What two fundamental features did the safety bicycle introduce to enable widespread practical gearing?
Answer
Equally sized wheels and the use of a chain drive to power the rear wheel.
The advent of the safety bicycle in the mid-1880s provided the necessary mechanical platform for effective gearing experiments. The shift to equally sized wheels made the machine safer and more stable, but the crucial element for gearing was the adoption of the chain drive connecting the pedals to the rear wheel. This chain drive allowed inventors to vary the gear ratio by simply changing the relative sizes of the front and rear sprockets, a massive mechanical advantage that eliminated the impracticality of altering the enormous wheel size found on high-wheelers.
Related Questions
What characterized James Starley's 1871 invention described as the first gear cycle?What inherent limitation defined the direct-drive pedals on the 'boneshaker' or 'penny-farthing'?What two fundamental features did the safety bicycle introduce to enable widespread practical gearing?Which gearing system generally offered very high durability because it was sealed from dirt and weather?Besides making hill climbing easier, what primary speed goal did early gearing systems help riders achieve?How does the external derailleur system physically accomplish shifting between different gear ratios?What practical difficulty often caused many cyclists to stick with fixed-gear bikes for decades?What refinement, developed in the mid-to-late 20th century, made derailleur shifting nearly foolproof?What was the initial function of the earliest devices separating pedal speed from wheel speed?Which cycling niche ultimately favored the external derailleur system over the internal hub gear?According to the comparison table, which system generally carried more weight?