Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

Many thanks for posting this

Many thanks for posting this – It’s a fascinating area for consideration.

I’ve long wondered how it was that there fully function railway systems long before bicycles became a ‘thing’. My suspicion is that it’s because a railway is a thing of ‘big money’ (a hugely rich plutocrat or more likely a company/shareholders will invest in a railway with the hope of making big returns) – were as – an individual will buy a bicycle and for a bicycle to cheap enough to be viable you need to have an industrial system that can reasonably cheaply make many small things accurately –  e.g bicycles aren’t going to be viable until a society is capable of  manufacturing a reasonably cheap roller chain.

Maybe the bicycle bears a closer relationship to the Maxim gun than it does to the locomotive?

Thanks for this, hawkinspeter

Thanks for this, hawkinspeter – I’ll read it later!