Conversation

Maybe GDP per capita just has to hit a certain point before people even have time/attention/resources to think about new inventions that aren't literally putting food on the table, a roof over your head, or a shirt on your back?
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Turns out, roads aren't the reason. People rode bikes on bad roads and the quality didn't improve until cyclists and others called for it. And it wasn't really horses; people had been dreaming of a way to travel without horses for centuries.
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For a long time, though, inventors were stuck on the idea that a human-powered vehicle would be a large, four-wheeled *carriage*. These designs were all too big and heavy. The first step was to try a light, two-wheeled vehicle: not a mechanical carriage, but a mechanical horse.
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A two-wheeled vehicle was invented in 1817, but it had no pedals! You pushed it with your feet like a scooter. It was made of wood with iron tires. This became a fad but didn't last, in part because pedestrians hated the intrusion (shades of today's scooter wars).
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Decades passed before someone added pedals. But at first, they were attached directly to the front wheels. They were still made of wood and later iron, and were known as “boneshakers”, which gives you an idea of how rough a ride they were.
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The problem with pedals directly attached to wheels is that you get no leverage. It's like a fixie with a 1:1 gear ratio, you're stuck in low gear the whole time.
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With no gears or chains, the only solution is to make the wheel bigger, leading to the ridiculous (and dangerous) “penny-farthing” design with the huge front wheel. The big wheel also absorbed shocks better; tires at this time were solid rubber but not yet inflatable.
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The final evolution was to detach the pedals from the wheel and connect them by a chain instead. This “safety bicycle” became a commercial success in 1885. A few years later inflatable tires were introduced and the penny-farthing was abandoned.
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So it took centuries to hit on the right basic concept (a two-wheeled, one-person vehicle), and then ~70 years of iteration to get to the right design. And that probably required technological advances in materials and manufacturing (especially metal and rubber).
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Now, *why* it took that long is an interesting question. I suspect general economic and cultural factors: a surplus required to fund R&D, a surplus required to create markets for new products, and a general cultural idea of invention and improvement.
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To put the development speed in perspective, it took less time to go from the Wright Brothers to the Moon landing than it did to go from the first bicycle design to the recognizable modern version.
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