“All life is suffering,” said the Buddha, the first of the Four Noble Truths, which is why we have technology (I’m cutting out roughly 2500 years of history for editorial expediency here). The point is: humans don’t like for stuff to be hard, and so we almost always develop tools to make the various jobs we need to do easier.
We have potato peelers, because it makes getting the skin off potatoes easier than gnawing it off before they go in the pot. We have cable TV, because it’s easier to watch 100 channels of garbage than listen to our family’s constant nonsense. And we have electronic shifting, because it’s easier to press a button than it was to press the button we had before.
And so, everything trends easier with bicycles. The originals were all direct drive, which is fixed gear, but more so. Then we had penny-farthings, which you needed to be a casual pole vaulter to mount. We made all those things easier. We ran fixed and single-speeds for a long time, before Campagnolo invented the derailleur. Once we had gears, we wanted more and more of them. We used to get flat tires, but now we seal our tires with liquid latex. You know, it’s all progress, of one sort or another.
Indexed shifting meant you didn’t have to develop a feel for the gears on the bike. Electronic shifting decided simple indexing wasn’t good enough. The next thing, we’ll have automatic transmissions. In 2023, 1.7% of US cars sold were manuals. How long is it before we decide we’re not really interested in shifting the gears on our bicycles?
Let me take a quick time out here to say that, despite my flippant tone and not-so-subtle sarcasm, I understand that this is fully the way of things. I am not a retro-grouch, although it’s safe to say I’m not an early adopter of new technologies either. What I’m trying to do in today’s TCIF is just to zoom out and ask a bigger question about bicycles.
Which brings me to today’s actual question, which is this: What is it really that makes a bike a bike? I’m not talking about eBikes here (nothing wrong with those), although they sort of make the point by eliminating much of the need to pedal in some cases. I would guess that if I say the word ‘bicycle,’ you get a mental picture immediately. What is that thing? And what are its critical characteristics?
When you say bicycle, I picture a two wheeled human powered machine. E-bikes don’t register, though I’m not against. (I’m an old motohead at heart!)
I like my controls to be analog but I won’t count out electronic shifting as my hands get more and more achy!
Webster’s sez: “a vehicle composed of two wheels held in a frame one behind the other, propelled by pedals and steered with handlebars attached to the front wheel.” That works for me. No mention of gears, brakes electronics, motors or batteries being pro or con in this instance. .