Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of iHeartRadio. Guess what, Well, what's that Mango? So this is something I certainly haven't thought about that often, but it is much harder to balance on a bike that isn't moving compared to one that is.
I'm glad to know you haven't thought about it that often, but it is actually strange when you think about it, like you think it would be harder to balance on something that's whipping along in like ten fifteen miles an hour.
Right exactly, And it turns out the difficulty is mostly due to the fact that a bike only has two points of contact with the ground, like the thin parts of the front and back wheel, and typically you need three contact points with the ground to create a good base of support, and four is actually I deal with like a table or a bed. But what bikes lack and static stability, they actually make up for in dynamic stability, which is the ability to remain stable while moving forward.
And it works because a rider can maneuver the bike's points of support, or in other words, the rider can reposition the wheels as needed to keep everything nice and balanced from one moment to the next. And the best part is riders usually steer like this without even realizing what they're doing. Like, that's how subtle these micro adjustments are.
Yeah, I was actually going to say, I never feel like I'm that focused on, you know, like the handlebars when I'm out riding a bike. It's just one of those things where your brain goes into autopilot and you really just respond without thinking about it.
Yeah, I mean, that's one thing I realized this week. There are a lot of things about bikes we don't really think about, from how we ride them, to where they came from, to what they have to do with horses deaths. So that's what I thought we could tackle today, all the weird questions about bikes we never think to ask. And this is usually where I suggest we dive right in. But since today it's all about bikes, why don't we put on our helmets and roll out instead.
Hey, their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always I'm joined by my good friend mangesh hot Ticketter on the other side of the soundproof glass. He's been doing this all morning, and I gotta be honest, it's pretty impressive.
He's saying there.
Popping yet another wheelie his office chair. That's the world's most impressive producer on one of these wheelie chairs, Lowel Berlante. So, Mango, are you much of a bike er? I don't think I've ever seen you ride a bike before.
I know. It's funny, you know what I was when I was a kid, Like I used to have this little BMX and I'd ride it around the neighborhood into the country store we had in our town and to get candy and whatever. But you know, when I hit sixth or seventh grade, like my dad got super to safety all of a sudden, and he put this long plastic stick on the back of our bike that had this orange flag at the top of it. Yeah, and
he made us wear helmets. And suddenly it was like, I'm good, I think I can walk from here.
Yeah.
Did you ride around much? Oh?
I rode to school every single day. But yeah, I was that kid. You know, we were the first generation where some parents started making kids wear helmets, you know, So I wore a helmet every day. But yeah, we were definitely like these days kids don't think that much about it. But but yeah, it was a little cooler. They do a look cooler. Yeah, it's a very big difference day. Some of them have those mohawk helmets, which are just so jealous of.
Yeah, I know, the helmets really are so much cooler with the mohawks. But let's get off my hesitation about bikes because I still don't really ride that much, and talk about a different weird story that bikes were invented because of volcano killed all the horses.
Right, of course. No, Actually, I think you're going to have to explain this one because I have no idea what you're talking about.
So today we tend to think of bikes mostly as recreational items, but their invention was actually a matter of necessity, so it was a weird, tragic necessity. Here's what happened. In eighteen fifteen, a volcano named Mount Tambora erupted on an island in Indonesia, and that eruption was and still is,
the largest eruption in recorded history. It was so bad that the blast all but wiped out the island's inhabitants, and to make matters worse, the neighboring islands became so choked with ash and smoke that tens of thousands of people died from famine and disease in the months that followed. But here's the thing. The effects were even more widespread
than just that area. In fact, they were worldwide, and such a massive amount of ash and sulfur dioxide had been shot up into the atmosphere that actually blocked sunlight and disrupted weather patterns all over the world for a full three years.
Wow. So this was one of those massive eruptions. It actually affected the Earth's climate, the whole Earth's climate.
Yeah, it did so. The average global temperature actually dropped almost a full degree after the blast, and while that doesn't sound huge, it was enough to make eighteen sixteen the coldest year on record since the fourteen hundreds. It was so bad that historians now referred to eighteen sixteen as the year without Summer.
Yeah, it's a pretty depressing label for a year. But all right, Well, what happened next?
I guess the temperature drop and the lack of sunlight actually led to all kinds of global problems like versus froze, crops failed, disease broke out, and lots and lots of people and animals starved to death and In fact, there was so little food in Europe that the vast majority of horses and draft animals wound up being slaughtered and
eaten by their owners who were themselves starving. And it was bleak and tragic, obviously, But you know, if there's any bright side to it, it's that two great creations were inspired by this dreary atmosphere, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein novel and Baron Carl von Dreys's early bicycle.
Ye know, I'm tempted. I've got a couple good frankensteinfachts that I'm ready to share with you for some reason, but I'm going to be disciplined. Let's stick to the bike for today, I think. So.
In Germany, this guy Andres worked both as an inventor and also as a forestry master for the government, and this meant that he had to travel between the different parts of the forest that he was in charge of, which became pretty difficult once all the horses in the region had been eaten. So basically Von Dreis needed this reliable, horseless way to get around, and the solution he came up with was this two wheeled running machine or lout machine,
as he called it. His device had no pedals, and as the name implies, the riders would actually have to run to propel it, kicking off the ground with their feet, kind of like you might on a scooter. Aside from the lack of pedals, though, the design looked pretty close to what we're used to today. It's got kind of like the two in line wheels, a seed, a pair of handlebars, so fairly similar.
Yeah, but it almost makes me think of like those little balanced bikes that toddlers use, right.
Totally, So it was exactly one of those kind of this protobike and Andre's Pattens's design in eighteen eighteen, and soon after that other manufacturers in England and France begin putting their own spins on the invention. So France comes up with a pretty cool name for the version, it's called a velocipede. England goes the other way. They call their bikes dandy horses.
Which, yeah, one name is definitely cooler than the other.
Yeah yeah, I mean, I guess it's a tribute to their horses, which you know they'd eaten. But it wasn't long before the pedalist bikes made their way straightside as well.
I mean, if you look at the timeline, one of the things that's funny is that it takes about another seventy years to go from these balanced bikes to the you know, like the gear and chain models with pedals. Why do you think that is well, I mean, I think part of the delay was that people were not at all convinced that it was possible to balance on a two wheeled bike, you know, while pedaling, and not just fall over. And so it's exactly what you were talking about at the top of the show. But a
few decades of innovation eventually got us there. This was by the eighteen nineties, and the truth is, the basic form of the bike has stayed pretty much the same ever since then. But even with better bikes and growing popularity, the cyclist of the era still had a huge obstacle ahead of them, the main one being that all the roads pretty much everywhere were terrible. So they were unpaved, uneven,
littered with holes, and easily turned into mud. So, as one New York Times article put it, the country roads where a Martian spring a sahara in summer, frozen stiff and later autumn, and a swamp wherever there was thought in winter, and so the urban roads weren't really that
much better. I mean, they were often covered in wood planks at least, which made riding a little bit smoother, but still you'd sometimes have cyclists riding on the sidewalk just to get a break from this rough ride, and so this inevitably led to accidents where pedestrians would get knocked over, and then people would complain that bikes should be banned entirely. So it was a tough time to be a bike fan or a wheelman as they were called back then.
How did things get better for bikers then?
Well, instead of giving up, these cyclists formed advocacy groups, including the League of American Wheelmen, and they began advocating for paved roads throughout the country. There are more than one hundred thousand of these people that joined the cause, and due to the success of their grassroots efforts, the nation got its first paved roads in eighteen ninety eight. So it's really no stretch to say that the early work of these cyclists literally paved the way for the
national highway system. I had been waiting so long to be able to say that literally paved alay.
That's pretty odd. Incredible both the fact and you're punning. But since we're giving the real men their due, let's talk a little bit about the real women of the day as well. Because as big as the bike craze was in general, from a cultural perspective, it was probably most significant to women. Before the bike came along in the nineteenth century, women had been expected to travel either
on foot or on horseback or in a carriage. They were usually accompanied by a chaperone of some kind, and they rarely got to travel at speeds any faster than a leisurely trot. The bike changed all of that by giving women the chance to travel with a whole new level of independence. It completely flipped the table on this old fashioned view of women as the frails, slow going gentler sex.
Yeah, and I feel like I can finish the story because I would imagine that newfound freedom was met with complete approval from the public and no backlash. Kind of changed everything for the better forever.
Right of course, so you know, there had to be detractors, and many of them were saying that being able to travel free and unsupervised might somehow corrupt the women's morals. In fact, that there was even a business that crop up to help guard against this threat. It was called the Cyclist Chaperone Association, and according to its ad the company provided gentlewomen of good social position to conduct ladies on bicycle excursions and tours so nervous husbands could be
put to ease. But you know, it wasn't just these husbands who were worried. Newspaper columnists all over the country were also baffled by the sudden appearance of wheelwomen. And here's what the confused editors at the San Francisco Call wrote in eighteen ninety five. Quote, it doesn't really matter much where one individual young lady is going on her wheels. It may be she's going to the park, or to the store for a dozen hairpins, or to get a dollar, or to get a doily pattern of somebody, or a
recipe for removing tens and freckles. Right right, of course, let that be as it may. What the interested public wishes to know is where are all the women on wheels going? You know, just one woman on an aaron for I guess a freckle cream is the type of thing you can excuse. But dozens of them traveling without knowing where the going is something to rail against. And the truth is, the outcry against women riding bikes did get pretty serious. So female cyclists were frequently harassed as
they rode. Men and women would both taunt the riders, demanding they go home where they belong. Some women were banned from public places where male cyclists were permitted, and in the worst cases, the female cyclists were actually assaulted with rocks and bricks.
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like there's a lot more at play here than just not wanting women to ride bikes, right.
Yeah, definitely, And I do want to talk a little bit more about what exactly was fueling that outrage, including the role bikes played in the women's suffrage movement. But before we get into that, let's take a quick break.
You're listening to Part Time Genius and we're talking about all the unexpected ways that bicycles changed the world. All right, mego, So before the break, you were saying that all the public outcry in the early twentieth century wasn't just about the bike's women were.
Riding, right, Yeah, So the outrage was also partly about what women wore while riding bikes, So long skirts and dresses posed as a safety risk for female cyclists because they could get caught in the bike chains and spokes. And in light of this, the modest fashion of the Victorian age, it all started to give way and all of a sudden, women were, I guess, taking up the scandalous practice of wearing ankle bearing bloomers in public. This was an appalling development for some people, and in fact,
one US newspaper referred to the bloomers as a gateway garment. Man.
I mean it starts with wearing bloomers, but the next thing, you know, like she's moved on to book learning, you know what I mean.
It's just dangerous, I know. And when you think about it, all that kind of criticism really just proved the level of cultural impact the women's movement was having. And probably the best example of that is the bicycle actually became a symbol of women's rights. This was both with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Katie Stanton's credited as saying that women were quote riding the suffrage on the bicycle.
I mean that was literally the case, though, right, I mean, suffragettes relied on bikes when they were out campaigning for the vote. They might not have won nearly as much support as they did without bikes to help them reach all these people.
Yeah, that's true. In fact, The Atlantic ran this great article a few years ago about just how much of a game changer bikes were for women. It closes on this really beautiful sentiment that I wanted to share. It's
from the author, Adrian Lefrance, and this is what she writes. Quote, Imagine what it must have felt like in an age when American women were still decades from the right to vote and inundated with men's opinions about their ankles for a women to go outside, hop on her bicycle, and ride as fast as she could wherever she wanted, leaving the rest of the world wondering where she might go next.
Yeah. I mean, maybe she's out looking for freckle cream. But maybe she's not. It's still really a mystery about it. But all right, let's talk about another public good that bikes are good for, which is they make perfect ambulances for ingested cities. So one of the first people to demonstrate just how effective a bike ambulance unit could be was this guy named Tom Lynch. And so what's interesting is that Lynch is a pro BMX rid turned London
Ambulance driver. This really isn't that long ago. This was back in the eighties and nineties. Lynch was basically the Tony Hawk of BMX, but as he got a little bit older, he wanted what he considered, you know, a normal job, and for Lynch that meant training with the London Ambulance Service and becoming a licensed EMT, which he did in nineteen ninety four. But the more time Tom spent stuck in traffic on his way to a call,
the more frustrated he became. So he often told his colleagues how much faster they'd be able to respond to calls if only they could use bikes instead of vans. No one else thought much of this idea, but Tom kept pushing it until finally, in nineteen ninety nine, Tom got permission to launch a trial version of the Ambulance Cycle Responsive Unit or CRU, which is just a great idea.
Yeah, I love that. You finally just kind of wore everyone down by talking about it all this time.
Yeah, so yeah. Anyway, Tom used his connections in the bike industry to make sure all the top gear was on hand for his big trial run and He loaded up his bikes with all sorts of customized equipment, including a siren, special medic bags, and there was this fifty pound defibrillator, which are much lighter these days of course.
And so you know, he set up the system like what are his metrics for success? Lay like, what's the goal of this? Exactly?
Well, basically to be able to successfully answer nine to nine to nine calls in the West of London. And if you asked Tom, he says that he could tell early on that the new approach was definitely going to work. He told one interviewer, I was based around the West End and the calls were coming in and I was doing my best to ease pressure on the ambulance cruise. I would race the incidents, flying past traffic, cycling where motor vehicles couldn't go, and getting to patients quickly. I
went to five incidents within one hour. I treated patients, canceled the ambulances and used other medical centers as opposed to the accident and emergency. And that last part is really the key in all of this, Like the bike EMT's free up ambulances to respond to the calls that actually require hospital treatment, not just the on site care. Yeah,
super interesting. And one group that benefits from this big time is their heart attack victims, like where every second you're not breathing counts so much and so it really helped a ton on that front.
So where does this cycle crew operate? Is it mainly like a London thing or has it expanded?
No, the unit Tom found that is now composed of several teams that operate all over London. More than one hundred paramedics and trained volunteers are involved. But other similar teams have started popping up in major cities across Europe, some of the US, even China and Japan. So each of those cycle response teams now responds to thousands of calls every year. And it's all because a big hearted bmx or just couldn't stand being stuck in traffic.
I love that. Well. I know we wanted to circle back and talk about the neuroscience behind biking, but that was such a feel good story. I just want to bask him the glow for a minute. Why don't we take another quick break and then we can jump right back in. Welcome back to part time Genius. Okay, Well, so today's show is clearly all about bicycles. But nonetheless, I have to tell you about something amazing I found out about this week, and it's all about unicycles.
M you know, this is a bike episode, so I'm not sure that's a little Frankenstein fack no unicycle and Loell is definitely shaking his head. But I actually because he's doing that, I kind of like breaking Loll's rules.
So if you insist, let's hear the story. Okay, So here's my fact. Unicycles have basically become a cornerstone of Japan's educational curriculum.
Is Japan like really into clowns or something? I've just somehow never noticed this. How did that happen?
I don't know that there are any countries that are still really into In Japan's case, the real apeeal is that unicycling can be a good way to teach and improve both motor skills and balance, and the idea to use unicycles in schools with the result of a series of studies done in Japan in the nineteen eighties, I guess researchers found that children who learned to ride a unicycle were more successful at school and in their home lives than children who didn't.
It's pretty interesting. So did they figure out why that would be the case?
I guess the leading theory is that it's because the high level of concentration that it takes to ride a unicycle like that kind of focus engages a different area of the brain than other physical activities, including biking.
So, based on these findings, Japanese schools started teaching kids to ride unicycles.
Yeah, I guess the Ministry of Education added unicycling to the p curriculum in all of the country's elementary schools. But Japan's schools aren't the only place you actually find this. Today, there are unicycle programs in schools across the US, and more and more educators are starting to see unicycles as a tool not just for brain development, but for character development.
So you think about people like the psychologist and Angela Duckworth who talks about like the most important metric for a person's successes is grit, because that's kind of what makes you keep trying when you fail instead of giving up. So riding a unicycle is so unnatural and so awkward and hard that the kids in these programs fall off dozens of times before they finally start to get it, and it's sort of like thought to reinforce that perseverance.
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of that famous Samuel Beckett quote. I think it was try again, fail again, fail better, but away. Speaking of well known phrases, you know the old cliche about how once you've learned to ride a bike, you never forget right. Sure, well, it was always a strange saying to me because it seemed to imply that riding a bike is super simple, like you could pick it up anytime in life and just nail it without practice. But the truth is that riding
a bike is incredibly complex as a task. So, according to the author and world class endurance athlete Christopher Bergland, riding a bike quote requires seamless coordination, dexter, and an intuitive ability to subconsciously calculate algorithms that take into the account the forces of gravity, velocity, and momentum. Makes me feel so smart that it can ride a bike? No, and then I'm doing all of this.
Yeah, I mean, as we talked about at the top, there's a lot that goes into it that we don't even think about. So in that sense, it's not that riding a bike is actually easy. It's more that our brains process all this information so efficiently that riding a bike seems easy to us.
Yeah. Yeah, But here's the thing, like, despite all that hard work from our brains, it turns out that we can absolutely still forget how to ride a bicycle.
So not only is it cliche, it's also inaccurate.
It is definitely inaccurate. And we know that partly because of this oddball experiment that a guy named Destin Sandlin did a few years back. We of course worked with Deston some when we were at Mental Flaws, But he has this this show called Smarter every Day. It's a channel on YouTube, super popular channel, and if you haven't
seen the video, it's called Backwards Brain Bicycle. And the gist of it is that Deston took a bicycle and basically inverted the steering direction of the handlebars, So if you turn the handlebars right, the front wheel would go left and vice versa. So in that scenario, all the automatic motor skills that a person develops from years of riding a regular bicycle, all of a sudden those are
just worthless. And the effect is that anyone who tries to ride the backwards brain bike pretty much tips over or falls off the bike before they've even gone two feet.
Yeah.
So Deston spent months riding only this backwards bike, and little by little he slowly got used to the inverted steering of it all.
It is one of those things like I actually saw a clip of someone riding in and thinking like, oh yeah, I could like think around that challenge. It doesn't seem that difficult, but clearly it is. So it is confusing though. It feels like this isn't so much about forgetting how to ride a bike, it's more kind of learning how to ride a different kind of bike.
Yeah, I mean that part is true, But that's where this gets weird because when Deston tried to switch back to riding a normal bicycle, he couldn't do it. Like, he fell over again and again until finally something clicked in his brain and he was able to ride his bike again. So the takeaway is that you can indeed forget how to ride a bicycle, but the good news is that if you practice, you'll probably be able to relearn the automatic motor skill pretty quickly the next time around.
All right, Well, since we're talking about the logistics, and science of bicycling. I think it's only right that we spend a minute on what's probably the biggest mystery in the whole field, and that is, of course, how did they get Kermit to ride a bike in the Muppet Movie?
Totally, that is the biggest mystery.
Yeah, for anyone listening. If you don't know, we'veeeing him talking about pauses, go watch the Muppet movie, the entire Muppet movie, and then come back.
I can watch the whole thing.
We'll wait. In the beginning of the flick, Kermit's riding his bike across town, and in the context of the story, it's this incredibly simple moment, right, But when you watch it, it's pretty mind blowing, partially because they keep zooming in on his feet, like you know on some level that Kermit is a puppet and that he's being controlled by Jim Henson or what I off the screen, but you can see Kermit's whole body and you can see his feet actually turning the pedals, and this blue audiences away.
When they first saw it back in the seventies, the Muppets had actually never been seen in the real world like this before. They had always been tethered to a stage or studio. But what's interesting is the technology that made it happen was also very simple. There's no audio, animatronics, there's no green screen, none of that. Instead, the Kermit in the scene is just a regular marionette with nearly
invisible strings attached to his body and limbs. The other ends of the strings are connected to a camera crane that's suspended above him out of shot, so as the bike moved forward, the crane would move along with it, and Kermit and his bike would stay upright and balanced, which is super simple. But according to the puppeteer Dave Goles,
it wasn't the original approach. The crew had actually assembled what he said quote was a very sophisticated bicycle rig that was made from a little radio controlled car that was mounted in the bike between the front and rear wheels, but it actually broke before the shoe, so they ended up rejiggering it with three strings from a camera crane. It is also possibly Kermit's best line in the world,
or at least my favorite Kurmit line. And what's that He almost gets to his accident with his giant construction equipment and his bike gets demolished, and you'd think he's toast, but then you realize he's jumped out of the way, and he says, that's pretty dangerous building a road in the middle of the street. If frogs couldn't hop, I'd be gone with a shwin. A terrible fun but also one of my favorites.
I could keep shaking my head for the rest of the episode, but instead, why don't we jump straight into the fact off?
So here's a quick one. I remember from an article we did in Mental plus years ago. But apparently bikes had a huge effect on romance and specifically long distance courtships. So, according to Julie Winterbottom, when the prices on bikes dropped in the eighteen nineties, suddenly it opened up this whole new world of dating, like people could finally date outside their family's friend circles or their churches or parishes. And it was the first time this has kind of happened.
And according to British geneticist Steve Jones, this widening of the gene pool had a huge impact on humanity. In fact, he calls the bicycle quote the most important event in recent human evolution.
Wow, that's a big claim. All right, well, I've found this amazing NPR interview with a guy named Daniel Kish who is blind but not only rides a bike, he rides it through traffic. So basically he uses echolocation, which we've talked about several times in previous episodes. So he clicks his tongue and uses the reverberations to create spatial awareness of buildings and vehicles and other things around him. I mean, it's pretty remarkable, but he doesn't really see
it that way, as he told reporters. Quote, when a sighted child gets hurt, we consider it to be unfortunate, Kish says, when a blind child gets hurt, we consider it to be tragic. It's a double standard that disadvantages a blind child, he says, which you know, I guess that makes sense.
So here's one about an Italian cyclist named Alfredo Binda. Have you ever heard of this guy? I have not. So apparently he was just dominant in the sport and at winning the Giro, which I guess is the tour of Italy that they have. He won it over and over in nineteen twenty five, nineteen twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine. And so this is like Italy's version of the Tour de France, and it was good for the newspaper business initially, right, like he's this like underdog, his hero.
Then he keeps winning, and his wins become bigger and bigger and so regular that the paper's sales start declining. So the organizers actually offered to pay him the equivalent of the winning sum not to race.
So did he accept it?
He did, I guess he quickly calculated that he could buy two more houses with the winnings, so he took the money and used it for this great investment. But he did come back to win the race again a few years later.
Oh that's pretty cool. Yeah, it's funny that you brought up Italian cyclists, because I've got another Italian I wanted to talk about. This is Gino Bartali, who won the twur Defrance in nineteen thirty eight. But then he made the surprising move of not dedicating his win to Mussolini. Instead, he decided to work for the resistance, so he helped Jews escape the country by stuffing counterfeit identity papers into
his handlebars and his bike frame. Basically, he would fill up the insides of his bike with papers and then go on these long training runs in order to deliver them. And if he was ever stopped for a police search, he was famous enough that he'd ask the cops not to mess with his perfectly calibrated bicycle. I mean, it
was the perfect cover. It's just brilliant. According to an article in Mental Flaws, by the time he eventually went into hiding, quote, he had cycled thousands of miles to help hundreds escape.
That is a great story and I think you just earned yourself the trophy with that one. Although I might pay you not to compete the next time a round.
Well, I'll consider it if I can buy a house. But all right, well, thank you to the bicycle for givings better dating options, freedom for women, and the greatest joke the Muppets ever told. That's going to do it for today's Part Time Genius for myself, Mango, Gabe, and Lowell. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with another episode. Part Time Genius is a production of iHeartRadio.
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