It all started with the bicycle
Mon, March 16, 2020 Modern road and air transport owe a great deal to the bicycle and to those who experimented on perfecting it.
Some thirty years before the first automobile was built, innovations appeared on bicycles, many of which are built into the design of powered transport today. A few of them are:
- Pneumatic tires
- Cable control brakes and other units
- Ball Bearings
- Free wheels
- Differential gears
- Chain drives
- Shaft drives
- Variable gears – the foundation of the transmission
Equally important contributions were improvements in the specifications of metals, also changes came about in machine tools, engineering techniques, and in production methods.
Many of the people who designed and manufactured bicycles went on the design and build the first automobiles. American aviation pioneers Orville and Wilber Wright designed bicycles in their Dayton, Ohio factory that subsequently became a proving ground for airplane components.
Today, bicycle advocates must lobby government to maintain the cyclist’s rights to be on the road. Many forget it was similar bicycle advocates who were instrumental in getting roads paved in the first place at the turn of the last century. Paved roads that were suitable for the introduction of the automobile.
The bicycle came into being as a viable form of transport and for many years was recognized and accepted as such. Somehow over the years the bicycle became relegated to the status of a recreational toy.
The next time you are sitting on an airplane, or you see an eighteen-wheeler truck hauling the nation’s supplies along our highways, you might do well to remember it all began with the humble bicycle
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Reader Comments (5)
Very true, most people have no idea what the development of the bicycle spawned in terms of engineering and social impact.
You forgot paved roads. For more on this and other innovations & social impacts see "Roads Were Not Built for Cars: How Cyclists were the First to Push for Roads and became the Pioneers of Motoring" Carlton Reid.
No you didn’t!
(Third paragraph from the bottom.... Edited, Dave.)
The history of engineering and technology is fascinating. The confluences between firearms and clocks is a great one. And then follow the chain from those to machine tools which were a major contributor to the development of bicycles.
I love digging into this stuff.
Things like the Toyoda family was building looms, and sold some inventions to a British film and this funded their entry into the vehicle industry. And they started be building a material research lab.
Actually truth speech! Equally important contributions were improvements in the specifications of metals, also changes came about in machine tools, engineering techniques, and in production methods.