pedal power
- John Bessant
- Jul 25
- 2 min read
The surprising innovation history of the bicycle
Bicycles are big business. It’s hard to get an exact figure but estimates suggest there are around 2 billion bikes in the world today. And of course they exist in all sorts of shapes and sizes – town bikes, racing bikes, mountain bikes, foldable bikes, electric bikes and many more besides. They’re available in cutting-edge high tech versions but their underlying design is very simple. They’re very green – once built they can be repaired and resurrected, some live for ages, handed on from generation to generation.
But bicycles weren’t always around and perhaps it’s worth reflecting a little more on their history, not least because it can teach us some useful lessons about innovation. In particular how (or not) to manage it for impact and scale.
What do you do after you've invented the wheel?
In the earliest days – around 3500 BC – the Mesopotamians used them to make pottery which seems to be the first application of this breakthrough idea. The problem with using them for transport wasn’t so much the wheel as finding an axle strong enough to enable the wheels to work. It took another 300 years before new materials and better carpentry techniques led to their being fixed to chariots and ushering in the era of mobile warfare. But once the wheels started rolling they were attached to an increasing variety of military and domestic vehicles, so it was only going to be a matter of time before someone came up with the idea of using them to enable personal transportation.
Well quite a lot of time, actually. Although there’s probably a sketch for something resembling a bike in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks or in some other inventor’s imagination, the reality is that it wasn’t until the early 19th century that the vehicle that we know and love began to see the light of day. That shouldn’t surprise us - innovation depends on a mixture of needs and means and the idea of personal transportation never mind the technologies to enable it was not a particularly high priority. People didn’t travel far – and if they did Nature had already supplied a robust solution in the form of horses (or mules, camels and other alternatives).
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