Why wasn't the bicycle invented earlier...

What little roads that were around were too bumpy.

According to
>wikipedia
"the first practical pneumatic tire was made in 1888". The first bicycles are some decades older than that.

That and lack of lightweight materials to build it with. Wood and steel are fucking heavy. Metallic aluminum and plastic weren't invented. Lubricants didn't have the same staying power and had to be frequently applied (and were often flammable). Roads were at best cobblestone, a lot of stress would be put on the wheels and bearings.

You dont need to propel a horse forward with your legs.

You dont need trails of any sort with a horse

You don't need complicated interlocking mechanical parts with a horse.

bump

Metal work sophisticated enough wasn't invented until much later.

Also kind of unrelated but reminder that we literally don't know how bikes work.

rubber is only useful for tires when it's been vulcanized (boiled with sulphur), so yes it had to be invented, retard.

>we literally don't know how bikes work
What.

A lot of people don't know bikes run off of ball bearings inside them, (think like a fidget spinner), pic shows wheel but they are in the crank too..
Tangentially related: did you know over 60% of people can't explain how a toilet works? (It's more complex than you think

>Letting it roll freely at high enough speeds, and it can withstand pushes from the side – it will wobble a little, but quickly recover. In the conventional analysis, that is because the gyroscopic force of the front wheel, its mass and the spontaneous turn of the handlebars all act together to keep the bicycle rolling forwards. This has something to do with the gyroscopic effect, the force that keeps a spinning top upright
>The first mathematical analysis of bicycles suggested that this is also what keeps a moving bike on its wheels. But although the equations were written down in 1910, physicists always had nagging doubts about whether this was the whole story.
>The most definitive analysis came a century later. It involved an experimental bicycle that had all its gyroscopic effects cancelled out by a system of counter-rotating wheels.
>Taking into account the angles of the headset and the forks, the distribution of weight and the handlebar turn, the gyroscopic effects are not enough to keep a bike upright after all. What does? We simply don’t know.

Try to draw a bike by memory. Really

Reminds me of this
theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/21/how-to-stop-airport-luggage-toppling
Scientific study of why luggage Starts to shake and wabbles more and more before it tips over instead of calming down. To:dr because the handle is attached to the middle the but pulled from the top details ^
You just have to bealive enough and it will stay up

I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to figure out, and i'm sure at least someone has done so already. It just isn't considered something worth investigating further I guess.

Don't forget the best one
>Bikes don't bring you home when you are drunk or passed out