Re:Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
by natroniks on Thursday July 18, 2019 @11:23AM
(#20470778)
I completely agree with you, slaves were a major cultural and economic motivation behind technological innovation (or lack thereof). Consider the aforementioned example of the cotton gin, which used rather simple tech to replace slaves. This device was only invented when slavery became legally dubious. If Romans (or Greeks, or Egyptians, or the Chinese, etc) of antiquity could have opened their eyes beyond the use of slavery as a source of power, technological innovation would almost certainly have improved
But there were wooden bicycles without ball bearings in real-life history and they worked with the infrastructure they had. How well they worked is a different thing, but still it proves "no tech to build a bicycle" isn't the reason we waited for bicycles for thousands of years.
We had people jumping off towers with wooden wings for centuries before aeroplanes were made after all ;)
It would be perfectly possible for Romans to make bicycles from technological POV. Just wouldn't make sense because 2 slaves with some chair on sticks were cheaper.
BTW - first real world mass-produced bicycle added ball bearings after several years:
> On the new macadam paved boulevards of Paris it was easy riding, although initially still using what was essentially horse coach technology. It was still called "velocipede" in France, but in the United States, the machine was commonly called the "bone-shaker". Later improvements included solid rubber tires and ball bearings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle#1860s_a...