Latest Photojournalism: The World's Most Advanced Bicycle

The ultimate answer to our fuel efficiency needs?

BY  Nick van der Leek , 27 September 20110 comments

In March 2011, Formula One’s McLaren and bicycle manufacturer Specialized released the Specialized McLaren Venge.

Right now, the global bicycle market is a $61 billion industry: 130 million bicycles are sold annually around the world; two thirds are made in China.

As recently as 1965, the production of bicycles and cars was the same, at 20 million each. Today, there are around one billion bicycles in the world, or twice as many cyclists as drivers.

Curiously, early bicycles tended to be adopted by the fashionable elite, a form of conspicuous consumption. The introduction of accessories (often more expensive than the original product) also first appeared in the bicycle industry.

The invention of the bicycle predates both the automobile and the aeroplane, and advances in bicycle tech – including ball bearings, spoke-tensioned wheels, chain-driven sprockets, gears and pneumatic tyres – eventually played a key role in the development of both. The birth of the bicycle says much about not just the accelerating pace of human innovation, but also where the mother of invention, necessity, can ultimately lead us.

The year without summer

The invention of the bicycle can be traced back to a string of likely and unlikely events. In 1550, Germany was utilising wagonways, roads comprised of wooden rails and the precursor to today’s railroads. Horses pulling wagons over wooden rails was a more efficient process than over dirt. By 1776, iron had replaced both the wooden rails and the wheels.

In 1804, the first steam-powered engine appeared in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. The technology behind the steam locomotive was intended to gradually replace horsedrawn carts. But at the same time, starting from 1790, solar activity suddenly decreased and global volcanism increased, culminating in the most powerful volcanic eruption in human history: in 1815, Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia, ejected 160 cubic kilometres of debris into the atmosphere.

The world experienced severe climate aberrations the following year, which unleashed crop failures and concomitant food shortages across the northern hemisphere. That year, 1816, which is infamously remembered as ‘the year without summer’ and the ‘poverty year’, also ushered in the end of subsistence agriculture – a methodology that had sustained human beings for millennia. But beyond the 71 000 dead, 1816 saw another vital population decimated due to starvation – horses.

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