Why didn’t someone invent the bike earlier?

Humans have been around for a few hundred thousand years, and the bike was only invented 202 years ago?
Just think of all the amazing inventive engineering minds of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, who all had the technology of metal frames, wheels, chariots, gears and pulleys, and not one of them had the brains to combine them all together! The Egyptians wasted all their time building big pointy houses, which still aren’t even finished!
Just think of how it would have transformed their lives instead of mucking about on horses or camels!
Roman armies could have got around their empire much quicker, their battles could have been on bikes instead of heavy horse!
Ok they didn’t have rubber for tyres, but they could have used a snake or real crocodile skin lol

No ball bearings, no steel, only blacksmithing.
No factories, no production lines.

The Romans never discovered lubricants - there are plenty of contemporary accounts how door hinges always squeaked!

The Egyptians had some nice technology in the suspension and axle bearings of their chariots, look at Tutankamuns chariots with leather padding under the axle.

The Romans’ must have had lube for their sex orgies lol

Bicycles also need decent roads and frankly even mountain bikes would have struggled with many (Roman aside) roads. Plenty of accounts of ruts six feet deep and people being lost in the depth of the mud from medieval (and later) times.

Probably also partly a mindset issue. Reading Black Beauty you really get the sense that this is a society that revolves around the horse. Nowadays, it reads like an alternative universe fantasty. Bikes would have the solution to a problem that didn't exist. Probably a little like we regard flying cars.

hamster":3ey5te5r said:

The Romans never discovered lubricants - there are plenty of contemporary accounts how door hinges always squeaked!

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They used animal fats on axles and rotating components.

All the roads were muddy rutted tracks until about the 1890’s when tarmac was invented, that’s why trains came before cars/lorries because they could build flat railways, but not roads. So cycling would’ve been a pain, pre-tarmac!

Ironically now we do have solid, flat, drained infrastructure in most places (admittedly it’s well worn), the local scumbags cover it all in broken glass, so nobody can cycle on it anyway!

greencat":1ftej5ca said:

Probably also partly a mindset issue. Reading Black Beauty you really get the sense that this is a society that revolves around the horse..

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Reminds me of something I heard. In bygone days, the poor had horses and only the rich had cars. Nowadays the poor have cars and only the rich have horses.