The bicycle has been something that’s been with us since a very young age at least for our generation and we often take it for granted. Just another artifact which we use till we come of age and then throw it away. We seldom appreciate it. I always have been attracted to the simplicity of the bicycle and both of the cycles I ever had were the most rudimentary specimens of all the bicycles you can find today. But recently, I am cycling for pleasure and I had the time to think about the elegance of this design and I just cannot stop appreciating it.
Even Steve Jobs was mystified by the design of a bicycle. He even contemplated naming the company “Bicycle” computers before it was scrapped by his teammates. It’s kind of crazy to think about it now. “Bicycle iPhone” … sounds weird, doesn’t it. My belief is that after reading this, you would empathize with Steve Jobs.
The best sequence in my most favorite movie of all time Steve Jobs (2015) is a dialogue exchange between young Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and John Scully (Jeff Daniels) in a restaurant. Steve Jobs pitches to John Scully to convince him to become the CEO of Apple computers by saying that a personal computer would be a bicycle for one’s mind. That’s the extent to which Steve Jobs admired the design of the bicycle.
“Condor is the most efficient animal on the planet. Humans are among the most inefficient. A human with a bicycle becomes the most efficient being on the planet and a computer will be a bicycle to our minds “.
This is the dialogue exchange in the movie I was talking about… and honestly one can disagree.
The energy efficiency of the bicycle movement is unmatched. Here it is measured as the amount of energy consumed when moving an object of a standard mass (say, 1 Kg) for a Standard distance (say, a meter). I can go with numbers, but that's not what I want to do. If you want, go search for them yourself. I can tell u this, riding a bicycle is not just more energy-efficient than any other animal on the planet, it is more efficient than any means of transport we have ever made.
To understand why this is happening you have to understand some "body" mechanics.
The way muscles consume energy is not too efficient. Here I am talking about the number of calories worth of carbohydrates required by the muscle to do calorie of work which is a one-newton force to move an object by a meter. The efficiency is around just 25% and it is due to the super inefficient process of ATP conversion.
The good thing here is that all the animals, more or less, use a muscle like contraption for locomotion making almost all the animals very inefficient.
What makes the Humans especially clumsy are two things; One, the resistance offered by the ground by friction and two, the transmission angle problem.
The ground resistance problem is fairly a simple problem to understand. You most probably have two legs. When walking, at any particular instant, one leg will be pushing you forward and the other leg will be levitated. The moment the levitated leg touches the ground all the momentum you gained by pushing is simply dissipated into heat at the sole of your shoes and a quick fact, that’s when your shoes get worn down the most. Many animals can do it much better than we do. Refer to Animal Planet for better examples.
The second one requires some “Engineering” and “Biomechanical” thinking. Muscles can be easily compared with the tension cables in bicycle brakes because they function quite the same way. They have no strength in compression and substantial strength in tension. The only difference is that the human muscles contract in response to neural signals by consuming ATP and Bicycle cables has to be pulled by the brake pedal and I will go with this analogy.
The Human muscular system is extremely complex with over 650 muscles, but I have oversimplified here to illustrate better.
Look at the pivoted structure below and think which one will be more efficient for force transfer.
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Experiment this with your arms lifting weights with the above positions to feel the difference. This is the transmission angle effect. If the angle is closer to 90 deg the motion will be more efficient, and if not, it will be very inefficient. This is what happens when we walk. You can look at the angles between the abdomen and the thigh, and thigh and the calf. If you want to visualize, look at the GIF below.
The same here, you can watch Animal Planet to see how a lot of animals are doing better in this arena too.
Adding a bicycle just obliterates these two inefficiencies. The first problem is being dealt with easily the greatest invention by mankind, The Wheel. And the freewheel in the pedals also deals with this by minimizing the momentum lost during motion.
Minimizing the second problem requires some proper adjustment of the bicycle seats and handlebars. A poor design (they are never poor on absolute terms, but on relative terms, say compared to my bicycle) of a bicycle can also make things worse. The angle is always close to 90 deg during the energy transfer. That’s why the energy stored in the muscles gets converted to torque at the wheels so efficiently. The right Transmission angles. All we are left to deal with is the tire deformation “rolling” resistance (the one you feel when the tire pressure is low), air drag, and gradient resistance and this is what makes the Bicycle super-efficient.
Suspensions, especially the rear suspension, of the bicycle are easily the dumbest addition to a road purpose bicycle. Anyone who knows basic physics should abstain from buying those. The shocks absorbers just absorb and dissipate a good chunk of the pedaling energy as heat.
The bicycle bypassed evolution to make us the most efficient species on the planet. That’s how significant the bicycle is.
More than that, the beauty of the bicycles is not just limited to its efficiency of energy transfer. Bicycles are among the very few artifacts that have no or extremely few redundant parts. In fact, except for the handgrips, my bicycle has literally no redundant parts - No mudguard, no bell, no nothing. Take one out, it won’t work. That’s how design must be done. Even look at the truss structure, you can find no redundant structural members. It is what you call an optimum truss. Not a lot of structures are designed to be efficient as this.
Honestly, Efficiency is beauty, and in that measure, there is nothing more beautiful than a bicycle. There is no wonder why Steve Jobs was so awestruck by them.
And this is my bicycle, I was talking about...
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