Did a Volcano Eruption Really Help Invent the Bicycle?

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 and like ten fifteen 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 microadjustments are. Yeah, I was actually gonna 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's all about bikes, why don't we put on our helmets and roll out instead? Heither podcast listeners,

Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend man Guesh Ticketer 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 there popping yet another wheelie on his office chair. That's the world's most impressive producer on one of these wheelly chairs, Little Berlante. So, Mango, are you much of a biker? 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 the 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, and he made us wear helmets and and suddenly it was like, I'm good, I think I can walk for me here? You did you 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, And so I were 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 little cool. Yeah, it's it's a very big different day. Some of them have those mohawk helmets, which are just so jealous of. Yeah, I know that 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 we're gonna 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 of 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. It's a pretty depressing label for a year. But but all right, Well, what

what happened next? I guess the temperature drop and the lack of sunlight actually led to all kinds of global problems like of hers 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 van dress early bicycle. You know, I'm tempted. I've got a couple good Frankenstein facts that I'm ready to share with you for some reason, But but I'm gonna 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 lau 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 so fairly similar. Yeah, but it almost makes me thinking like those little balanced bikes that toddlers use right totally, so it was exactly one of those kind of this protobike andv Andreys pattens is 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 Velocit Pede. 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 um, it wasn't long before the pedal list bikes made their way stateside 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? 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 on, even 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, and 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 bike 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? 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 a 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 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 incredible, both the fact and you're punning, But But since we're giving the wheel men their due, let's talk a little bit about the wheel 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. Um 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 no backlash. Kind of changed everything for the better forever, right, of course, So you know, there had to be detractors, and 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 cropp

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 wheel women.

And here's what the confused editors at the San Francisco Call wrote in quote, it doesn't really matter much where one individual young lady is going on her wheels. And maybe 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, 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 errand for I guess a freckle cream is 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 their road 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 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 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 change 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

whild riding bikes. So long skirts and dresses post as a safety risk for female cyclist 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 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 there is 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 le France,

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 woman 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 and but but

maybe she's not. It's it's still really a mystery. But let's talk about another public good that bikes are good for, which is they make perfect ambulances for jested cities. So one of the first people to demonstrate just how effect of a bike ambulance unit could be was this guy named Tom Lynch. And so what's interesting is that Lynch is a pro BMX rider 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 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 e m T, which he did in 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 Tom got permission to launch a trial version of the Ambulance Cycle Responsive Unit or c r U, which is just a great idea. Yeah, I love that. He finally just kind of where everyone down by by talking about

it all this time. Yeah, so you know. 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 defribrillator, which are much lighter these days of course, And so you know he set up the system, like what are his metrics for success?

They like, well, what's the goal of this exactly? Well, basically to be able to successfully answer 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 two 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 ke mt s free up ambulances to respond to the calls that actually require hospital treatment,

not just the on site care. Yeah. Super interesting and 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 the cycle crew operate is it? 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 a hundred paramedics and train 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 of big hearted BMX or just couldn't stand being stuck in traffic. I love that. Well. I know we wanted to cycle back and talk about the neuroscience behind biking, but that was such a feel good story. I just want to

bask him to 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. You know, this is a bike episode, so I'm not I'm not sure that a little Franken Sein facts no unicycle is definitely shaking his head. But actually because he's doing that,

I kind of like breaking Lowell'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 uh.

In Japan's case, the really feel is that unicycling can be a good way to teach and improve both motor skills and balance, and the idea to use unicycles and 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 to ride a unicycle like that kind of focus engages a different area of the brand. Then then 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. They're unicycle programs and schools across the US and 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 who talks about like the most important metric for a person's successes is grit um, 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 a speaking of well known phrases, you know the old cliche about how once you've learned to ride a bike, you never forget right. 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 any time 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 that it can ride a bike

no one that 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 that we don't even think about. So in that sense, it's not that riding a bike is actually easy. It's 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 Destin 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 Destin took a bicycle and basically invert 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. 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's 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 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 that I mean that part is true. But that's where this gets weird because when Destin 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 that is the biggest mystery for anyone listening. If you don't know if we're seen I'm talking about pauses, go watch the Puppet Movie, the entire Muppet movie, and then come back and watch

the whole thing. Will 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 ever off the screen, But you can see Kermit's whole body, and you can see his feet actually turning the pedals, and

this blue audience is 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 Goals, 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 current line. And what's that He almost gets his accident with his giant construction equipment and his bike gets demolished, and you think he's toast, but then you realize he's jumped out of the way, and and he says, uh, 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. 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 winter Bottom, when the prices on bikes dropped in the nineties, suddenly it opened up this whole new world of dating, like people could finally date outside their families, friend circles, or their churches or parishes. And and it was the

first time this has got to happen. 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, it's a big claim, all right. Well, I 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 sided 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 dull will 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. Um have you ever heard of this guy? Have not? So apparently he was just dominant in the sport and at winning the Gero, which I guess is the Tour

of Italy that they have. He won it over and over in 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 winds become bigger and bigger and so regular that the papers 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. That's pretty cool. You know. It's funny that you brought up Italian cyclist because I've got another Italian I wanted to talk about. This is Gino Bartali, who won the Tour de France 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 asked 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 he just earned yourself the trophy with that one. Although I might pay you not to compete the next time I run. 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 gonna 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. Kay. Part Time Genius is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.