Two wheels good, four wheels bad
Listeners to BBC Radio 4's You and Yours have been voting for their favourite invention of the past 200 years. Their choice is a sad indictment of attitudes to technology today.
They voted for the bicycle, steering past such giants as the internal combustion engine, the aeroplane, and the transistor. Even the two media involved in the vote (the radio and the internet) were roundly ignored. The bicycle won because of its simplicity, universality and environmental-friendliness.
As a cyclist, I find my bike very handy - but only as a pisspoor substitute for a proper transport system. The internal combustion engine, by contrast, has provided billions of people with the opportunity to travel long distances quickly and cheaply - and is the predominant means of moving goods, too. Has there ever been a society transformed by cycling? Hardly.
This is the problem. The spirit of our age is not to try to conquer natural barriers but to tip-toe across the surface of the planet, causing as little offence to nature as possible. It was bad enough when bicycles and wind-up radios were touted as pragmatic solutions for the developing world, when people there want so much more. For people in wealthy countries to show such enthusiasm for the bicycle shows how much backward ideas are being pedalled today.
Bicycle chosen as best invention, BBC News, 5 May 2005
2 Comments:
Sure, the bicycle might be a "piss poor substitute" in terms of how fast you can go, and how efficiently it converts human energy expenditure into motion. But remember that the life of the internal combustion engine might prove to be much shorter then we would hope. I'm not talking about it breaking down. It's entirely possible that within our lifetimes, fuelling the ICE on the scale that we do now will be impossible. In 200 years when only the hyper-elite can afford to use it, who will even care that it exists? We might ALL be moving ourselves and our food around town by the power of our own muscles. I fhat happens, the bicycle will be remembered quite fondly indeed.
Trading off the internal combustion engine against the bicycle is the wrong way to look at this. The question is: why, 100 years or more after the ICE was invented, are we still basically using the same technology? Partly, it's the success of the ICE - it works, the energy required is stored in quite a small form etc. But I do think we should have gone beyond it by now. To suggest that we should have flying cars by now is to invite ridicule, yet the idea would not have seemed preposterous 30 years ago. While in communications we are seeing relentless innovation, in many other areas of society, innovation has stagnated.
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