Tim Talks Bicycles with Patented
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Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. Pushkin. Hello, Tim Harford here, and there'll be a brand new episode of Quarternary Tales next week as per our usual schedule.

But this week I want to talk about something a bit different. Well, about all kinds of different things, because the conversation you're about to hear is full of the most delectable digressions. We talk about the invention of the bicycle, why some inventions fail, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the emancipation of women, the great stock market bicycle bubble, and the four possessions that define any successful household.

Who's we? Well, me, Tim Harford, host of Cautionary Tales in My Alter Ego is the author of a book, 50 Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy, and Dallas Campbell, the host of Patented, History of Inventions. Patented is a wonderful podcast from the History Hit Network. Every few days there's a delightful, light-hearted, yet knowledgeable conversation about an invention, anything from the satellite to the pyramid.

I recommend you check it out while you wait for next week's episode of Cautionary Tales. And until then, here's me and Dallas Campbell talking about the bicycle and so much more. Hello, I'm Dallas Campbell. Welcome to Patented, a podcast all about the history of inventions from history hit. Today on the show, we are talking about the Humble Bicycle.

Invented in the mid-1800s, bikes have had enduring popularity, promising freedom and mobility at a low price point. 200 years later, the basic design and function of the bike remains pretty much the same. They're still powered by sweat, e-bikes excluded obviously. They're still made up of wheels, frames, pedals, chains, gears. Cyclists are still exposed to the traffic and the elements.

In contrast to, say, the comfort of the car. And they still come with the potential for freedom and mobility and excitement. And we saw this clearly in the pandemic when supply was unable to keep up with demand for bicycles. People wanted to move around safely and quickly. And the humble bike was the easy answer. And for those of us like me living in cities and towns, it's impossible to ignore the boom in bike sharing apps, which only seems to be growing. Respect

Research from Statista suggests that in 2020, the bike-sharing app market was estimated to be worth £3.3 billion. Crikey. And by 2026, it'll reach over £13.7 billion.

These apps make bikes an even more visible feature in our day-to-day lives. If you live in the city, you'll know what it's like. You see banks of them parked absolutely everywhere. They also lower the barrier to entry to people cycling even further. So they're a really interesting phenomenon. These days, you don't even need to own a cycle to be a cyclist.

Today on the show, I'm joined by the wonderful Tim Harford, host of the podcast Cautionary Tales, and the BBC's 50 Objects That Defined the Modern Economy. Today, we are going back to the origins of the bicycle and to explore how they've remained steadfast in their utility in an ever-changing world. ♪

Tim Harford, welcome to the show. It's lovely to have you. It's a pleasure to be here. I absolutely love your podcast, Cautionary Tales, which I've been listening to a lot recently. And of course, every time I listen to an episode, of course, you say, I've got to ask him about that! Yeah.

Well, yeah, now's your chance. I know, I know. But I've got too many ideas like fizzing around because I'm an idiot and I haven't actually landed any of these ideas in a way that any of them are going to make sense. We're going to talk about bicycles and we'll get on to invention stories in a minute. But I just listened to your episode about Clive Sinclair and the C5. There's a thing that you mentioned in that particular episode, which I think is so interesting. And it's this idea of adjacent possibilities, this idea of

in the world of innovation and invention, a little bit like evolutionary biology, there are all kinds of possibilities. And in these rooms of possibilities, there are doors that we can go through. And the secret is you can't do big jumps in rooms far away and sort of shadow futures. Yeah, it's very hard to do. It's really hard to do. You don't get, well, you know, in evolutionary biology, of course, we know that, but it kind of works in innovation. And Clive Sinclair

I know I'm digressing. We haven't even started yet, but I'm already on to a digression. Was a kind of victim of looking too far ahead for doors in future possibilities that were not quite ready yet. He was indeed. And I don't regard Sir Clive Sinclair as a digression from the bicycle at all, because I think one of the problems he faced was he was distracted by...

bicycle regulations. So we should talk about that at some stage. But before we do, the adjacent possible, you already discussed it on the show before Matt Ridley talks about it. It's an influential idea in certain circles, but I think it's really informative and

comes from evolutionary biology, as you say. They're just certain things that you can't do, even if you have the idea, because all of the supporting infrastructure just isn't there. And Sir Clive Sinclair, for those who don't know, made his money in pocket calculators

and then dramatically increased his money, being one of the most successful computer entrepreneurs the world had ever seen in the 1980s, and then lost almost all of it, making this ridiculous vehicle called the C5, which is impossible to describe. It's like riding around in a giant white stiletto with roller skates. It's an absurd vehicle.

You must have wanted one. We must be roughly the same age. Because I remember when they came out and I'm like, oh my God, this is the future. And it was like, I must have. And of course I didn't get one. Yeah, to a 12-year-old boy, it seemed incredible. My goodness. I didn't realise they didn't work at the time. It's only now I realised they were not very good. Yes. And I mean, the main problem, I think, was the batteries. There were lots of different problems, but the fundamental problem was the batteries. Batteries were...

were very heavy, were expensive, didn't take you very far and didn't work in the cold. So that was a problem, particularly since Sir Clive chose to unveil this invention in January, I think. The London roads are covered in slush and the batteries are conking out and they just didn't realise that was going to be an issue. But what makes me feel for Sir Clive is when you hear people

his vision for electric vehicles, and also when you hear his vision for computers, you realize the guy was absolutely right in both respects. He saw Google coming, he saw Siri coming, he saw Tesla coming, he saw it all coming. He tried to make it happen. And with his computers, such as the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum, he was able to make this important incremental step and make a great product.

But with the C5, this proto-electric car just wasn't good enough and left him a laughing stock, which is a great shame. It really is. It really is. Yeah. One of the people who tweeted their happy memories of playing with Sir Clive's computers was Elon Musk. Elon Musk loved Sir Clive's computers. And of course, Elon Musk is a man who, like Sir Clive, made his money in tech.

And then, you know, as in, you know, computing and software, and it was PayPal. And then took that money, and like Sir Clive, had this vision of an electric future. But unlike Sir Clive, instead of embarrassing himself and losing almost everything, he became the richest man in the world. And that is the difference. I don't think it's any difference in their talents. It's a difference in whether they have the adjacent possible on their side or not. I mean, crikey, though. I mean, Elon Musk nearly went bust a few times. I think in the beginnings of SpaceX, it was a kind of coin flip situation.

whether it was going to go bust or not. And you're absolutely right. I just think in his house with all these doors, these adjacent doors...

He was just lucky that the doors were a little bit closer to him. But yeah, I think we're going to have a revisionist view of Clive Sinclair soon, I hope. I hope we kind of remember him fondly. Because I know he had quite a chaotic life towards the end, which you kind of go into detail a little bit in your podcast about. He became a poker player, which I always thought was quite... I remember watching late night poker in the 90s, actually. And all these amazing people were on, people like Clive Sinclair. I'm like, who knew that Clive Sinclair became a poker champion? Yeah.

Yeah, there's your problem. He was into poker before it was cool as well. He was just like massively ahead of everything. Actually, and it's weird now, I live in central London, I walk out the door now and the pavement is littered with electric bikes. And again, one of the things you talk about this idea of the shared economy, thanks to the internet, of course, which didn't exist when Clive Sinclair was doing the C5. The internet, the fact that we can have apps that let us take bikes and ride them around and then dump them and

that was a pretty fundamental door to go through. Yes. So I was quite struck. I was rereading a piece I did for the BBC maybe three years ago, and it became part of my book, The Next 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. And I speculate on the future of bikes, and I point out that they seem to have a very bright future. But interestingly to me, I think I missed the big picture. So I was pointing out, oh yeah, with apps and with sort of sharing economy technologies, you could just have these bikes lying around and

You can rent one and recycle it for a couple of miles and then just leave it. And by the way, the roads will be cleaner and safer because there'll be electric cars and they'll probably be self-driving. But what I missed was now obvious, and just a few years later obvious fact, that they'll take the battery technology from electric cars and they'll stick the batteries in bikes and indeed in scooters.

And even, you know, I think maybe 2018, maybe even 2019, I was writing this, that wasn't obvious. And suddenly it's like, of course, that's what's going to happen. So these things can be hard to predict. Yeah.

Wow, the bicycle. It's so interesting. It is such a symbol, really, the bicycle in lots of ways. It's the simplicity I think we like about it that makes it so interesting. It's a symbol of the future. It's a symbol about change. It's a symbol about, you know, emancipation. It's a symbol about freedom and equality. All these different things, I think, make it really, really interesting. One of my favourite films is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which you will have seen, I'm hoping. Please say yes. Yes.

Yeah, although a long time ago. A long time ago. Okay, so you think of it as a Western. It's a Western. You know, it's Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and it's a kind of comedy buddy movie. But it's very much a film about transition, about change. And it's about the end of one era and the beginning of another era.

You know, here are two bank robbers on the make and their whole lives collapse because the world is changing around them and they don't have the ability to change. And eventually it ends and there's the famous ending where they get shot and that's how it ends. But there's a scene in it about the bicycle and they're standing in a square in a sort of Western town. And there's a bicycle salesman who says, welcome to the future. And he holds up this brand new thing and it's 1890 something.

and he's extolling the virtues of the bicycle, how wonderful it is, and the horse is dead, and this is going to be the new thing. And then there's the weird scene with Catherine Ross and Paul Newman on the bicycle with the raindrops keep falling on my head, and they do all the bicycle stunts. And at the end, they crash the bicycle, and Paul Newman throws it in the bin and says, "'The future's all yours, you lousy bicycle.'"

And it's just a weird incongruous scene that shouldn't really be there in the middle of the Western, but it's about the bicycle and it's about future and it's the invention of the bicycle and how Paul Newman can't adapt to it. And then his whole life unravels from there. So it is this, I don't know, it's an interesting symbol, I think, of lots of different things. It is. Sorry, that was a complete... No, no, it's lovely. And yes, the bicycle's moment was there in the late 19th century. It's intriguing...

how long it existed in a proto form that was pretty useless, and then how rapidly it became modern. Well, let's start at the beginning of the bicycle. How do we define a bicycle? Is it like the two-wheelness of it? Yeah, well, I suppose it's two wheels, right? It's a two-wheeled, non-powered device, I suppose is how you'd describe it. So you can make a case that bicycle number one

was demonstrated around 1817, 1818. I forget the exact date. There was a gentleman called Karl von Dres in what we would now call Germany. And he had been working on a wooden horse, effectively. He'd been working on a cheaper alternative to the horse. And the reason he'd been doing that is because there'd been several bad harvests. The price of oats had risen.

And it was expensive to keep a horse. Well, it had always been expensive to keep a horse, but it was getting even more expensive to keep a horse. And so he was quietly working away on a device called

that wouldn't need to be fed with oats. In 1815, there was a catastrophic explosion in what we would now call Indonesia, Mount Tambora. It changed the world's weather dramatically for several years. 1816 in Europe became known as the year without summer. Nobody knew it was anything to do with a volcano, but it was. Crops failed, there was widespread starvation. It was absolutely catastrophic.

One of the things that was invented was Frankenstein. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein that summer.

But another thing that was invented, and there were several inventions, but another thing that was invented in the shadow of this year without summer was Carl Dreyse's Velocipede, or sometimes called a Dreysean. There were no pedals or anything on this, is it? It's just to kind of describe a Velocipede, just so we've got an image of it. There were no pedals. Now you're complaining here about the details. No pedals? Yeah, sure. Okay. Who needs pedals? But no, you're right. So this is one of the reasons. One of the reasons it was limited was you didn't have very good roads.

And one of the reasons it was limited was you didn't have pedals. So you effectively, it looked a bit like a modern bike. And then you realised that, you know, it had handlebars with some steering and it had a crossbar and two wheels and a saddle. And you sat on the saddle, but your legs would drape on either side of the bike and your feet would touch the ground. And you'd just propel yourself for these long loping strides.

So, it's dramatically inferior to what we now regard as a bicycle. There was a bit of a fad for them. They were sometimes called dandy horses. So, for about six months, people would be charging around the streets of London on these things. Everybody thought they were ridiculous and they very rapidly went out of fashion. The hipsters of the time would have been dumber. Yeah, but these things didn't have brakes as well as not having pedals. So, yeah, they weren't really very good.

And they just sort of disappeared for decades. And it takes a while for an improved version to be delivered. The next stage in the bicycle's evolution is the penny farthing. The penny farthing is something we, I think, regard as this sort of very quaint Victorian thing. And we imagine somebody with a top hat or a bowler hat and a four-piece suit and a pocket watch on a gold chain and a monocle and all this sort of stuff. Actually, they

They were speed machines. And the reason the front wheel was so big was not as some kind of fashionable affectation. It was because that was the way to get speed. Because without gearing, as you push the pedals, you don't go very fast. So you need to make the wheel bigger and bigger and bigger. At that point, well, they particularly must have had chains, but no one had invented a bicycle chain yet.

which is the solution to the big wheel. Yes, gearing and chains, yes. Now, that's an interesting point. I'm not sure exactly when the bicycle chain itself was perfected, but there's a general story in bicycle manufacture of trying to make interchangeable parts

that work cheaply. The interchangeability is important because it means that if something fails you can just buy a replacement part and fix it. Interchangeable parts was not a new idea, so the military had perfected this idea of interchangeable parts. You want a musket where if something goes wrong with a musket

You just grab another part of the musket, grab a spare and fit the spare on the battlefield and it doesn't require days and days of handcrafted smithing. So that idea had been around since the time of the French Revolution. It slightly got lost in the noise of the French Revolution, but there's this famous demonstration that Thomas Jefferson witnesses in Paris of a French gunsmith taking apart 10 muskets in front of an audience.

and just throwing all the parts in the box and just randomly mixing all the parts and then taking random parts out of the box, reassembling them into a musket and showing that the musket works. That blew Thomas Jefferson's mind. It was incredible. But that was really high-end military technology. What commercialized it and made it available to the everyday citizen was bicycle manufacture. One of the problems that bicycle manufacturers are trying to solve is

Can I make, say, links to a chain? Or can I make cogs? Or can I make the spokes of a wheel in a standard way that they're all interchangeable in a way that's not super expensive? And they achieved that. And that then paves the way for certain other small inventions such as the motor car. It paves the way for Henry Ford's assembly line.

That's really interesting. We can James Burke ourselves in connections from the bicycle to the motor car. I think it was Rover as well. Was it Rover who obviously made cars in the UK? They were making bicycles. Yeah. Rover were the first British manufacturers of what became known as a safety bicycle. And then Rover...

as older listeners will know, then became very big players in the British motor car industry. And of course, you've got the Wright brothers who were bicycle mechanics who built the plane. So you can go all the way to the plane if you really want to make the connections. Yeah. The Wright brothers is another great story of innovation. Of course, the Wright brothers were not the first in flight, but they were...

arguably the first in controlled flights because they realized actually the mechanics of flying a pitch, roll and yaw, which they evolved from their work with bicycles. You know, that's how it sort of came to be. Can we just pause on penny farthings for a moment because I'm really interested in the penny farthing. Yes. Because as a sort of design solution, okay, before we have chains, before we have brakes, the way in order to get speed, and you say they're racing machines,

is to have a giant front wheel. They are such peculiar objects. Who was making them and why were they making them? Was it like, OK, we've got this dandy horse thing, which has become a bit of a novelty. We're now going to race them because that's what humans like to do. We like to turn everything into sport or art. We'll be back after this short break. We'll be back after this short break.

Tim Harford here. You're listening to a conversation between me and Dallas Campbell from the Patented podcast. Cautionary Tales will be back next week, and Patented will be back after this brief message. AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry, and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So, buckle up.

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And now, back to Patented with me, Tim Harford, and Dallas Campbell. Yeah, yes, and it's fearless young gentlemen are the people who are riding them. And actually, I need to, let me just read you a nice quotation from the next 50 things that made the modern economy, if I may advertise my own book for a second. I just love this. So you've got these five-foot wheels. You're on top of this five-foot wheel. You've got massive potholes because these are mid-19th century roads. Bone-shaking suspension.

you'd hit this pothole and you'd just be pitched forward. And one gentleman says, as you pitched forward, you'd encounter a nice straight iron handlebar close across your waist to imprison your legs and make quite certain that it should be your face that first reached the surface of this unyielding planet.

So not for the faint-hearted. Unyielding planet. That's great. Simpler times, Tim. You see, we didn't worry about safety and this kind of thing. Have you ever been on a penny farthing? They're absolutely lethal for exactly the reason you've just read out. I have a friend who races penny farthings still, and she owns a couple of penny farthings. My friend Kat. Hello, Kat. But she races them, and they're just terrifying. They're just unbelievable. Yes, I can believe it. Having not so very long ago, a couple of years ago,

fallen off a regular bicycle because the chain failed. It's an importance of maintenance. And hit the tarmac face first. It wasn't a joke. And I wouldn't have wanted to be falling any further than I already did. So yeah, I can only imagine really what it is like to fall from that height and just to smack into the tarmac.

So there was still really, I mean, they were just for racing, the penny farthings. People weren't sort of riding around on them, particularly to get from A to B. I mentioned at the beginning, we talked about emancipation and about how, you know, suddenly the bicycle can help low wage people get around cheaply. And we can talk about the emancipation of women as well, I think. But the penny farthing was not that expensive.

Yes, it was a huge factor in the emancipation of women. And Cap will be able to tell you much more about that than I will. But I think it was the safety bicycle rather than the penny farthing that really opened it up to the masses. And this wasn't this rather daring, foolhardy thing, but it was a sort of simple, practical... What do we mean by the safety bicycle? What defines the safety bicycle? Good. What defines the safety bicycle is you're not sort of...

The seat is not five foot up. Yeah, you're not going to kill yourself automatically. So it's much more like the shape of the original Velocipede, where your feet can touch the ground. So obviously it really helps if you can put your feet down when you get into any trouble, the bicycle is safer. But the reason that the bicycle went from the shape of the Velocipede, which looks modern, up to this crazy penny farthing shape, and then back down, it brings the saddle back down...

to a height of say three feet, a meter. What makes that possible is gearing. So you've got the gears, you've got the chains, and then you can travel at a reasonable speed by pedaling. The Velocipede didn't have pedals, the Penny Farthing didn't have gears. The Safety Bicycle has pedals and gears and can travel at a reasonable speed while also traveling at a reasonable height.

Now, at the same time, you've got manufacturing improvements, which are making the bikes lighter and stronger. You have the diamond frame very quickly comes along, which is a very simple, strong way to support the structure of the bicycle. And you can make it lighter again. You have pneumatic tires. Dunlop comes along with pneumatic tires. And suddenly the ride is much smoother.

And this is all happening within the space of a decade at the end of the 19th century. So it's very dramatic. Did all these innovations, was it all the same people who came up with these innovations? Did whoever was making these bicycles say, oh, this person is making pneumatic tires or this person understands gearing? And I'm just trying to find out how all these little pieces came together. So my understanding, so I'm a dilettante of innovation. So I can't tell you every detail about how.

how the bike was invented. But my impression, distinct impression, is that these are at about the same time from different people.

So you've got manufacturers trying to get to the cold pressing of steel. You've got the invention of the chain. You've got the invention of the gear. You've got the invention of the pneumatic tire. And it's not the same people, but they're all very rapidly, lots and lots of different bicycle companies appearing and taking advantage of these innovations. And suddenly the bike is everywhere. And you've got these social implications, women wearing trousers, cycling around without chaperones. Outrageous.

But you also have financial implications. So there's a bicycle bubble in Birmingham, the main Midlands city in the UK.

in the 1890s. Loads and loads of bicycle companies set up in Birmingham. The most successful of them, and the one that really starts the bubble, has the right to use Dunlop technology. So you've got the Dunlop tyres. This is a company that's got real potential because everyone wants a bike and these guys have got the best technology. But there's a bit of a sort of bubble in speculation. People see the shares of this company go up and up and up. There's a little bit of financial chicanery verging on fraud. And then suddenly everybody else is setting up a bicycle company. So

So some of these bicycle companies never made a bike and I think almost certainly never intended to make a bike. The whole purpose of the company was to be able to sell some shares to people who want to own shares in a bicycle company and the people who created the bicycle company get out of it.

So you get stuff like, it's probably now illegal and certainly should have been illegal at the time, but people seem to get away with it. So you'd set up two companies, one of which would order 20,000 bicycles from the other company and then launch this company that says, well, we've got this order of 20,000 bikes from this other company. So demand is strong for our product. People would buy the shares and then the founders of these companies would just quietly disappear.

And this was all happening in 1896, 1897. Very dramatic boom and bust. And there was a railroad mania earlier on in the Victorian era. We have the dot-com bubble. I mean, as so often, there's a real technology, there's real progress, there really is something to be excited about. But then the bubble mentality takes over.

And a lot of people lose a lot of money. Even though there is something really important underneath the surface, the bubble just takes over for a while. Okay, so we've got this interesting sort of financial dynamic going on with the sort of bicycle bubble beginning of the 20th century. Just talk us through how the bicycle sort of changed things socially. I'm so interested in that. You know, what it meant for people, everyday people, what it meant for women, and how bicycles kind of became objects of desire. Yeah.

Steve Jones, the geneticist, once quipped, I think plausibly, although without proof, that the bicycle was a dramatic shock to the genetic mix of Western society because it moved us from a situation where all the marriages were within a particular village to a situation where young men could go a courting, they'd cycle and they could go to the next valley, they'd go to the next village, and suddenly there's much more genetic mixing enabled by the bicycle. Now,

As I say, I don't think he has any direct evidence for this, but it seems very plausible. It's a nice idea. It makes sense. It's a lovely idea. But this is what Carl Dresch, I'm not sure Carl Dresch was particularly thinking about that, but he was thinking when he first invented his wooden horse, he was thinking of this democratizing technology. Only rich people can afford a horse, but anybody can afford a bike. And when you think about it, that's still true. The bike is still the democratic technology that, I mean, not everybody in the world can afford a bike, but

a huge number of people can, far, far more than can afford a car, and it provides that freedom. So the first obvious instance of this, example of this, was freedom for women in

in Western societies in the UK and the US in the late 19th century. One feminist campaigner said towards the end of her life that it was the bicycle that had done more than anything else to emancipate women. Susan B. Anthony made this comment. Because suddenly you could just get on your bike and you could be free. And you didn't have to have a chaperone, you didn't have to have someone with you.

There's this lovely vignette in Margaret Guroff's book about the history of the bicycle, where she talks about Angeline Allen riding around the streets of, I think it was Boston, wearing trousers in the 1890s. And the newspapers, because there's a newspaper story about this, like, she wore trousers, was the headline. And they added that she was young, pretty, and divorced. But the interesting thing was that she, nobody was fussed about the fact that she was

by herself on a bicycle. That was, by then, completely accepted. It was what she was wearing while she was doing it, not what she was doing. And that, I think, hints at this idea of the bike providing freedom for young women. And the much more recent work shows, for example, the benefits to schoolgirls in India of having access to a bike.

LeBron James, basketball star, he's funded a school and every pupil at the school gets a free bike. And LeBron has spoken about how when he was a boy and he and his friends were on their bikes, they felt like they had wings, they were free.

So it is this hugely emancipating technology for the poor, for women, for the young. It always was, and it still is today. It's really interesting, actually, because as well as this innovation of the bicycle itself, I mentioned my friend Kat Youngnickel, who's done all this research, looking at all these Victorian patents of Victorian cycleware. I'm holding up her book now. It's called Bicycles and Bloomies.

But actually, you know, women were inventing or innovating with some different materials and also sort of skirts with pulleys and things that you could pull so your skirt would come up so you could get over the crossbar. And it's really interesting how these sort of really peculiar but wonderful patterns have evolved alongside the bicycle in order to make it rideable, particularly for women. It's really... I love this idea. That's obviously the solution. Not lower the crossbar, not wear some trousers.

Skirt pullers. But yeah, I mean, this is the way humans think. It's terrific. Actually, social mobility. That's really interesting. I remember in the 1980s, I can't remember who it was, the bicycle became this great symbol of Thatcherism when... Norman Tebbit. It was Norman Tebbit. Yeah, Norman Tebbit's get on your bike. Yeah. What he actually said, he was talking about his father and he was saying that when his father was struggling to find work, he got on his bike and cycled around until he found work.

So, implicitly, he was telling everybody else, "Be like my dad and get on your bike." But yeah, that was the idea. And obviously people have their feelings about how easy it was to find work when Norman Tebbit was a cabinet minister. But I think the underlying point is that it does expand possibilities. You can search in a larger job market. You can search, as Steve Jones implied.

you can search in a larger marriage market, you can roam more widely, you're freer, and it's cheap. I mean, you could do all this with a car, but the bike is incredibly cheap. Yeah. Just while we're on the subject of the 80s and Steve Jones and gene pools,

The rally bike in the 1970s and the 1980s became this great badge of, it was almost like the peacock's feather. Like what bike did you have when you were growing up in the 1980s in the UK? Like if you had a rally chopper, I always thought that was the sort of, and I was never allowed a rally chopper. There was a kind of great currency as a kid growing up in the UK about what bike you had.

I had a Tomahawk, which was like the junior chopper. Tomahawk, great bike, but didn't have the gears. Yeah. The chopper had three gears. I think the Tomahawk didn't. Yeah, that's right. The Tomahawk was the smaller version. The chopper, of course, had the gear stick in the middle, which was the thing you wanted and the banana seat. I had a Commando, which was the junior version of the Grifter.

Actually, no, the boxer was the junior. Anyway, sorry. But yes. The conversation we're having here sounds very parochial, but in fact, this is really universal. So you've got this very famous Italian movie, I think from the 1950s, The Bicycle Thief. Of course. And then there is a Chinese remake called Beijing Bicycle. I think maybe the late 80s, maybe the 90s. But in both cases, this is about somebody's bicycle being stolen and the bicycle is such an important possession.

and why the thief stole the bike and how the owner desperately tries to get the bike back. And it's the bike as this symbol of mobility and this prized possession. And in fact, in China in the 1970s, 1980s, people would talk about, this is deeply communist China, incredibly poor. People talked about the four possessions, the four possessions that you could have as a household, that every household aspired to have. And they were the sewing machine, the radio, a wristwatch,

and a bicycle. And if you had all four of those, you had the four possessions, then you had made it materially speaking. What are the four possessions now? The iPhone, probably still the bicycle. For me anyway, I suppose it depends where you live, I wonder. I think still the bicycle. That I think is a really interesting point because we think of the bicycle as a transitional technology. So you had the horse, then along comes the bike,

and it's cheaper and better, and it paves the way for the car. And then you have the car, and then once you can afford the car, you don't need the bike anymore. And that's true for individuals, and it's true for societies. That's the way we think, and it's completely wrong. And you can see that in the data. So David Egerton's wonderful book, The Shock of the Old, makes this point that in the 1950s and 60s, global production of bicycles and global production of cars

was about the same. You had about the same number of cars made as bicycles around the world. But then as you get into the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, bicycles leave cars in the dust. More and more production of bicycles, production of cars increases, production of bicycles increases much more. This incredibly practical thing, they're practical in very poor countries, they're practical in very rich countries. I have two bicycles. I've got the bike in the shed and I've got the folding Brompton that I can take on the train.

I use the bicycle much more than I use the car. Even leaving aside environmental concerns or the price of fuel, the bike is incredibly practical technology and it's always been used no matter how much competition there was for the car.

And I think that tells us something fundamental about technology. It's that it's not just a case of, oh, you had this technology, then a better technology comes, and then you get rid of the old technology. That's rarely how it works, and it's certainly not how it's worked with transport. And the bike is a great example of that. We mentioned right at the beginning, we sort of talked about Clive Sinclair, and we talked about batteries and shared economies and, you know, bicycles now. What about the next decade, maybe two decades? Where are we going to be with a bike? So a couple of obvious things that have appeared are,

One is battery power. So the idea that you can recharge a battery on a bike when you brake,

get a little bit of extra juice and use that to help you get up a hill. Personally, I don't see the point of it myself, but then I'm, you know, I'm fit and I'm a keen cyclist. I'd like to pedal up a hill, but lots and lots of people find that really useful. And it really struck me the first time I was cycling up a steep hill in Oxford and it's the only one we have in the city. I was going to say, which steep hill in Oxford? There's no steep hill in Oxford. We've only got, there's one, Heddington Hill. There's one. It's quite steep, but we've only got the one.

As I was laboring up this hill, enjoying the workout, a lady who I think was at least 15 years older than me, definitely past retirement age,

just in a sit up and beg bike, just absolutely effortlessly cycled past me, seeming to exert no energy at all. And the first thing I thought was, goodness me, she's so fit. And then I realized, oh, it's an electric bike. And it's the first time I'd seen one. Now, of course, they're absolutely everywhere. It was two, three years ago. It was quite recent.

So the electric bikes have come from nowhere and they're clearly, they're clearly game changers because lots of people who wouldn't have cycled because they didn't want to get sweaty, because they didn't feel they had the energy, because they were frightened of the hills. They'll be out there with the electric bikes or just because they like them because they're fun. People like, people like to do them.

And there's a critical mass element there. There is a movement in favor of cycling in cities called critical mass. And the whole idea is you want more cyclists because the more cyclists there are, the safer each individual cyclist is. So that's coming.

And then, of course, the other thing is just a general movement in many societies towards making more space for bikes on city roads, squeezing the car, expanding the space available for bikes. And those two things together potentially will democratize the bike. I mean, I don't mind sharing a road with cars. I'd rather not as a cyclist, but it's fine. But a lot of people worry about that.

And the more space there is available for those people, the more they'll get on the bike. And I think with an electric bike on roads that feel safe, the vast majority of the population in a country like the UK is going to be able to get around by bike. Don't actually need the car because all the journeys are five miles or less.

It'd be very interesting to see whether we get there. I don't know that we will. I've made many forecasts that have been proved wrong within months, let alone years. But that seems to be an interesting possibility. It's interesting that Clive Sinclair's electric bicycle, basically the C5 was sort of an electric, recumbent electric bicycle, which wasn't really a bicycle. We've kind of...

We're sort of there. I wish Clive Sinclair was around to see this now because he'd go, ah, that's what I should have done. If only I'd got my batteries. The irony is very early in his career, before he had any money, he was experimenting with battery enhanced scooters. So he was, and now of course they're everywhere. You can't, no, you can't.

Can't cross the street without being hit by a battery. Don't get me started. Don't get me started. I'm always getting run over. But these things are not as obvious as it seems. I think Sir Clive was somewhat distracted by, his vision was an electric car. And then he was distracted by there were new regulations introduced in the UK for electric

electrically assisted bicycles in the early 80s. So Clive saw them and thought, "Oh, my little car could qualify as an electric bike if I just make some small modifications, basically add some pedals. And then people wouldn't have to get insurance, they wouldn't need a driving license, they don't need a helmet, the age restrictions are more forgiving."

And so he saw this as an opportunity, but I think in hindsight, it's much obviously always easier in hindsight. I think in hindsight, it was a distraction. It distracted him from what is the best possible way to get a short range electric vehicle on the road and make people feel safe in it. And he produced this thing that, you know, wasn't really a bike. It wasn't really a car. It wasn't really a very practical solution at all because it's just too close to the road. So you get splashed and you can't be seen.

And I think had he not been distracted by the need to try to squeeze into that regulation and sort of feel that he was somehow getting one over on, you know, the government rulemakers, he might have made a better vehicle. Hard to be sure, but that's my speculation. That's interesting. I'm lucky. I've ridden a Penny Farthing. I've ridden a Sinclair C5 and I flew the Wright Brothers 1902 glider, all of which...

We can thank the bicycle for. But listen, thank you so much for joining me on the show. And will you come back on and talk about other things at some point? Because I could talk to you all day. I would gladly, gladly do that. And if people want to hear more about the C5, that Cautionary Tales episode is already out. And there is one coming about...

the volcano the year without summer and the invention of the velocipede so yeah they'll be there it's a fantastic podcast it's really really good oh i enjoyed the tutankhamun one as well i listened to the other day which is very good as well anyway i'm not going to talk about that but yes listen to cautionary tales tim harford thank you very much my pleasure thank you

Thank you very much for listening to today's episode. That's all we've got time for you today. Hope you enjoyed it. I certainly did. We've got plenty more to come. I'm back every Wednesday and Sunday with brand new episodes. Coming up next, we're going to be talking about one of the most iconic invention stories, the Wright Brothers, one of my favourite stories ever. Nothing defines what invention and innovation means.

means, I think, more than that particular story and how they did their very first controlled flight back in 1903 at Kitty Hawk. If you want to hear more from Tim, check out his Cautionary Tales podcast. It's absolutely fantastic. And you can find that, of course, wherever you get your podcasts from. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honour.

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