Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

I find this map - London, 1806 -  endlessly thought provoking

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/1806_Mogg_Pocket_or_Case_Map_of_London%2C_England_-_Geographicus_-_London-mogg-1806.jpg

It’s of a scale & level of detail where you can mentally walk (cycles have yet to be invented) around it.

This was the London of Jane Austin & the Napoleonic wars – A world were steam engines were rare & lumbering beasts and most power was provided by muscle (human or animal), wind or water – A world of wood, wool, cotton, hemp & blacksmith crafted iron.

It’s quite possible for someone to have been born into that world & in their dotage held in their arms a child who would see the moon landings.

The Apollo landings - as reported by James Burke, are I'm fairly sure my earliest memories. 

(Am I right in remembering that the BBC's broadcasts used Straus's Also Sprach Zarathustra as an intro?)

Of that period I rather like this (possibly apocryphal) quote from a surprising source

"Brian Eno once confessed that he liked to explain to ‘young people’ that, back in the bad-old-low-tech-flared-trousered-analogue days things were so backward that you could fly from London to New York in three and a half hours and men regularly walked on the Moon."

http://www.disraeligears.co.uk/Site/Huret_Jubilee_derailleur_2248.html

And ;  + lots on the allowing for some poetic licence!

What James Burke showed, ie H and O combined and hey presto a rocket takes off is not really right. The first stage was fired by a solid fuel called RP1 (Rocket Propellant).

"No green screen, no special effect, just one chance to get it right if you have the most incredible timing".......Gosh & FlipertyPhuckIt!!!

Please stop posting Connections Youtoobage - It's puttng me at severe risk of being hauled before the company yard arm for a sound, dead-line missed, flogging.

James Burke's Connections deserves to be in the pantheon of 'Good television' with the likes of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Seeing it mentioned has brightened my day - thanks!

I've recently read "Three Men and a Bradshaw" the holiday diaries of a chap in the 1870's. I don't recall that the proto-bicycles of the time getting a mention but it does paint a vivid portrait of a world in which the 'Cambrian Explosion' of bicycle design of the 1880's & 90's was imminent.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/three-men-and-a-bradshaw/john-george-freeman/9781847947444  (Well worth a read)

For a randonee through the evolutionary pathways of the bi/tri cycle “Bicycle Design: an illustrated history’ (Hadland & Lessing): https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bicycle-design makes for an entertaining guide.

One of the things that it demonstrates is how ideas appear ‘before-their-time’ are then forgotten until they reappear when conditions are rather more propitious.  Using designs that were appearing at the time it would have been possible in the later 1890’s to have produced an aluminium framed bike with full suspension & disc brakes ~ something that needed a century to pass before it became a marketable reality.

Another factor might be that, unlike clocks and mills, the bicycle doesn't seem to address a need. We walked. If we needed to carry heavy loads, we used a horse and cart. To go quickly, we rode a horse. But mostly we walked. So transport wasn't something we lacked. Whereas telling the time with any more precision than morning, noon, afternoon and night – and so being able to arrange meetings, for instance – was something we couldn't do. 

By the way, I second the recommendation for the Herschel Museum. 

Re: "Americans who think Pluto should still be classified as a planet, because it was the only large solar system object discovered by an American"

If I was witty I'd be able to craft a joke around the theme of the inhabitants of Bath & the discovery of Uranus .... sadly I'm not.

p.s - A museum recomend: https://herschelmuseum.org.uk/

He did ~ but ~ off the top of my empty head I can't recall it's appearing in the same drive related way in any of his other ‘transport’ drawings...... and to 'get' rear wheel chain driven drive - AND- to have equi-sized wheels that look about the same size as was eventually settled upon after some experiment.....????? 

The word according to Wikiwotnot:

"A sketch from around 1500 AD is attributed to Gian Giacomo Caprotti, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, but it was described by Hans-Erhard Lessing in 1998 as a purposeful fraud.[1][2] However, the authenticity of the bicycle sketch is still vigorously maintained by followers of Prof. Augusto Marinoni, a lexicographer and philologist, who was entrusted by the Commissione Vinciana of Rome with the transcription of Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus.[3][4] "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle

The design uses a suprisingly modern looking chain drive which to me makes it particually iffy. 

Didn't Da Vinci have a design for a hobby horse type bicycle?

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?

Thank you HP,  reading the headline, I almost didn't bother.

You can only read so many Canyon customer service stories!

Thanks for this, hawkinspeter - I'll read it later!