I'm doing postgraduate research at University of Leicester and am interested in the development of cycling as a leisure activity among the working classes in the late nineteenth century. I'm trying to understand why it took so long to develop the "safety bicycle". This appeared on the scene, probably in the Stanley show in 1885. There were a number of evolutions culminating in the "ordinary" which preceded the "safety bicycle". With hindsight, this latter seems a trivial engineering exercise. All the technology was well in place before the 1880s – spoked wheels, chain drive, etc. It is difficult to understand why all this was not in place many decades before. There has been some recent research in understanding a workable model that represents the stability of a bicycle, and this seems to imply that the evolutionary development of the bicycle was not trivial. This may explain why it took so long to get from the "hobbyhorse" to the "safety bicycle". I'd be very interested to discuss this matter with anyone who has a view on the subject.
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