The bicycle.

[Forgetting2]

If this is a voting thing I gotta' go for the funny bike wipe out. Anyone calling winners obviously isn't taking a tally.

[barracuda]

James Howard Means, 1896:

WHEELING AND FLYING

By the Editor

The slow development of the flying machine in its early stages finds its analogue in that of the bicycle. The admirable wheel of to day is the product of more than eighty years of careful thought and experiment.

The machine has been improved very gradually; most of the modifications have been slight; yet some of the stages have been marked with great distinctness.

The twelve machines here shown in the drawings give a rough outline of the progress made. First we have the wheel of 1816 (Fig 1.) propelled by striking the feet against the ground. This machine represents the parent form involving the great principle of two wheels balanced by the act of turning the forward wheel on a pivot. It was used principally for the purposes of sport, and it is easily seen that it was at its best on down grades.

Looking backward, it seems strange to us that a device so simple as a pair of foot cranks attached to the front axle was not soon adopted, yet the discovery of such simple things sometimes takes years of hard thinking. Columbus was doubtless surprised when the superficial people of his day told him on his return that any sailor might have discovered the distant land, "all one had to do was to sail west." His alleged reply, illustrated by the balancing of the egg, was most appropriate. The inventor of the sewing machine informed the world that all through the centuries the sewing needle had been threaded at the wrong end; no one knows how long it took him to think that out. We do know however, in the case of the wheel, that it took many years to think of putting foot cranks on the front axle.

Mr Porter says that in 1821 Gompertz invented the Hobby Horse shown in Fig 2 and that in 1840 McMillan made a rear driving machine as shown in Fig 3.

He quotes M. de Saunier as saying that the honors of first applying foot cranks to the front axle seem to be evenly divided between Michaux and Lallement, who probably worked independently of each other, the former applying the cranks in 1855 the latter in 1863.

Lallement's machine of 1866 is shown in Fig 4. This was the machine which immediately preceded the velocipede excitement of the late sixties.

Fig 5 shows the improvement made from 1866 to 1869.

Mr Porter says, "In 1871 WHJ Grant proposed the use of rubber pedals ... and he also vulcanized rubber tires into crescent shaped metal rims."

"In 1873 there was produced by Starley, 'the Father of the Bicycle', about the first machine (Fig. 6) embodying most of the features which are found in the modern Ordinary.

The Ordinary was greatly improved in the ten or twelve succeeding years (see Fig. 7), and long distance riding became common, yet the dangers attending the use of the high machine gradually led to the designing of lower wheels, of which types are shown in Figs 8, 9, 10, and 11.

Later came the safety with cushion tires, which was followed at last by the pneumatic Safety of today (Fig. 12) This is a mere outline; the intermediate machines were many.

It is not uncommon for the cyclist, in the first flush of enthusiasm which quickly follows the unpleasantness of taming the steel steed, to remark, "Wheeling is just like flying!" This is true in more ways than one. Let us note the points of resemblance. Both modes of travel are riding upon the air, though in one case a small quantity of air is carried in a bag and in the other the air is unbagged. There are many who believe that in order to travel upon air it is not necessary to put the air in a bag; they not only believe this but they know it has been done. Lilienthal has done it many times, and the Lilienthal machine is to flying what the wheel of 1816 was to pneumatic wheeling. The Lilienthal machine seems likely to lead to important things, yet there are men who say of the inventor, "He cannot fly up he can only fly down, he is a parachutist, a flying squirrel, he has not solved the great problem." True he has not solved it but he has given a partial solution which will place his name on the roll of the immortals.

It is not unlikely that men regarded the wheel of 1816 as some now regard the Lilienthal soarer. They probably said, "This machine will do for coasting down hill, but that is not practical traveling. You cannot climb hills with the thing; it is not of much importance anyhow." But after a while one day a man who thought put cranks on that machine.

Lilienthal flies not only down but also up. His course as a whole is downward, but when under favoring winds he gets energy from beneath he rises. The only reason that his course as a whole is not upward is that he has not yet completed his apparatus for giving constant energy.

That will take time and if the world is to make rapid progress in manflight it must have a much greater confidence in the value and importance of the Lilienthal soarer than it had in the wonderful balancing wheel of 1816. It was a balancing wheel, and the great art of balancing began with it. To learn to wheel one must learn to balance; to learn to fly one must learn to balance. Why not begin now, instead of imitating the human race of the first half of the century which took so many years to get its feet off the ground?

[barracuda]

[Feilan]

Church Of the Bicycle Jesus



"Our father,
whose art's in heaven,
hollow be thy frame.
Thy links' cogs run.
Thy wheel be done on earth,
as it is in bicycle heaven.
Give us this day our steely thread.
And forgive us our dents,
as we forgive our denters, or dentees.
So why not lead us into temptation,
for after all, you're delivering us from evil:
for thine is the kingdom,
and the pedal power,
and the chrome-plated glory,
for ever.
AMEN"

-Church Of the Bicycle Jesus

http://churchofthetallbike.blogspot.ca/2010/07/church-of-bicycle-jesus.html

[82_28]

Fascinating, barracuda. Thanks.

[Feilan]

Possibly a member of the churchofthetallbike...



...may ingenuity ever run riot in the form of bicycle-cart hybrids and suchlike.

[Feilan]

.invisible.bike.

http://my-funstuff.com/strange-bicycle/

[Feilan]

[Feilan]

[barracuda]

Possibly a member of the churchofthetallbike...

I always loved the Pedersen:



A friend of mine had one. They take a little getting used to, but as with the penny-farthing they have a singular advantage: the higher you are from the ground, the more time you have to make decisions during a fall.

[barracuda]

Obama has good taste in three-wheeled vehicular transport: he appears to be sporting an early sixties Murray with a reinforced truss-rod fork and wheel faring. Suspension is an important factor in negating shock transmission to the rider, you know, and that faring reduces drag significantly at higher speeds. The high-flange grips protect the hands from wind chafe encountered on the downhill. All in all, an excellent choice in cycles.

[Project Willow]

%&*$! Queen ear worm!

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2012/05/training_wheels_don_t_work_balance_bikes_teach_children_how_to_ride_.single.html

Down With Training Wheels
They train kids how not to ride a bike! Why balance bikes are better.

By Nicholas Day|Posted Friday, May 11, 2012, at 12:33 PM ET
Gentle reader, let your mind wander back to the day you first learned how to ride a bike. Who can forget such a magnificent moment?

It’s an iconic scene: The child is nervous on his shiny new Schwinn, but he trusts his father—and his training wheels. On the sun-dappled day they are finally removed, the child is confident that his training wheels have prepared him to ride a bike—that they have trained him. His father runs beside the bicycle, holding onto the seat, and then lets go. The child triumphantly sails forth—face down, into the pavement.

Oh, the memories!

For generations, training wheels have been the standard way of not teaching children how to ride a bike. It’s a time-honored childhood ritual: fumble with wrench, remove tiny wheels, watch child fall on face, repeat.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Compared to the rub-some-dirt-on-it old-timeyness of training wheels, balance bikes—those wooden, pedalless bikes you’ve definitely seen if you live in Portland or Brooklyn, and you’ve maybe seen if you live somewhere else—look like a newfangled waste of money, a meta-bike, a parody of the kinds of crap consumer-culture parents will buy. (They will buy a bike that literally doesn’t work!) But the balance bike isn’t newfangled at all. It is a direct descendant of the first proto-bicycle. And its popularity is growing for very good reason: It corrects the tragic historical error of training wheels.

It’s unclear when training wheels became popular, although historians suggest the early 1900s seem most likely. But it’s apparent why they became popular. They were an obvious solution to an obvious problem: How do you convince someone to climb onto something that is obviously going to fall over?

It’s easy to forget how counterintuitive the act of bicycling is. For starters, to steady a bicycle, you have to turn in the direction that the bike is leaning. This is so unconscious that when you’re riding a bike you don’t know you’re doing it. Children know they’re doing it, though, which is why they have such trouble. It just feels wrong. The intellect, as Mark Twain wrote after learning to ride a bicycle, “has to teach the limbs to discard their old education and adopt the new.”

To make matters worse, in order to ride a bike, you have to be willing to embrace its precariousness. As Archibald Sharp, an English engineer, wrote in a seminal book on bicycling in 1896, “If the bicycle and rider be at rest, the position is thus one of unstable equilibrium, and no amount of gymnastic dexterity will enable the position to be maintained for more than a few seconds.” To lose your nerve is to lose your balance.

So it isn’t surprising that aspiring riders wanted some greater stability, especially when bicycles were still a wondrous sight. “We can't imagine today how huge the fear of balancing was among the adult population,” the German historian of technology Hans-Erhard Lessing explained in an interview. “People would hardly dare to take their feet off safe ground.”

The impulse to solve this problem by adding extra wheels predates training wheels. “No sooner was a practicable bicycle made than attention was turned to the three-wheeler as being the safer of the two machines,” Sharpe noted. In the 1880s, there were tricycles that look like today’s bicycles—except instead of a having a single back wheel, they have a pair of wheels, evenly spaced. The problem, as the early innovators learned, was that the extra wheel made matters worse. Any kid who’s tried to corner on a tricycle or training wheels knows this.

To learn to bike, you must solve two problems: the pedaling problem and the balance problem. Training wheels only solve the pedaling problem—that is, the easy one. Learning to balance on a bike is much more difficult, and a “training” tool that eliminates the need to balance is worse than beside the point. Training wheels only train you to ride a bike with training wheels. It’s no wonder your first experience riding a bike with no training wheels was terrifying! You’d never done anything like it before.

In his classic Bicycling Science, the MIT engineering professor David Gordon Wilson dismissed the whole concept of training wheels in a single memorable sentence: “It’s hard to see how training wheels can inculcate any of the desired balancing habits, unless they are off the ground.” Instead, Wilson proposed, try “the commonsense idea of having those learning to ride a bicycle adjust the bicycle’s seat low enough to plant their feet on the ground and practice by coasting down gentle, grassy slopes.”

Wilson’s advice wasn’t new. A century before, young bicyclists were being told the same thing: “Another plan that may be adopted with advantage, is to remove the pedals and place the saddle so low that the feet can easily reach the ground, and then push the machine along in the way the old hobby-horse was propelled, taking care to begin on a level surface.” Do this and you have made a balance bike. But you have also made the first proto-bicycle: the Draisine.

In the beginning, there was Mount Tambora. (Stay with me.) When the Indonesian volcano exploded in April 1816, it blew ash into the outer atmosphere, altering the weather worldwide for months. Harvests failed across Europe; 1816 would be known as the Year Without a Summer. As the price of oats for horses soared, the mind of a young German baron named Karl Drais turned to the idea of a mechanical horse.

His Draisine was a wooden contraption with no pedals or chain. Instead, the rider would walk along the ground and push himself forward, moving faster than a pedestrian could. The invention swiftly spread across Europe and the Atlantic, inspiring numerous knock-offs. But the novelty wore off within a couple of years: The roads were too rough; the ride was exhausting; there were accidents. The bicycle historian David Herlihy has written that early riders of the Draisine soon discovered that “every journey cost a pair of boots.” Drais died in poverty.
This image of a child on a draisine is taken from an 1857 agricultural machinery catalog of Anton Burg & Sohn, published in Vienna.



To a remarkable degree, the modern balance bike is a copy of the Draisine. Both are made mostly of wood (although not all balance bikes are). Draisine riders leaned forward against a board, not unlike the way children do today, pushed off the ground and sped away. Today, it is easy to see a bicycle in a balance bike. In 1816, no one could: The bicycle wouldn’t achieve anything close to its modern form for decades. Children who hop off a balance bike and onto a bicycle are taking a half-century shortcut.

There are more and more parents who are taking that shortcut. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition runs a popular event that’s explicitly about junking the training wheels. (They also have a good handout about how to do so.) Balance bike models are proliferating and, according to bicycle dealers, sales are rising.

And they should. Children learning to ride on a balance bike solve the balancing problem first. And they solve it easily: Kids on balance bikes are faster and steadier than the contraptions would seem to permit. (Yield the sidewalk.) They have the same confidence as a child on training wheels, but the confidence is justified: They actually do know how to balance themselves on a bicycle. Once on a real bicycle, these kids only have to learn how to make the pedals work. Learning to pedal while balancing is still tricky, of course, but it is far simpler than learning to balance while pedaling.

So skip the training wheels and get rid of the pedals instead. The longstanding popularity of training wheels is a historical headache; no one knows why anyone ever thought they’d be good at what they’re meant to do. Instead, they are a paradigmatic case of a learning tool that teaches the wrong lesson. Once they disappear, only the makers of Band-Aids will feel the pain.

[compared2what?]

A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking bicycling man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support systems. When motor vehicles were introduce they appeared to increase man's freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking bicycling man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and further than a walking bicycling man.

But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace; one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking cycling distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car.

Even the walker’s cyclist's freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walkcycle along the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)

— (Almost) Ted Kaczynski, Industrial Society and its Future Paragraph 127

_________________

Lightly adapted.

[Gnomad]

True dat, about balance bikes. Ive sold quite a few to kids learning to ride (their parents, to be exact), and all say that it was a great way for their kids to learn balance, without ever needing training wheels. Just don't let your kid out of your sight and down a major hill on one of those

[barracuda]