TechStuff Takes Off The Training Wheels

But today I've got the subject that I'm really excited to talk about. Now. I've done episodes in the past about electric bikes, but a listener recently pointed out that I'm not yet actually discussed the bicycle itself. And so today we're gonna take a look at the bicycle. We're gonna take off the training wheels, and we're gonna look at this evolution and probably make some queen references. We'll see how it goes. But yes, I like to ride my bicycle. I like to ride my bike. So where

did the bicycle come from? We're gonna really focus on that today. We're looking at the birth and evolution of the bicycle as opposed to the latest engrazed in bikes. I'll do another episode about that later on. Well, As is the case with many inventions, the answer of where the bicycle came from is not really that simple an answer. The bicycle evolved from a series of different inventions, and it would be disingenuous to point to a specific person

as the inventor of the bicycle. Now, I should start all of this by talking about the earliest evidence of wheeled vehicles in general, but I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time on it, because come on, you don't need a fourteen series episode about the invention and modernization of the wheel. But the actual wheel dates back to at least in both Asia and Europe, and going into more detail would be a bit much, even for me. The early wheeled vehicles used four wheels for the most part.

That's not a surprise, as it provides a stable base. Historians discovered a few early two wheeled vehicles dating from around that same time, but these were carts and the wheels were aligned side by side as opposed to front and back like a bicycle. Skipping ahead thousands of years,

let's talk about Geovanni Fontana. He was known as not just a fifteenth century doctor of medicine, but also an engineer and even in some circles, a magician, though he was using a proto form of the scientific method to get results and didn't necessarily present his work as that of a magical nature. He was replicating what magicians claimed they could do using scientific principles and saying, doesn't it

make more sense that it's done this way? Well. In fourteen twenty five he published a manuscript that detailed a self driving carriage. By that he did not mean an autonomous car, though that would have been incredibly forward thinking back in the fourteen hundreds. Rather, he had suggested a vehicle that would be propelled by the people inside the vehicle itself. Up to that point, land vehicles had to

be pulled by animals or other human beings. Fontana suggested that a hand powered vehicle could allow for a new method of getting from place to place. His proposal included a brief description of a carriage that used ropes and cogs to transform power from a writer or transfer power, I should say, from a writer to the wheels of the vehicle. So imagine sort of a loop of rope wrapped around cogs like their pulleys, and if you pull on the rope, you transfer the energy needed to rotate

the wheels of the carriage itself. But that's about all the details we have for this proposed device. If Fontana actually ever tried to build one of these things, it was lost to time. And on a tangential note, before I trend for away from Fontana, I have to also mention that he proposed a sort of proto rocket car that would be fueled by gunpowder. Now I mentioned that

only because I love how crazy that sounds. I don't think he ever made one of those either, because there are no reports of Fontana having to be dug out of the side of a mountain. A French mathematician ended up laying out the argument for human powered vehicles in a six nine six manuscript titled Recreations Mathematiques a physiques because it's French. He hypothesized that such conveyances would be much more readily available to the general population because you

wouldn't have to care for an animal. You wouldn't have to have the space to keep a horse, and you wouldn't have to feed it. Plus you could even get some exercise and some fresh air using such a vehicle. However, this was just sort of a armchair philosophizing kind of approach.

He didn't actually build anything. There is interesting story about a sketch that was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and supposedly that sketch dated back to fourteen three, and not only was it a sketch of what looked like a bicycle, it even had pedals like it was. It was pretty much a modern style bike, uh in a in a sketch format. It's it's undeniably that sort of thing, but

it is a somewhat crude design. The sketch had remained undiscovered and I say that in air quotes until nineteen seventy four, So it was attributed to fourteen but it wasn't uncovered until nineteen seventy four. That was when there was an art restoration project. Experts were working on Da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus, and supposedly this particular design was part of that and just had not been seen for centuries. Historians debated the legitimacy of this sketch, and the general

consensus is that it's hocum. Here's the weird thing. This is not the only example of false attribution to the bicycle's evolution. Another sketch, this one supposedly dating to fift thirty four and made by one of da Vinci's pupils, also appears to be a fraud. So what was going on? There are these crazy fake sketches claiming to be the proto design of the bicycle centuries before it was ever

really introduced. Well to understand, we need to take a quick detour and then I'll get back to the actual timeline of the bicycles invention. But I think this is pretty fascinating. So in the early twentieth century, European nations were becoming increasingly isolated and jingoistic. It became a point of national pride to champion the various advancements and inventions each country could lay claim to. I think of it a lot like the way we treat the Olympics at times.

How some people will reduce the Olympics to a discussion of our country took home twelve gold medals and your country only took home eight. It's sort of a one upsmanship tendency, which I think it's pretty darn tacky because it takes attention away from the actual accomplishments, but that's just my own opinion. While his tensions in Europe built toward World War One, more nations were getting involved in kind of this one upsmanship. They were scrambling to prove

that they were the seat of ingenuity and innovation. And sometimes it meant that some rather um let's say, creative but undaunted by ethics sorts of people would fabricate evidence that clever inventions came from their respective homelands. Historians suspected that the alleged Da Vinci sketch is one of those examples. It was a forgery intended to give the honor of creating the bicycle to Italians rather than to say, the Germans. Spoiler alert, Most historians agree that the bicycle really got

started in Germany first. Another bogus claim to the invention of the bicycle dates to See and a fellow known as Compt. Deceive Rack. Though it maybe that this bogus claim was arrived at honestly by mistake, as opposed to a hoax perpetuated by someone. The good Count allegedly developed a vehicle called the Salt Affair, which by a nineteenth century historians description sounded a lot like the basic frame of a bicycle. According to the description, it had two wheels,

one set in front of the other. It did not have any pedals or brakes or handlebars. It was essentially a frame with a saddle on it, a leather seat, and you would sit on the saddle and you would propel yourself with your feet pushing against the ground, and you would steer yourself by leaning left or right, and that's as best as you could do. As it turns out, there were vehicles sort of like this, but they were all three or four wheeled vehicles, not two wheeled vehicles.

Many people, particularly French people, adopted the belief that a Frenchman had come up with the idea for a bicycle. But it appears that was not quite the case. It may well have been an error in translation or transcription. Now I prefer stories that actually have evidence to support them, and I am inclined to give the nod of the invention of the bicycle, or at least the invention of a device that would evolve into the bicycle, to a

certain Baron Carl von Dreiss in eighteen seventeen. He was concerned with finding a way for people to get around due to recent unfortunate events see an eighteen fifteen. A couple of years earlier, there was a volcano in Indonesia called Mount Tambora, and it done blowed up. The volcano ejected an enormous cloud of ash into the atmosphere. Now that ash cloud had a global effect. It lowered temperatures across the world. It was kind of like a nuclear winter, except,

of course, this is a volcanic one. This in turn led to massive crop failures in certain regions around the world, like in Europe, and that led to other problems such as animals like horses, dying of starvation. So there was a shortage of horses in Europe at the time. Dryce wanted to invent a means of getting around quickly despite

this lack of horses. The good Baron came up with a novel idea, assuming that the previous examples I mentioned were in fact hoaxes and not just poorly recorded history. It was again a two wheeled vehicle, with one wheel set in front of the other. It had a padded saddle to sit upon and a set of handlebars for steering. There were no pedals and only a single wheel break so again, and for real, the writer would push him or herself along the ground with his or her feet.

Let's be honest, it was mostly hymns and he's that we're talking about because there were lots of laws about what women could and could not wear, and most of those were not conducive to riding a vehicle of this design. So what was this thing called? Well, it actually had several names. Dryce called it the laos machine, which means

running machine. You gotta love the German language in which new words are invented by just stringing existing words together and you just end up with a very long new word. According to the sources I referenced, he used this name originally for a four wheeled vehicle of his design, but he later adapted the same name to the two wheeled model. It was known in English as the dry zine or dry Zine d r A I s I n E. In French it was the dry zen oh, and it

was also called a velocipede. Velocipede would become a generic term for these sort of two wheeled vehicles for many many years. Uh In England, it was also sometimes called a hobby horse or and this is my favorite a dandy horse because they were expensive, so typically only really rich people in nice clothing were striding along with these suckers. The word velocipede would be used for many such vehicles

for decades until the term bicycle came around. Now people liked these when they could ride them on nice, smooth surfaces, because a push with your foot would propel you much further than just if you were to take a regular step, so you travel more ground faster than normal, So you wouldn't be going at ridiculous speeds, but you could certainly get across a sidewalk area much faster than if you were just strolling, and it had a certain appeal. Dryce's

invention was a hefty one. It was made out of wood and brass and iron shod wheels, plus that leather saddle. The whole thing weighed around fifty pounds or twenty three For a few years, his invention was all the rage

in Europe. Over in England, a coachmaker named Dennis Johnson began to market his own variation of Dryce's invention, and the inspired a few seasons of vigorous sporting events among the aristocracy of London, but turned out to mostly just be a fad, and excitement died down by the eighteen twenties. So why did it go out of style so quickly? Well, it might have had something to do with writing conditions. The vehicles worked best on smooth paved surfaces. Now, most

roads in Europe did not fit that description. They were a cobblestone if you were lucky, But sidewalks were frequently very smooth, so velocopied writers would stick to sidewalks and they would terrorize pedestrians. This might sound pretty familiar if you're a pedestrian out there, and I'm sure you've got your own story or stories of crazed bicyclists barreling down

pedestrian walkways. Anyway, many places ended up passing laws that would forbid velocipede writers to go on sidewalks, and since they were incredibly uncomfortable to ride on rutted roads or a cobblestone streets, they faded from common use. Meanwhile, across the pond, the early invention had debuted in the United States.

There was a man named W. K. Clarkson Jr. Who received a patent for a velocipede in eighteen nineteen and I would love to tell you more about mention, but sadly all records of that particular patent were destroyed in eighteen thirty six and a fire at the U. S. Patent Office, And I may have to do an episode one day about that particular event, because it definitely had a major impact on innovation and invention at the early nineteenth century in the United States. Next, we come to

another possible hoax, or at least potential misinformation. There's a story that a Scottish blacksmith named Kirkpatrick McMillan came up with the idea of attaching pedals to a bicycle in eighteen thirty nine, which would be decades before anyone else had thought of this. Now, these pedals didn't turn gears that were connected by a chain the way a modern

bicycle does. According to the story, they were treadle style pedals, so they were connecting to rods that were in a position so that they in turn would rotate the rear wheel. So solid rods as opposed to a chain drive. You can kind of think of the way a locomotive uses these sort of rods to turn wheels. If you've ever seen pictures of that same sort of idea for these particular bikes. The front wheel was steerable, so you had to have that be freely turnable left or right. That's

why it was a rear wheel drive. But some historians are skeptical of this account. The stories of McMillan's work were first publicized in the eighteen nineties and they came from a guy named James Johnston, who, as it turns out, was related to macmillan. There is an account from an eighteen forty two edition of a newspaper in Glasgow of a minor accident involving a quote velocipede of ingenious design end quote, and Johnston says that article is all about McMillan.

But since there's no actual mention of macmillan's name in the article, nor a description of how the velocity design was ingenious, the matter is not quite settled. In fact, one bit of evidence arguing against this claim is that the article referred to the operator of the velocipede as a gentleman. Macmillan, who was a tradesman, would not have qualified for that distinction in the extremely class conscious United Kingdom.

So it may well be that McMillan was the first to attach pedals to a two wheeled vehicle in this manner, but we just lack the evidence. There's a similar story that tells the tale of Gavin Dalzel of les Mahago, which I'm sure I'm mispronouncing because you get to these tiny English names and Scottish names and you get fourteen syllables once written out, but you realize that when you pronounce it it's Fanshaw. Anyway, Dalzel was a cooper in

the eighteen forties. That means he's he made barrels. He's a barrel maker, and he was said to have made a rear drive bicycle in eighteen forty five based off of Macmillan's design, though again this is undocumented. Now his son would go on to donate one of Dalzell's bikes to the Lasgow Transport Museum, but that happened several years later. In eighteen sixty three, a French design changed the way people got around on these two wheeled vehicles, another entry

into the velociped category. This design had pedals mounted to the hub of the front wheel, so there's no chain drive or anything like that. The pedals were literally attached to the wheel hub. Peddling would drive the front wheel and provide the power needed to move forward. It was a bit of a challenge to operate, and on top of that, most models were made of unyielding materials and had steel wheels or ironclad wheels, so if you were to ride one of those on say a couple Stone Street,

you'd be in for a pretty rough ride. As a result, those sort of vehicles gained a nickname bone shakers. Some large cities began to build special indoor writing academies were well to do. Velociped owners could come together and ride without worrying about shaking themselves to pieces. And it was right around this time that the word bicycle began to enter the common lexicon, slowly replacing velocipede and other names

for two wheeled human powered vehicles. Now I've got a lot more to say about the evolution of bicycles, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. The first documented rod driven two wheeled vehicle might not be the first one ever, but the first one that's

documented dates to eighteen sixty nine. Thomas McCall of Kilmarnock was the inventor, but his design didn't gain much popularity as the front crank velocipedes did, which were mostly three or four wheeled vehicles at that time, and they were easier to operate. Also, in eighteen sixty nine, there was a Frenchman named Eugene Meyer who patented the wire spoke

tension wheel for bicycles. Wire spoke wheels were first proposed decades earlier, back in eighteen o eight, in fact, by George Kayley, but that was for a totally different type of vehicle. And this gives me a chance to talk about how wire spoke wheels work. Only enough, it's more complicated than you might imagine. All right, so why would we even have a wire spoke wheel? What? What's the

big deal here? It's largely to provide stability to the wheel and connect the rim of the wheel, which is the outer edge, with the hub of the wheel that's the inner edge, the part that rotates around an axle. The spokes help a wheel support a load such as a rider on a bike, without collapsing. Now, the wire spokes are just what they sound like. They're spokes made

out of thin wire. You'll have a couple of dozen spokes connecting the rim to the hub, and each wire spoke has to be tightened carefully in a process called pretension ing. Now, ideally, you want each of the spokes to create the same amount of tension on the hub in the center. They're all pulling the hub, but from different directions and at the same strength. So let's make

an analogy to understand what's going on here. Imagine that you are standing in the center of a circle of friends, and each friend is holding a rope, and that rope connects to a sturdy hula hoop that's at your feet. You're standing right in the middle of that hula hoop. At a signal, all of your friends pull on their ropes and they all exert exactly the same amount of force. The hula hoop will rise up around you, but it won't touch you because everyone is pulling on it from

all directions at the same amount of force simultaneously. So that's what a bicycle wheel is doing with the hub. Those spokes are all pulling on the hub simultaneously and with the same amount of force. Now Here enters a tricky question when you place a load on a bicycle wheel, such as you know when you get on a bike. Uh, so you and your regulators all mount up on bicycles. When you do that, that deforms the wheel slightly. The increased weight causes the bottom of the wheel to flatten

out just a little bit. So the question is does the hub stand on the wire spokes that are below it, as in the ones that lead straight down to where the ground is, or does the hub hang from the spokes that are above it connecting it to the rim. Now, remember each of those wires is tightened so that it has tension, deforming the bottom of the wheel, which means that you're slightly pushing the rim inward. Reduces that tension

because you are applying a compressive force. If this were a table instead of a bicycle, and the spokes were the table legs, we'd say the table legs were experiencing compression and we're holding up the table, and that the table was standing on its legs. But with wheels it's not quite so simple. The wire spokes beneath the hub experienced compression, but it's not enough to return the wires

to their pretensioned state. So, in other words, the wires below the hub still have tension on them, just not as much as they did before the wheel had to carry a load. Some argue that if the spokes still have tension, which means technically they are still pulling on the hub, they're just not pulling as hard as they were before the compression was applied, they cannot be said to support the hub. So the hub cannot stand on those spokes. You can't stand on something that's pulling downward.

It's because standing on references like a push, so you can't push if the forces a pull. So these folks argue you'd have to say the hub hangs in place from the spokes around it, rather than stands on the spokes below it. Other people argue that this stance doesn't make any sense, and that the hub does in fact stand on the wire spokes beneath it, and some of them have used a lot of math and computer simulations

to back up their arguments. In some cases, I think you could just say that this is semantics, that one side and the other aren't really arguing opposites, but rather they are working from different perspectives and definitions in an attempt to describe the same thing. I think it is fascinating that something is seemingly simple as a wire spoke bicycle wheel could evoke such a fuss in the first place,

and there really is a fuss. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, you can start doing searches on how wire spoke wheels work and see the incredible arguments between people who insist that the hub stands on the spokes or that the spokes hang the hub. Now, all we really need to know is that the wheels work and that they made bicycles lighter. That's really important because there using these thin wires, you don't have to

use massive amounts of materials to build working wheels. That reduced weight of the bicycles and made them more attractive, because up to this point you were still talking about bicycles that weighed fifty pounds or more. I was incredibly heavy. Reducing the amount of materials you needed to make your

bicycle was an attractive proposition. It brought the cost down and made them more practical, and so slowly we saw bicycles become lighter, particularly as metallurgical sciences progressed and lighter, stronger metal alloys became available. Myer's approach led to an interesting trend in design known as the high bicycle or high wheeler, sometimes also known as the ordinary and later on known as the penny farthing. These are those old timey bikes you've likely seen in photographs or maybe even

in person. They feature a much larger front wheel than the rear wheel, sometimes significantly larger, and the pedals are attached directly to the hub of the front wheel, so when you pedal, your directly rotating that front wheel. Improvements in construction and design meant that you could have a wheel with a sixty diameter. That's that's five ft or

one and a half meters diameter. Of course, to ride such a bicycle, you'd have to have legs long enough to reach the pedals, so you were limited by the length of your legs what sort of bicycle you could ride. But why would you even want a large wheel in the first place? What what was the deal there? Well, that has to do with wheel circumference, rotational speed, and travel speed. So get out your pencils and paper. Let's

do some drawing. So first draw two circles and make the second circle about twice as big as the first circle. Then in the middle of those two circles, draw a smaller circle in each That inner circle will represent the wheel hub and the outer circles will represent the wheel rims. Now, imagine you have pedals attached to each of those hubs. One rotation of the petals will equal one full rotation

of the respective wheel. Let's assume you've matched the revolutions per minute on both wheels, so you're peddling the same speed on the small wheel as you would on the big wheel. From that perspective, from just the revolutions per minute, you might say you're going the same speed on both wheels. However, the larger wheel will cover more ground in a single

rotation than the smaller wheel. So if you took those circles and you straighten them out so that they were just straight lines, the circumference just becomes a straight line. The larger wheel would be a longer line, and that's the amount of space you would cover in one rotation. So rotation speeds are the same, and you're getting maybe let's say, let's make it simple. We'll say one rotation per second, so sixty rotations per minute. So both wheels

turn at sixty rotations a minute. But the larger wheel is going to cover more ground in that space, which means your travel speed. Using a larger wheel is faster, so that was why you started seeing penny Farthings. With these larger and larger wheels in the front. It meant that rich people who had a death wish could ride really,

really freaking fast. So the Ordinaries and penny Farthings became popular for gentlemen with long legs and a desire to go quite fast and potentially terrifying pedestrians because we made our own fund back then. One big disadvantage of that design was safety, or rather a lack of so the writer had to maintain our position high up over the front wheel to pedal properly. You know, you need to be able to see where you're going, you had to be able to balance, and you had to be able

to pedal that front wheel. The handlebars were typically directly over the hub, and your legs would be snug underneath them. In fact, most handlebars were designed in such a way where there was a little bit of a bulge across the handlebars so that your your legs could move up and down underneath them, but otherwise it was really close to the wheel, so you're you're kind of sandwiched in.

If you were to hit an obstruction like a rut in the road or a rock or something, you might find yourself flying over the top of the wheel quite high up, in such a way that you're nearly guaranteed to land on your head. Those handlebars would prevent you from flying straight off. You would end up following the rotational direction of the wheel, and you would face plant in front of your bicycle. And remember you're potentially more than five ft up because of the size of those wheels.

This is where the phrase taking a header came from. The scenario happened frequently enough for there to be a phrase to describe it, and to this day, taking a header means to experience a sharp and sudden decline. Writing these things was really hard. You had to get a running start, for one thing, and then you had to jump onto the ordinary or penny farthing and hope that you did it correctly. When you came to a stop, you had to jump off again, as there was no

way to put your feet down to steady yourself. A famous American author wrote about this experience, that author being Mark Twain, and he summed it up pretty nicely. I think his is This is a quote from Mark twain about writing an ordinary or penny farthing. When you have reached the point in bicycling where you can balance the machine tolerably fairly and propel it and steer it, then comes your next task, how to mount it? You do

it in this way. You hop along behind it on your right foot, resting the other on the mounting peg, and grasping the tiller with your hands. At the word, you rise on the peg, stiffen your left leg, hang your other one around in the air in a general and indefinite way, lean your stomach against the rear of the saddle, and then fall off, maybe on one side, maybe on the other. But you fall off. You get up, and you do it again, and once more, and then

several times. By this time you have learned to keep your balance and also to steer without wrenching the tiller out by the roots. I say tiller because it is a tiller. Handlebar is a lamely descriptive phrase. So you steer along straight ahead a little while. Then you rise forward with a steady strain, bringing your right leg and then your body into the saddle. Catch your breath, fetch a violent hitch this way, and then that, and down

you go again. Seems pretty accurate to me, Mr Twain. Well, I've got a lot more to say about the evolution of bicycles, but before I continue, let's take another quick break and thank our sponsor. Around this time when we start to see the rise of the ordinary or Penny Farthing,

materials for bicycles were slowly changing as well. Wheels started to switch over to solid rubber wheel, so instead of having iron sheets nailed to a wooden frame, you had solid rubber that provided a softer ride, though obviously not nearly as soft as the later pneumatic tires would. Ball bearings also became a thing that made wheel rotation along the actle much more smooth, as well as handlebar motions. So these are just ball bearings that that allow for

a smoother movement between different elements. You just have to make sure that the fit is snug without being too tight, because if it's too tight, then the balls will just snug up against the edges and it will prevent any sort of turning at all. But it meant motions in general on the bicycle became more elegant and less jerky and and violent and difficult to control. Oh and you

might wonder why these things were called penny farthings. Well, in England at the time penny coin measured either thirty four millimeters or thirty one millimeters in diameter. That would depend on whether it was an old carper copper penny before eighteen sixty or a bronze penny. When they switched over far things which were worth one quarter of a penny, as in one fourth of a penny, we're twenty two millimeters in diameter if they were made of copper, or

twenty millimeters that they were made of bronze. So the ordinaries wheels were similarly of different sizes. You had the larger penny and the smaller farthing. Well, that was kind of like the larger front wheel and the smaller rear wheel. While rich men were causing themselves head trauma on penny farthings. Groundbreaking work was underway in France as far back as eighteen sixty eight. A French watchmaker named Andre Gulime came up with an alternative to the front wheel pedal mounts

of the ordinary bicycles. His design used a chain drive, and in fact, we didn't even learn about his contributions to this uh. In fact, you could argue that there weren't contributions at all, because it was pretty much kept to himself when one of his relatives discovered one of Glum's old bikes in storage after Gloomy himself had passed away. The simple chain right by the way consists of pedals

mounted to a crank. The crank has got a gear wheel typically called the chain wheel, mounted to it, so when you pedal, you turn the crank, and the crank, in turn is since it's mounted to this chain wheel, turns the chain wheel. The teeth of this chain wheel fit into links on a bike chain. The chain is in a loop, and the other end of that loop

is mounted around a second gear wheel. This one is connected to the hub, typically of the rear bicycle wheel, although there were front wheel chain drives as well, UH in sort of a hybrid of this style and penny farthings. So if you push on the pedals you would turn this chain wheel. That would end up engaging the teeth into the bicycle chain, rotating the chain loop anyway, and then that would again transfer rotational motion to the back gear wheel, which would in turn turn the that wheel.

The freely turning rear wheel most of the time. So the ratio of gear teeth between the rear wheels gear wheel and the chain wheel would determine how fast you would go per rotation of the pedals. So let's take a standard bike wheel so that I can explain how chain drives work. It makes it easier if we just work with an easily understandable standard. A typical bike wheel

might be twenty six inches in diameter. So if we take the good old handy formula and we can figure out that the circumference of this wheel is eight one seven inches or so, meaning that if we were to take the wheel and lay it out flat, you know, un unwheel it. In other words, it would lay out to a length of eighty one point seven inches. One full rotation the wheel would take you that far. But how much pedaling is required to make one rotation that

would depend upon the gear ratio. So let's say that the chain wheel, you know, the one that attaches to the crank that is attached to the pedals, has twenty two teeth, and the rear wheels gear has thirty teeth.

That gives us a twenty two to thirty ratio. Also, a you could argue it down to a point seven three to one ratio, which means if you were to do a full pedal stroke on the chain wheel one full rotation, the rear wheel would only turn point seven three times, so not quite three quarters of a rotation. But if the ratio were different, let's say the chain wheel has and the rear wheel has eleven teeth on its gear, you'd see a lot more turning in that

rear wheel per turn of the crank. That would give us a four to one ratio, which means every time the crank wheel turn once, the rear wheel will go around four times. So if you tried it out two bikes with the gear ratios I just mentioned, and you were peddling those two bikes at exactly the same rate, you get on one and you peddle it where you're again going maybe sixty revolutions per minute, and then you get on the other one and you do it sixty

revolutions per minute. On the first bike, you'll find yourself ambling along at a leisurely pace, and on the second bike you'll find yourself zooming down at ridiculous speeds. The gear ratios are what allowed bicycle manufacturers to create chain driven bikes that could attain speeds of the high wheelers without all those drawbacks. Remember the high wheelers. The reason they kept getting taller and taller was that the taller wheels would allow people to go faster as long as

their legs were long enough to pedal the pedals. Using gear ratios with chain drives would allow the same thing, although it would take quite some time to get there, and it would take even longer to get two bicycles that would have multiple gears and not just a single gear. Goolo May didn't really do anything with that bike design, Like I said, it just kind of sat in his workshop. It would take a few decades for others to kind

of pick up this particular approach. It wasn't until the mid eighteen eighties, well into the mid eighteen nineties that you start seeing chain driven bikes emerge and get some popularity. Some of them actually used chain driven front wheels like I mentioned, and they still had a larger wheel in the front as well Penny Farthing style. But a British engineer and entrepreneur named John kept Starley changed things with a bicycle called the Rover two. John kept Starley was

the nephew of John Starley. John Starlely was a successful businessman who had started off with sewing machines really and had moved on to making ordinaries or penny farthings and did quite well with them. So his nephew J. K. Starley picked up the mantle and his first bicycle was known as the Rover, and it featured a chain drive.

It also had a larger front wheel, so still kind of penny farthing ish, uh, But because his design didn't require the writer to perch at the top of a precariously high wheel, it became known as a new type of bicycle. Instead of it being a velocipede or a penny farthing or an ordinary or a bone shaker, these became known as safety bicycles. That classification would be used for chain bikes for years, So the bicycle that you and I are familiar with is really an outgrowth of

these safety bicycles from the late nineteenth century. The Rover two was different. It had two wheels that were more or less of equivalent size, so no longer did we have that larger front wheel. It also had a frame that looks a lot like the typical diamond shaped frame you'll see in modern bikes, although it lacked a few

things like the seat tube that modern bikes have. So a frame on a modern bike has a tube inside which you can fit a pipe where the bike seat is mounted, and you can typically adjust the height of the seat. That was not a feature of the rover too. But if you take a look at a picture of a rover too, you'll see the unmistakable features of a modern bicycle. The fact that these style bikes were called

safety bicycles might have hurt sales a little bit. They actually did have other names too that also seemed diminutive, like in France, they were known as bicyclets like little bicycle essentially is what that means, and some people interpret this as meaning the vehicles weren't meant for big, old, rugged, manly men who had better things to do than avoid having their brains smashed in whenever they hit a small

rut in the road. Around the same time, other engineering advances brought about features like caliber brakes, which made it easier to control bicycles, and pneumatically inflated tires helped smooth out the ride and made bicycling more comfortable, as well as safe. The pneumatic tire was originally meant to help a young boy have a smoother ride on a tricycle. The inventor of the pneumatic tire was a Scottish veterinarian

named John boyd Dunlop. He had a son who was in poor health and Dunlop wanted to help his boy be able to play, and so he invented the pneumatic tire in order to help his son have a good time on his tricycle, and that would go on to change bicycling and later on the car industry. In fact, a lot of the advancements made during this era with

bicycles would carry over into the automotive industry. By the late eight nineties, mass production had become a thing, and that meant the bicycles could be made in greater numbers, which brought down their cost and it made them more easily accessible to a larger customer base. At the same time, there were changes in the way women were allowed to dress.

I hate having to use that phrase that way, but that is how things were back then, and so there are also changes in bicycle design that we're catering so to women so that they too could ride bicycles, because up to that point, the design of bicycles was such that women were unable to ride them while also uh committing to the social morays of how they should dress

in polite society. Women would typically ride larger, three wheeled vehicles that were similar to the penny farthing in design, but didn't require you to sit astride an enormous bicycle, which, as it turns out, is hard to do if you also have to wear an ankle length dress. I think this is a pretty good place to wrap up this episode.

There's a whole lot more we could talk about, even in the evolution of the bicycle, and then, of course there's more to talk about with the future developments, things like gear switching bikes, UH, the UH, the first appearance of the fix E and then the return of the fix E, the evolution of materials like carbon fiber, and a lot more. So. Maybe I'll do a follow up

episode in the future where I touch on those. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, you can get in touch with me. My email address for this show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of those is tech Stuff hs W. Remember I stream live on Wednesdays and Fridays over at twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. Hope to see you over there and join me in the chat room. Also, don't forget to

follow our Instagram account. And I think that's it. I'm done. I'm gonna go, uh go for a bike ride and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com