Today, we talk about bicycles and freedom. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
The history of the bicycle
is curiously tied to that of the horseless
carriage. Together they represent the routes taken
by the poor and by the wealthy to freedom of
motion. The early 1800s saw all kinds of new
steam-powered vehicles. At first, steam carriages
competed with locomotives, but the railways won
that battle -- largely because they made
transportation inexpensive in a way steam-carriages
couldn't.
Still, trains were confining. People wanted freedom
to travel the roads as they pleased. The new dream
of rapid movement had to be individualized. If the
answer was not to be the steam carriage, then maybe
it could be the bicycle.
Between 1816 and 1818, Scottish, German, and French
makers all came out with primitive bicycles. They
all seated a rider between a front and a back wheel
with his feet touching the ground so he could
propel himself with a walking motion. The odd thing
about this form of bicycle is that it wasn't new.
Such bikes are found in Renaissance stained glass,
Pompeian frescos, and even in Egyptian and
Babylonian bas-reliefs.
But the Scottish maker Macmillan added a feature to
his "hobbyhorse," as he called it, around 1839. He
added a pedal-operated crank to drive the back
wheel -- like the pedal-operated chain drive on
your bike. Oddly enough, that idea didn't catch on
then, and later bikes used a pedal attached to the
front wheel -- like the tricycles we rode as
children.
The front-wheel pedal led to larger and larger
front wheels. The bigger the wheel, the further the
bike would move on each turn of the pedal. This led
to the dangerously unstable bicycle you've seen in
Courier and Ives prints -- the one with the huge
front wheel and the tiny back one. In its developed
form it was called the "ordinary" bicycle, but it
was nicknamed "penny farthing" because its wheels
looked like large and small coins.
The ordinary was so tricky that it finally gave way
to the so-called safety bicycle -- the modern bike
with two equal wheels, the back one driven by a
chain and sprocket. The safety bike was a lot like
MacMillan's hobbyhorse design 46 years earlier. It
went into production in 1885 and soon not only
replaced the ordinary but remained the basic bike
design ever after.
So the modern bike entered the 20th century along
with the new gasoline automobiles. It freed those
people who couldn't afford cars. Now they too could
go where they pleased.
And, oh, the sense of freedom I felt as a boy when
I got my first bike. It let me fly like the wind
and go where I wanted. It was a wonderful thing.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
