticed on a coach, you'd probably also need to avoid main roads so that could be a problem.
Most cities grew up on waterways, so I suggest you have your character find a convenient river and travel by boat, even if it means adjusting your geography a little.
However, if you really need to invent a medieval bicycle, I suggest you start with an upside-down spinning wheel.
A successful pedal cycle relies on ...
... on two things - light weight coupled with strength. These were achieved by the invention of light steel tubing and the wire spoked wheel. The high ordinaries (so-called penny-farthings) were quite successful (and terrifyingly dangerous) and enjoyed both advantages. Despite Kirkpatrick Macmillan, the Dumfries blacksmith who is credited with the invention of the first practical bicycle, the truly useful bike didn't appear until Starley introduced the Rover safety bicycle which had equal sized wheels and a chain drive to allow easy gearing. Although outstanding journeys were undertaken on ordinaries and speeds of over 20 mph were relatively common. To this day, in the UK, cycle gears are measured in inches which represent the equivalent wheel diameter of a high ordinary - well, at least amongst we older generation :)
Perhaps Eric's hero might used a simple two wheeled vehicle similar to a hobby horse propelled either by gravity or paddling along the ground by foot. It would carry luggage and be much quicker down hill. I have seen several examples of all wooden bicycles in museums (even wooden chains) but I doubt they'd be practical for a lot of use. A company in the UK has marketed bamboo framed bikes recently which look very handsome (and expensive) but they have conventional components.
A mast on a handcar
You point out certain problems with travel, but if he can travel at night, then he can use a 4 wheeled vehicle the size and shape of a railroad handcar, powered by a mast and wind. With a torch in front or travelling on nights with a full moon, he/she could move quickly.
RAMI
RAMI
Roads, gears and bicycles
Major Roman roads were smooth enough for bicycle traffic and the Romans had gears that were strong enough for the job, too. Unfortunately, most of their gears would have been very heavy for bicycles. But... it is well accepted among engineers that the invention of the bicycle itself is what created a major spur for smaller, lighter and stronger gears. Bikes for small gears and clocks for tiny ones helped drive the industrial revolution as much as did steam and steel.
Lots of woods and laminate materials are strong enough for bike frames, btw. Some would be stronger and more flexible than all but the most modern steels.
It's also possible to construct a bicycle without gears, using springs and gritted wheels and perhaps pulleys. Until someone actually tries it, no one will know for sure if such a bike would be practical in the everyday world. You can use your dramatic license to just say that it is. If you do it well, no one will doubt it enough to break the story. :)
See David Gerrold and Larry Niven's The Flying Sorcerors for a "primitive" culture using bikes.
Additional note: Any such bikes in a pre-industrial world would be EXPENSIVE!
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Its a matter of gears and chains
There were simply no reliable way to cast metal the before hand to make the chains as accurate as they need to be, also gears weren't that much in use and weren't accurate enough as well.
I really don't think bikes were possible before the 17th century (without modern steel any frame wouldn't have been resilient enough). After that its plausible that one could have made it if one would have invented the necessary facility (Steel casting and precision gear), anyway it wouldn't have been a success without the means to pass to word onward (telegraph , proper locomotion etc.)
Lily.
Really have to disagree
One hidden assumption is that someone is going to try to build a modern bike with medieval technology. A highly efficient modern bike could only be built with modern tech, yes. But in engineering, there are always other ways to do things.
Central American Indians had ways of making knives sharper than anything that could be made with European-type technology until the Twentieth Century. They made them out of copper that had been specially treated to have some of the properties of glass.
Steel made in medieval Japan and Syria was much superior for some purposes than anything made elsewhere or else when until modern alloy theory surpassed the practical knowledge of Syrian and Japanese steel workers, sometime in the last fifty years. There's more than one way to skin a cat, and more than one kind of cat.
Think of how simple an electric cell is, it could and probably was discovered and built over and over before the modern era. Vinegar and two kinds of metal in a ceramic container, archaeology now has found clues that this was done again and again. The invention of the battery and electroplating was probably kept as a trade or religious secret until modern science made the knowledge of how to build one commonplace.
Ever see a Vietnamese repeating crossbow? It's a simple gimmick that never occurred to anyone in Europe who had to wait for breech-loading gunpowder repeaters to match the rate of fire of Annamese archers. The lightweight and sturdy mechanism helped them stave off invasions from China over and over.
And still to this day, no one outside a narrow clan-based cabal knows how to make opaque playing cards out of paper. It's a secret you can't discover by just disassembling a playing card. But you CAN make opaque playing cards out of plastic without access to the late medieval technical "magic" a few families still keep to themselves.
This is for fiction. We can assume that there are engineering tricks and techniques that our world has never had to discover because we came up with some other way to do it on a different schedule.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Hmmm
A bicycle in this setting would call just too much attention. To be unnoticed, it would have to be something fairly common. If you place a bicycle as a common thing in this setting, this raises all sorts of other questions you would have to answer. Like: if people managed to do this fairly complex machine in large numbers, why aren't there *other* machines of similar complexity (and that would have a much larger labor-saving impact, such as mechanical harvesting machines) in appreciable numbers?
Instead, just reconsider walking. People can walk comfortably at about 5 km/h (that's 3.1 mph for the non-SI-compliant). If you postulate about 8 hours of walking a day on average (the day is longer, but you do have to stop and do something -- beg, trade, steal -- for food and sleep), that's about 40 km a day. Those 400 miles would theoretically just 16 days to travel on foot. Even if you halve the average (like working for half a day every day in exchange for food and lodging), we are talking about a month at the outside. Doesn't seem unfeasible to me.
To compare, look at some known pilgrimage routes, like the Way of St. James. Pilgrims travel as much as 780km (487 miles) in less than one month, traversing the Pyrenees on the way. And those pilgrims are probably less fit than your teenager.
Is travel by water against the rules?
Boats can be quick, depending... and balloons might work, and neither are so absolutely dependable that you couldn't get some good story elements out of the travel difficulties.
Thanks, Everyone...
A lot for me to think about here, and some really good ideas. It's much appreciated.
Best, Eric
Critical Mass
The industrial revolution began in the 18th century C E. This enabled certain products to be made that were essential for making a bicycle that could be used, practically. In addition there had to be enough people to be in touch with, understand and use the new technology caused by the industrial revolution. To give you an idea of this critical mass, around 1900 there were about 1,000,000,000 people living. Today there are seven times that number.