On 3/14/2018 1:42 AM, Emanuel Berg wrote:
Frank Krygowski wrote:

The book _Bicycles & Tricycles, An Elementary
Treatise_ is probably interesting only to
those who love the history of engineering.
It was written well over 100 years ago.
I enjoyed finding out what they knew back
then - which was quite a lot

Well, how fast were the fastest cars in the
early 20th century? 130 km/h?

I mean, wasn't this the Jules Verne,
ballon-to-the-north-pole, Titanic, pre-WW1
hay days of this kind'a stuff?

You seem to misunderstand what the book's about. I very much doubt
there's a single mention of an automobile.

The book was written in 1896, in the midst of the first great bike boom,
triggered by the combination of the "safety bicycle" chain drive system
plus the pneumatic tire. At that time, bikes were the height of
technological fashion, kind of like smartphones today. But they were
being produced by hundreds and hundreds of companies, and many details
of design were not yet understood. There was a lot of craziness in some
of the approaches, a lot of ignorant trial and error, a lot of "myth and
lore" as Jobst Brandt used to say here.

Archibald Sharp was an engineer. Supposedly he had a crusty personality,
he engaged in public correspondence in which he pointed out the folly of
various designers, and he ultimately wrote this engineering book about
bicycles, hoping that people would learn from it and the art would
thereby advance. Seems to me he was quite similar to the late Jobst
Brandt or Sheldon Brown.

The book really is an engineering textbook. It's full of free body
diagrams, stress calculations, mathematics of all kinds, illustrations
of countless designs, etc. It contains no science fiction. It's all
about understanding and applying bicycle physics and engineering.

--
- Frank Krygowski