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Bicycles in the Digital Age
The first, at least known, bicycle had no breaks and no chains. You stopped by, well, crashing. Humans have a tendency to do this quite often with new technologies. Crash, then innovate. With the rise of electric vehicles and the wistful promise of automated vehicles, one may think bicycles are a bit on an outlier. On the technology extinction list. Quite the opposite.
You might also be wondering what on earth bicycles have to do with our future and the digital age. Possibly, quite a lot.
Bicycles have played an important role in society since their invention. They were slower to take off at first, like most technologies are. Culture, which includes economic and political systems, social governance and of course, customs and traditions, works in peculiar and unpredictable ways with regard to technology.
The first bicycle that had pedals was invented by French gentleman by the name of Pierre Lallement. His contraption was called a velocipede (which sounds a bit like a dinosaur centipede), but it had no gear chains or again, brakes. Why stop when you can keep going?
The next iteration of the bicycle was the penny-farthing (the big wheel being large like a farthing and the small wheel bing like a penny.) It went considerably faster and was superbly designed for the execution of the perfect face plant should it hit a small…
