May 23, 2025 • 28 mins
Will and Mango dig into all the biggest bicycle questions: From how bikes seriously altered the dating scene, to how blind people ride bikes through traffic, to the ingenious way Kermit pedaled his Schwann in the Muppets Movie. Grab a helmet and join us!
This episode originally aired on November 7, 2019.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of iHeartRadio. Guess what, Well,
what's that Mango? So this is something I certainly haven't
thought about that often, but it is much harder to
balance on a bike that isn't moving compared to one
that is.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I'm glad to know you haven't thought about it that often,
but it is actually strange when you think about it,
like you think it would be harder to balance on
something that's whipping along in like ten fifteen miles an hour.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Right exactly, And it turns out the difficulty is mostly
due to the fact that a bike only has two
points of contact with the ground, like the thin parts
of the front and back wheel, and typically you need
three contact points with the ground to create a good
base of support, and four is actually I deal with
like a table or a bed. But what bikes lack
and static stability, they actually make up for in dynamic stability,
(00:52):
which is the ability to remain stable while moving forward.
And it works because a rider can maneuver the bike's
points of support, or in other words, the rider can
reposition the wheels as needed to keep everything nice and
balanced from one moment to the next. And the best
part is riders usually steer like this without even realizing
what they're doing. Like, that's how subtle these micro adjustments are.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, I was actually going to say, I never feel
like I'm that focused on, you know, like the handlebars
when I'm out riding a bike. It's just one of
those things where your brain goes into autopilot and you
really just respond without thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah, I mean, that's one thing I realized this week.
There are a lot of things about bikes we don't
really think about, from how we ride them, to where
they came from, to what they have to do with
horses deaths. So that's what I thought we could tackle today,
all the weird questions about bikes we never think to ask.
And this is usually where I suggest we dive right in.
But since today it's all about bikes, why don't we
put on our helmets and roll out instead.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Hey, their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Will Pearson, and as always I'm joined by my good
friend mangesh hot Ticketter on the other side of the
soundproof glass. He's been doing this all morning, and I
gotta be honest, it's pretty impressive.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
He's saying there.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Popping yet another wheelie his office chair. That's the world's
most impressive producer on one of these wheelie chairs, Lowel Berlante. So, Mango,
are you much of a bike er? I don't think
I've ever seen you ride a bike before.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
I know. It's funny, you know what I was when
I was a kid, Like I used to have this
little BMX and I'd ride it around the neighborhood into
the country store we had in our town and to
get candy and whatever. But you know, when I hit
sixth or seventh grade, like my dad got super to
safety all of a sudden, and he put this long
plastic stick on the back of our bike that had
this orange flag at the top of it. Yeah, and
(02:55):
he made us wear helmets. And suddenly it was like,
I'm good, I think I can walk from here.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Did you ride around much? Oh?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
I rode to school every single day. But yeah, I
was that kid. You know, we were the first generation
where some parents started making kids wear helmets, you know,
So I wore a helmet every day. But yeah, we
were definitely like these days kids don't think that much
about it. But but yeah, it was a little cooler.
They do a look cooler. Yeah, it's a very big
difference day. Some of them have those mohawk helmets, which
are just so jealous of.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, I know, the helmets really are so much cooler
with the mohawks. But let's get off my hesitation about
bikes because I still don't really ride that much, and
talk about a different weird story that bikes were invented
because of volcano killed all the horses.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Right, of course. No, Actually, I think you're going to
have to explain this one because I have no idea
what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
So today we tend to think of bikes mostly as
recreational items, but their invention was actually a matter of necessity,
so it was a weird, tragic necessity. Here's what happened.
In eighteen fifteen, a volcano named Mount Tambora erupted on
an island in Indonesia, and that eruption was and still is,
the largest eruption in recorded history. It was so bad
that the blast all but wiped out the island's inhabitants,
(04:05):
and to make matters worse, the neighboring islands became so
choked with ash and smoke that tens of thousands of
people died from famine and disease in the months that followed.
But here's the thing. The effects were even more widespread
than just that area. In fact, they were worldwide, and
such a massive amount of ash and sulfur dioxide had
been shot up into the atmosphere that actually blocked sunlight
(04:25):
and disrupted weather patterns all over the world for a
full three years.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Wow. So this was one of those massive eruptions. It
actually affected the Earth's climate, the whole Earth's climate.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yeah, it did so. The average global temperature actually dropped
almost a full degree after the blast, and while that
doesn't sound huge, it was enough to make eighteen sixteen
the coldest year on record since the fourteen hundreds. It
was so bad that historians now referred to eighteen sixteen
as the year without Summer.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Yeah, it's a pretty depressing label for a year. But
all right, Well, what happened next?
Speaker 1 (04:54):
I guess the temperature drop and the lack of sunlight
actually led to all kinds of global problems like versus froze,
crops failed, disease broke out, and lots and lots of
people and animals starved to death and In fact, there
was so little food in Europe that the vast majority
of horses and draft animals wound up being slaughtered and
eaten by their owners who were themselves starving. And it
(05:15):
was bleak and tragic, obviously, But you know, if there's
any bright side to it, it's that two great creations
were inspired by this dreary atmosphere, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein novel
and Baron Carl von Dreys's early bicycle.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Ye know, I'm tempted. I've got a couple good frankensteinfachts
that I'm ready to share with you for some reason,
but I'm going to be disciplined. Let's stick to the
bike for today, I think. So.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
In Germany, this guy Andres worked both as an inventor
and also as a forestry master for the government, and
this meant that he had to travel between the different
parts of the forest that he was in charge of,
which became pretty difficult once all the horses in the
region had been eaten. So basically Von Dreis needed this reliable,
horseless way to get around, and the solution he came
up with was this two wheeled running machine or lout machine,
(06:02):
as he called it. His device had no pedals, and
as the name implies, the riders would actually have to
run to propel it, kicking off the ground with their feet,
kind of like you might on a scooter. Aside from
the lack of pedals, though, the design looked pretty close
to what we're used to today. It's got kind of
like the two in line wheels, a seed, a pair
of handlebars, so fairly similar.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, but it almost makes me think of like those
little balanced bikes that toddlers use, right.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Totally, So it was exactly one of those kind of
this protobike and Andre's Pattens's design in eighteen eighteen, and
soon after that other manufacturers in England and France begin
putting their own spins on the invention. So France comes
up with a pretty cool name for the version, it's
called a velocipede. England goes the other way. They call
their bikes dandy horses.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Which, yeah, one name is definitely cooler than the other.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Yeah yeah, I mean, I guess it's a tribute to
their horses, which you know they'd eaten. But it wasn't
long before the pedalist bikes made their way straightside as well.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
I mean, if you look at the timeline, one of
the things that's funny is that it takes about another
seventy years to go from these balanced bikes to the
you know, like the gear and chain models with pedals.
Why do you think that is well, I mean, I
think part of the delay was that people were not
at all convinced that it was possible to balance on
a two wheeled bike, you know, while pedaling, and not
just fall over. And so it's exactly what you were
(07:20):
talking about at the top of the show. But a
few decades of innovation eventually got us there. This was
by the eighteen nineties, and the truth is, the basic
form of the bike has stayed pretty much the same
ever since then. But even with better bikes and growing popularity,
the cyclist of the era still had a huge obstacle
ahead of them, the main one being that all the
(07:41):
roads pretty much everywhere were terrible. So they were unpaved, uneven,
littered with holes, and easily turned into mud. So, as
one New York Times article put it, the country roads
where a Martian spring a sahara in summer, frozen stiff
and later autumn, and a swamp wherever there was thought
in winter, and so the urban roads weren't really that
(08:03):
much better. I mean, they were often covered in wood
planks at least, which made riding a little bit smoother,
but still you'd sometimes have cyclists riding on the sidewalk
just to get a break from this rough ride, and
so this inevitably led to accidents where pedestrians would get
knocked over, and then people would complain that bikes should
be banned entirely. So it was a tough time to
(08:23):
be a bike fan or a wheelman as they were
called back then.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
How did things get better for bikers then?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Well, instead of giving up, these cyclists formed advocacy groups,
including the League of American Wheelmen, and they began advocating
for paved roads throughout the country. There are more than
one hundred thousand of these people that joined the cause,
and due to the success of their grassroots efforts, the
nation got its first paved roads in eighteen ninety eight.
So it's really no stretch to say that the early
(08:49):
work of these cyclists literally paved the way for the
national highway system. I had been waiting so long to
be able to say that literally paved alay.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
That's pretty odd. Incredible both the fact and you're punning.
But since we're giving the real men their due, let's
talk a little bit about the real women of the
day as well. Because as big as the bike craze
was in general, from a cultural perspective, it was probably
most significant to women. Before the bike came along in
the nineteenth century, women had been expected to travel either
on foot or on horseback or in a carriage. They
(09:20):
were usually accompanied by a chaperone of some kind, and
they rarely got to travel at speeds any faster than
a leisurely trot. The bike changed all of that by
giving women the chance to travel with a whole new
level of independence. It completely flipped the table on this
old fashioned view of women as the frails, slow going
gentler sex.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Yeah, and I feel like I can finish the story
because I would imagine that newfound freedom was met with
complete approval from the public and no backlash. Kind of
changed everything for the better forever.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Right of course, so you know, there had to be detractors,
and many of them were saying that being able to
travel free and unsupervised might somehow corrupt the women's morals.
In fact, that there was even a business that crop
up to help guard against this threat. It was called
the Cyclist Chaperone Association, and according to its ad the
company provided gentlewomen of good social position to conduct ladies
(10:10):
on bicycle excursions and tours so nervous husbands could be
put to ease. But you know, it wasn't just these
husbands who were worried. Newspaper columnists all over the country
were also baffled by the sudden appearance of wheelwomen. And
here's what the confused editors at the San Francisco Call
wrote in eighteen ninety five. Quote, it doesn't really matter
much where one individual young lady is going on her wheels.
(10:32):
It may be she's going to the park, or to
the store for a dozen hairpins, or to get a dollar,
or to get a doily pattern of somebody, or a
recipe for removing tens and freckles. Right right, of course,
let that be as it may. What the interested public
wishes to know is where are all the women on
wheels going? You know, just one woman on an aaron
(10:54):
for I guess a freckle cream is the type of
thing you can excuse. But dozens of them traveling without
knowing where the going is something to rail against. And
the truth is, the outcry against women riding bikes did
get pretty serious. So female cyclists were frequently harassed as
they rode. Men and women would both taunt the riders,
demanding they go home where they belong. Some women were
(11:15):
banned from public places where male cyclists were permitted, and
in the worst cases, the female cyclists were actually assaulted
with rocks and bricks.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like there's a lot more
at play here than just not wanting women to ride bikes, right.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Yeah, definitely, And I do want to talk a little
bit more about what exactly was fueling that outrage, including
the role bikes played in the women's suffrage movement. But
before we get into that, let's take a quick break.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
You're listening to Part Time Genius and we're talking about
all the unexpected ways that bicycles changed the world. All right, mego,
So before the break, you were saying that all the
public outcry in the early twentieth century wasn't just about
the bike's women were.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Riding, right, Yeah, So the outrage was also partly about
what women wore while riding bikes, So long skirts and
dresses posed as a safety risk for female cyclists because
they could get caught in the bike chains and spokes.
And in light of this, the modest fashion of the
Victorian age, it all started to give way and all
of a sudden, women were, I guess, taking up the
(12:26):
scandalous practice of wearing ankle bearing bloomers in public. This
was an appalling development for some people, and in fact,
one US newspaper referred to the bloomers as a gateway garment. Man.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
I mean it starts with wearing bloomers, but the next thing,
you know, like she's moved on to book learning, you
know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
It's just dangerous, I know. And when you think about it,
all that kind of criticism really just proved the level
of cultural impact the women's movement was having. And probably
the best example of that is the bicycle actually became
a symbol of women's rights. This was both with Susan B.
Anthony and Elizabeth Katie Stanton's credited as saying that women
(13:02):
were quote riding the suffrage on the bicycle.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
I mean that was literally the case, though, right, I mean,
suffragettes relied on bikes when they were out campaigning for
the vote. They might not have won nearly as much
support as they did without bikes to help them reach
all these people.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Yeah, that's true. In fact, The Atlantic ran this great
article a few years ago about just how much of
a game changer bikes were for women. It closes on
this really beautiful sentiment that I wanted to share. It's
from the author, Adrian Lefrance, and this is what she writes. Quote,
Imagine what it must have felt like in an age
when American women were still decades from the right to
vote and inundated with men's opinions about their ankles for
(13:39):
a women to go outside, hop on her bicycle, and
ride as fast as she could wherever she wanted, leaving
the rest of the world wondering where she might go next.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yeah. I mean, maybe she's out looking for freckle cream.
But maybe she's not. It's still really a mystery about it.
But all right, let's talk about another public good that
bikes are good for, which is they make perfect ambulances
for ingested cities. So one of the first people to
demonstrate just how effective a bike ambulance unit could be
was this guy named Tom Lynch. And so what's interesting
(14:08):
is that Lynch is a pro BMX rid turned London
Ambulance driver. This really isn't that long ago. This was
back in the eighties and nineties. Lynch was basically the
Tony Hawk of BMX, but as he got a little
bit older, he wanted what he considered, you know, a
normal job, and for Lynch that meant training with the
London Ambulance Service and becoming a licensed EMT, which he
(14:29):
did in nineteen ninety four. But the more time Tom
spent stuck in traffic on his way to a call,
the more frustrated he became. So he often told his
colleagues how much faster they'd be able to respond to
calls if only they could use bikes instead of vans.
No one else thought much of this idea, but Tom
kept pushing it until finally, in nineteen ninety nine, Tom
(14:50):
got permission to launch a trial version of the Ambulance
Cycle Responsive Unit or CRU, which is just a great idea.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Yeah, I love that. You finally just kind of wore
everyone down by talking about it all this time.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Yeah, so yeah. Anyway, Tom used his connections in the
bike industry to make sure all the top gear was
on hand for his big trial run and He loaded
up his bikes with all sorts of customized equipment, including
a siren, special medic bags, and there was this fifty
pound defibrillator, which are much lighter these days of course.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
And so you know, he set up the system like
what are his metrics for success? Lay like, what's the
goal of this? Exactly?
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Well, basically to be able to successfully answer nine to
nine to nine calls in the West of London. And
if you asked Tom, he says that he could tell
early on that the new approach was definitely going to work.
He told one interviewer, I was based around the West
End and the calls were coming in and I was
doing my best to ease pressure on the ambulance cruise.
I would race the incidents, flying past traffic, cycling where
(15:49):
motor vehicles couldn't go, and getting to patients quickly. I
went to five incidents within one hour. I treated patients,
canceled the ambulances and used other medical centers as opposed
to the accident and emergency. And that last part is
really the key in all of this, Like the bike
EMT's free up ambulances to respond to the calls that
(16:09):
actually require hospital treatment, not just the on site care. Yeah,
super interesting. And one group that benefits from this big
time is their heart attack victims, like where every second
you're not breathing counts so much and so it really
helped a ton on that front.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
So where does this cycle crew operate? Is it mainly
like a London thing or has it expanded?
Speaker 2 (16:30):
No, the unit Tom found that is now composed of
several teams that operate all over London. More than one
hundred paramedics and trained volunteers are involved. But other similar
teams have started popping up in major cities across Europe,
some of the US, even China and Japan. So each
of those cycle response teams now responds to thousands of
calls every year. And it's all because a big hearted
(16:51):
bmx or just couldn't stand being stuck in traffic.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
I love that. Well. I know we wanted to circle
back and talk about the neuroscience behind biking, but that
was such a feel good story. I just want to
bask him the glow for a minute. Why don't we
take another quick break and then we can jump right
back in. Welcome back to part time Genius. Okay, Well,
(17:22):
so today's show is clearly all about bicycles. But nonetheless,
I have to tell you about something amazing I found
out about this week, and it's all about unicycles.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
M you know, this is a bike episode, so I'm
not sure that's a little Frankenstein fack no unicycle and
Loell is definitely shaking his head. But I actually because
he's doing that, I kind of like breaking Loll's rules.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
So if you insist, let's hear the story. Okay, So
here's my fact. Unicycles have basically become a cornerstone of
Japan's educational curriculum.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Is Japan like really into clowns or something? I've just
somehow never noticed this. How did that happen?
Speaker 1 (17:57):
I don't know that there are any countries that are
still really into In Japan's case, the real apeeal is
that unicycling can be a good way to teach and
improve both motor skills and balance, and the idea to
use unicycles in schools with the result of a series
of studies done in Japan in the nineteen eighties, I
guess researchers found that children who learned to ride a
unicycle were more successful at school and in their home
(18:19):
lives than children who didn't.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
It's pretty interesting. So did they figure out why that
would be the case?
Speaker 1 (18:24):
I guess the leading theory is that it's because the
high level of concentration that it takes to ride a
unicycle like that kind of focus engages a different area
of the brain than other physical activities, including biking.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
So, based on these findings, Japanese schools started teaching kids
to ride unicycles.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Yeah, I guess the Ministry of Education added unicycling to
the p curriculum in all of the country's elementary schools.
But Japan's schools aren't the only place you actually find this. Today,
there are unicycle programs in schools across the US, and
more and more educators are starting to see unicycles as
a tool not just for brain development, but for character development.
So you think about people like the psychologist and Angela
(19:01):
Duckworth who talks about like the most important metric for
a person's successes is grit, because that's kind of what
makes you keep trying when you fail instead of giving up.
So riding a unicycle is so unnatural and so awkward
and hard that the kids in these programs fall off
dozens of times before they finally start to get it,
and it's sort of like thought to reinforce that perseverance.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of that famous Samuel
Beckett quote. I think it was try again, fail again,
fail better, but away. Speaking of well known phrases, you
know the old cliche about how once you've learned to
ride a bike, you never forget right. Sure, well, it
was always a strange saying to me because it seemed
to imply that riding a bike is super simple, like
you could pick it up anytime in life and just
(19:45):
nail it without practice. But the truth is that riding
a bike is incredibly complex as a task. So, according
to the author and world class endurance athlete Christopher Bergland,
riding a bike quote requires seamless coordination, dexter, and an
intuitive ability to subconsciously calculate algorithms that take into the
account the forces of gravity, velocity, and momentum. Makes me
(20:08):
feel so smart that it can ride a bike? No,
and then I'm doing all of this.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah, I mean, as we talked about at the top,
there's a lot that goes into it that we don't
even think about. So in that sense, it's not that
riding a bike is actually easy. It's more that our
brains process all this information so efficiently that riding a
bike seems easy to us.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Yeah. Yeah, But here's the thing, like, despite all that
hard work from our brains, it turns out that we
can absolutely still forget how to ride a bicycle.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
So not only is it cliche, it's also inaccurate.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
It is definitely inaccurate. And we know that partly because
of this oddball experiment that a guy named Destin Sandlin
did a few years back. We of course worked with
Deston some when we were at Mental Flaws, But he
has this this show called Smarter every Day. It's a
channel on YouTube, super popular channel, and if you haven't
seen the video, it's called Backwards Brain Bicycle. And the
gist of it is that Deston took a bicycle and
(20:58):
basically inverted the steering direction of the handlebars, So if
you turn the handlebars right, the front wheel would go
left and vice versa. So in that scenario, all the
automatic motor skills that a person develops from years of
riding a regular bicycle, all of a sudden those are
just worthless. And the effect is that anyone who tries
(21:19):
to ride the backwards brain bike pretty much tips over
or falls off the bike before they've even gone two feet.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
So Deston spent months riding only this backwards bike, and
little by little he slowly got used to the inverted
steering of it all.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
It is one of those things like I actually saw
a clip of someone riding in and thinking like, oh yeah,
I could like think around that challenge. It doesn't seem
that difficult, but clearly it is. So it is confusing though.
It feels like this isn't so much about forgetting how
to ride a bike, it's more kind of learning how
to ride a different kind of bike.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yeah, I mean that part is true, But that's where
this gets weird because when Deston tried to switch back
to riding a normal bicycle, he couldn't do it. Like,
he fell over again and again until finally something clicked
in his brain and he was able to ride his
bike again. So the takeaway is that you can indeed
forget how to ride a bicycle, but the good news
(22:13):
is that if you practice, you'll probably be able to
relearn the automatic motor skill pretty quickly the next time around.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
All right, Well, since we're talking about the logistics, and
science of bicycling. I think it's only right that we
spend a minute on what's probably the biggest mystery in
the whole field, and that is, of course, how did
they get Kermit to ride a bike in the Muppet Movie?
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Totally, that is the biggest mystery.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Yeah, for anyone listening. If you don't know, we'veeeing him
talking about pauses, go watch the Muppet movie, the entire
Muppet movie, and then come back.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
I can watch the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
We'll wait. In the beginning of the flick, Kermit's riding
his bike across town, and in the context of the story,
it's this incredibly simple moment, right, But when you watch it,
it's pretty mind blowing, partially because they keep zooming in
on his feet, like you know on some level that
Kermit is a puppet and that he's being controlled by
Jim Henson or what I off the screen, but you
can see Kermit's whole body and you can see his
(23:04):
feet actually turning the pedals, and this blue audiences away.
When they first saw it back in the seventies, the
Muppets had actually never been seen in the real world
like this before. They had always been tethered to a
stage or studio. But what's interesting is the technology that
made it happen was also very simple. There's no audio, animatronics,
there's no green screen, none of that. Instead, the Kermit
(23:25):
in the scene is just a regular marionette with nearly
invisible strings attached to his body and limbs. The other
ends of the strings are connected to a camera crane
that's suspended above him out of shot, so as the
bike moved forward, the crane would move along with it,
and Kermit and his bike would stay upright and balanced,
which is super simple. But according to the puppeteer Dave Goles,
(23:45):
it wasn't the original approach. The crew had actually assembled
what he said quote was a very sophisticated bicycle rig
that was made from a little radio controlled car that
was mounted in the bike between the front and rear wheels,
but it actually broke before the shoe, so they ended
up rejiggering it with three strings from a camera crane.
It is also possibly Kermit's best line in the world,
(24:07):
or at least my favorite Kurmit line. And what's that
He almost gets to his accident with his giant construction
equipment and his bike gets demolished, and you'd think he's toast,
but then you realize he's jumped out of the way,
and he says, that's pretty dangerous building a road in
the middle of the street. If frogs couldn't hop, I'd
be gone with a shwin. A terrible fun but also
(24:28):
one of my favorites.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
I could keep shaking my head for the rest of
the episode, but instead, why don't we jump straight into
the fact off?
Speaker 1 (24:44):
So here's a quick one. I remember from an article
we did in Mental plus years ago. But apparently bikes
had a huge effect on romance and specifically long distance courtships. So,
according to Julie Winterbottom, when the prices on bikes dropped
in the eighteen nineties, suddenly it opened up this whole
new world of dating, like people could finally date outside
their family's friend circles or their churches or parishes. And
(25:07):
it was the first time this has kind of happened.
And according to British geneticist Steve Jones, this widening of
the gene pool had a huge impact on humanity. In fact,
he calls the bicycle quote the most important event in
recent human evolution.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Wow, that's a big claim. All right, well, I've found
this amazing NPR interview with a guy named Daniel Kish
who is blind but not only rides a bike, he
rides it through traffic. So basically he uses echolocation, which
we've talked about several times in previous episodes. So he
clicks his tongue and uses the reverberations to create spatial
(25:42):
awareness of buildings and vehicles and other things around him.
I mean, it's pretty remarkable, but he doesn't really see
it that way, as he told reporters. Quote, when a
sighted child gets hurt, we consider it to be unfortunate,
Kish says, when a blind child gets hurt, we consider
it to be tragic. It's a double standard that disadvantages
(26:02):
a blind child, he says, which you know, I guess
that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
So here's one about an Italian cyclist named Alfredo Binda.
Have you ever heard of this guy? I have not.
So apparently he was just dominant in the sport and
at winning the Giro, which I guess is the tour
of Italy that they have. He won it over and
over in nineteen twenty five, nineteen twenty seven, twenty eight,
twenty nine. And so this is like Italy's version of
(26:25):
the Tour de France, and it was good for the
newspaper business initially, right, like he's this like underdog, his hero.
Then he keeps winning, and his wins become bigger and
bigger and so regular that the paper's sales start declining.
So the organizers actually offered to pay him the equivalent
of the winning sum not to race.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
So did he accept it?
Speaker 1 (26:46):
He did, I guess he quickly calculated that he could
buy two more houses with the winnings, so he took
the money and used it for this great investment. But
he did come back to win the race again a
few years later.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Oh that's pretty cool. Yeah, it's funny that you brought
up Italian cyclists, because I've got another Italian I wanted
to talk about. This is Gino Bartali, who won the
twur Defrance in nineteen thirty eight. But then he made
the surprising move of not dedicating his win to Mussolini. Instead,
he decided to work for the resistance, so he helped
Jews escape the country by stuffing counterfeit identity papers into
(27:21):
his handlebars and his bike frame. Basically, he would fill
up the insides of his bike with papers and then
go on these long training runs in order to deliver them.
And if he was ever stopped for a police search,
he was famous enough that he'd ask the cops not
to mess with his perfectly calibrated bicycle. I mean, it
was the perfect cover. It's just brilliant. According to an
(27:41):
article in Mental Flaws, by the time he eventually went
into hiding, quote, he had cycled thousands of miles to
help hundreds escape.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
That is a great story and I think you just
earned yourself the trophy with that one. Although I might
pay you not to compete the next time a round.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Well, I'll consider it if I can buy a house.
But all right, well, thank you to the bicycle for
givings better dating options, freedom for women, and the greatest
joke the Muppets ever told. That's going to do it
for today's Part Time Genius for myself, Mango, Gabe, and Lowell.
Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with
another episode. Part Time Genius is a production of iHeartRadio.
(28:31):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite show.
Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of iHeartRadio. Guess what, Well,
what's that Mango? So this is something I certainly haven't
thought about that often, but it is much harder to
balance on a bike that isn't moving compared to one
that is.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I'm glad to know you haven't thought about it that often,
but it is actually strange when you think about it,
like you think it would be harder to balance on
something that's whipping along in like ten fifteen miles an hour.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Right exactly, And it turns out the difficulty is mostly
due to the fact that a bike only has two
points of contact with the ground, like the thin parts
of the front and back wheel, and typically you need
three contact points with the ground to create a good
base of support, and four is actually I deal with
like a table or a bed. But what bikes lack
and static stability, they actually make up for in dynamic stability,
(00:52):
which is the ability to remain stable while moving forward.
And it works because a rider can maneuver the bike's
points of support, or in other words, the rider can
reposition the wheels as needed to keep everything nice and
balanced from one moment to the next. And the best
part is riders usually steer like this without even realizing
what they're doing. Like, that's how subtle these micro adjustments are.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, I was actually going to say, I never feel
like I'm that focused on, you know, like the handlebars
when I'm out riding a bike. It's just one of
those things where your brain goes into autopilot and you
really just respond without thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah, I mean, that's one thing I realized this week.
There are a lot of things about bikes we don't
really think about, from how we ride them, to where
they came from, to what they have to do with
horses deaths. So that's what I thought we could tackle today,
all the weird questions about bikes we never think to ask.
And this is usually where I suggest we dive right in.
But since today it's all about bikes, why don't we
put on our helmets and roll out instead.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Hey, their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Will Pearson, and as always I'm joined by my good
friend mangesh hot Ticketter on the other side of the
soundproof glass. He's been doing this all morning, and I
gotta be honest, it's pretty impressive.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
He's saying there.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Popping yet another wheelie his office chair. That's the world's
most impressive producer on one of these wheelie chairs, Lowel Berlante. So, Mango,
are you much of a bike er? I don't think
I've ever seen you ride a bike before.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
I know. It's funny, you know what I was when
I was a kid, Like I used to have this
little BMX and I'd ride it around the neighborhood into
the country store we had in our town and to
get candy and whatever. But you know, when I hit
sixth or seventh grade, like my dad got super to
safety all of a sudden, and he put this long
plastic stick on the back of our bike that had
this orange flag at the top of it. Yeah, and
(02:55):
he made us wear helmets. And suddenly it was like,
I'm good, I think I can walk from here.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Did you ride around much? Oh?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
I rode to school every single day. But yeah, I
was that kid. You know, we were the first generation
where some parents started making kids wear helmets, you know,
So I wore a helmet every day. But yeah, we
were definitely like these days kids don't think that much
about it. But but yeah, it was a little cooler.
They do a look cooler. Yeah, it's a very big
difference day. Some of them have those mohawk helmets, which
are just so jealous of.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, I know, the helmets really are so much cooler
with the mohawks. But let's get off my hesitation about
bikes because I still don't really ride that much, and
talk about a different weird story that bikes were invented
because of volcano killed all the horses.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Right, of course. No, Actually, I think you're going to
have to explain this one because I have no idea
what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
So today we tend to think of bikes mostly as
recreational items, but their invention was actually a matter of necessity,
so it was a weird, tragic necessity. Here's what happened.
In eighteen fifteen, a volcano named Mount Tambora erupted on
an island in Indonesia, and that eruption was and still is,
the largest eruption in recorded history. It was so bad
that the blast all but wiped out the island's inhabitants,
(04:05):
and to make matters worse, the neighboring islands became so
choked with ash and smoke that tens of thousands of
people died from famine and disease in the months that followed.
But here's the thing. The effects were even more widespread
than just that area. In fact, they were worldwide, and
such a massive amount of ash and sulfur dioxide had
been shot up into the atmosphere that actually blocked sunlight
(04:25):
and disrupted weather patterns all over the world for a
full three years.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Wow. So this was one of those massive eruptions. It
actually affected the Earth's climate, the whole Earth's climate.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yeah, it did so. The average global temperature actually dropped
almost a full degree after the blast, and while that
doesn't sound huge, it was enough to make eighteen sixteen
the coldest year on record since the fourteen hundreds. It
was so bad that historians now referred to eighteen sixteen
as the year without Summer.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Yeah, it's a pretty depressing label for a year. But
all right, Well, what happened next?
Speaker 1 (04:54):
I guess the temperature drop and the lack of sunlight
actually led to all kinds of global problems like versus froze,
crops failed, disease broke out, and lots and lots of
people and animals starved to death and In fact, there
was so little food in Europe that the vast majority
of horses and draft animals wound up being slaughtered and
eaten by their owners who were themselves starving. And it
(05:15):
was bleak and tragic, obviously, But you know, if there's
any bright side to it, it's that two great creations
were inspired by this dreary atmosphere, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein novel
and Baron Carl von Dreys's early bicycle.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Ye know, I'm tempted. I've got a couple good frankensteinfachts
that I'm ready to share with you for some reason,
but I'm going to be disciplined. Let's stick to the
bike for today, I think. So.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
In Germany, this guy Andres worked both as an inventor
and also as a forestry master for the government, and
this meant that he had to travel between the different
parts of the forest that he was in charge of,
which became pretty difficult once all the horses in the
region had been eaten. So basically Von Dreis needed this reliable,
horseless way to get around, and the solution he came
up with was this two wheeled running machine or lout machine,
(06:02):
as he called it. His device had no pedals, and
as the name implies, the riders would actually have to
run to propel it, kicking off the ground with their feet,
kind of like you might on a scooter. Aside from
the lack of pedals, though, the design looked pretty close
to what we're used to today. It's got kind of
like the two in line wheels, a seed, a pair
of handlebars, so fairly similar.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, but it almost makes me think of like those
little balanced bikes that toddlers use, right.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Totally, So it was exactly one of those kind of
this protobike and Andre's Pattens's design in eighteen eighteen, and
soon after that other manufacturers in England and France begin
putting their own spins on the invention. So France comes
up with a pretty cool name for the version, it's
called a velocipede. England goes the other way. They call
their bikes dandy horses.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Which, yeah, one name is definitely cooler than the other.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Yeah yeah, I mean, I guess it's a tribute to
their horses, which you know they'd eaten. But it wasn't
long before the pedalist bikes made their way straightside as well.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
I mean, if you look at the timeline, one of
the things that's funny is that it takes about another
seventy years to go from these balanced bikes to the
you know, like the gear and chain models with pedals.
Why do you think that is well, I mean, I
think part of the delay was that people were not
at all convinced that it was possible to balance on
a two wheeled bike, you know, while pedaling, and not
just fall over. And so it's exactly what you were
(07:20):
talking about at the top of the show. But a
few decades of innovation eventually got us there. This was
by the eighteen nineties, and the truth is, the basic
form of the bike has stayed pretty much the same
ever since then. But even with better bikes and growing popularity,
the cyclist of the era still had a huge obstacle
ahead of them, the main one being that all the
(07:41):
roads pretty much everywhere were terrible. So they were unpaved, uneven,
littered with holes, and easily turned into mud. So, as
one New York Times article put it, the country roads
where a Martian spring a sahara in summer, frozen stiff
and later autumn, and a swamp wherever there was thought
in winter, and so the urban roads weren't really that
(08:03):
much better. I mean, they were often covered in wood
planks at least, which made riding a little bit smoother,
but still you'd sometimes have cyclists riding on the sidewalk
just to get a break from this rough ride, and
so this inevitably led to accidents where pedestrians would get
knocked over, and then people would complain that bikes should
be banned entirely. So it was a tough time to
(08:23):
be a bike fan or a wheelman as they were
called back then.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
How did things get better for bikers then?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Well, instead of giving up, these cyclists formed advocacy groups,
including the League of American Wheelmen, and they began advocating
for paved roads throughout the country. There are more than
one hundred thousand of these people that joined the cause,
and due to the success of their grassroots efforts, the
nation got its first paved roads in eighteen ninety eight.
So it's really no stretch to say that the early
(08:49):
work of these cyclists literally paved the way for the
national highway system. I had been waiting so long to
be able to say that literally paved alay.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
That's pretty odd. Incredible both the fact and you're punning.
But since we're giving the real men their due, let's
talk a little bit about the real women of the
day as well. Because as big as the bike craze
was in general, from a cultural perspective, it was probably
most significant to women. Before the bike came along in
the nineteenth century, women had been expected to travel either
on foot or on horseback or in a carriage. They
(09:20):
were usually accompanied by a chaperone of some kind, and
they rarely got to travel at speeds any faster than
a leisurely trot. The bike changed all of that by
giving women the chance to travel with a whole new
level of independence. It completely flipped the table on this
old fashioned view of women as the frails, slow going
gentler sex.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Yeah, and I feel like I can finish the story
because I would imagine that newfound freedom was met with
complete approval from the public and no backlash. Kind of
changed everything for the better forever.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Right of course, so you know, there had to be detractors,
and many of them were saying that being able to
travel free and unsupervised might somehow corrupt the women's morals.
In fact, that there was even a business that crop
up to help guard against this threat. It was called
the Cyclist Chaperone Association, and according to its ad the
company provided gentlewomen of good social position to conduct ladies
(10:10):
on bicycle excursions and tours so nervous husbands could be
put to ease. But you know, it wasn't just these
husbands who were worried. Newspaper columnists all over the country
were also baffled by the sudden appearance of wheelwomen. And
here's what the confused editors at the San Francisco Call
wrote in eighteen ninety five. Quote, it doesn't really matter
much where one individual young lady is going on her wheels.
(10:32):
It may be she's going to the park, or to
the store for a dozen hairpins, or to get a dollar,
or to get a doily pattern of somebody, or a
recipe for removing tens and freckles. Right right, of course,
let that be as it may. What the interested public
wishes to know is where are all the women on
wheels going? You know, just one woman on an aaron
(10:54):
for I guess a freckle cream is the type of
thing you can excuse. But dozens of them traveling without
knowing where the going is something to rail against. And
the truth is, the outcry against women riding bikes did
get pretty serious. So female cyclists were frequently harassed as
they rode. Men and women would both taunt the riders,
demanding they go home where they belong. Some women were
(11:15):
banned from public places where male cyclists were permitted, and
in the worst cases, the female cyclists were actually assaulted
with rocks and bricks.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like there's a lot more
at play here than just not wanting women to ride bikes, right.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Yeah, definitely, And I do want to talk a little
bit more about what exactly was fueling that outrage, including
the role bikes played in the women's suffrage movement. But
before we get into that, let's take a quick break.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
You're listening to Part Time Genius and we're talking about
all the unexpected ways that bicycles changed the world. All right, mego,
So before the break, you were saying that all the
public outcry in the early twentieth century wasn't just about
the bike's women were.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Riding, right, Yeah, So the outrage was also partly about
what women wore while riding bikes, So long skirts and
dresses posed as a safety risk for female cyclists because
they could get caught in the bike chains and spokes.
And in light of this, the modest fashion of the
Victorian age, it all started to give way and all
of a sudden, women were, I guess, taking up the
(12:26):
scandalous practice of wearing ankle bearing bloomers in public. This
was an appalling development for some people, and in fact,
one US newspaper referred to the bloomers as a gateway garment. Man.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
I mean it starts with wearing bloomers, but the next thing,
you know, like she's moved on to book learning, you
know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
It's just dangerous, I know. And when you think about it,
all that kind of criticism really just proved the level
of cultural impact the women's movement was having. And probably
the best example of that is the bicycle actually became
a symbol of women's rights. This was both with Susan B.
Anthony and Elizabeth Katie Stanton's credited as saying that women
(13:02):
were quote riding the suffrage on the bicycle.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
I mean that was literally the case, though, right, I mean,
suffragettes relied on bikes when they were out campaigning for
the vote. They might not have won nearly as much
support as they did without bikes to help them reach
all these people.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Yeah, that's true. In fact, The Atlantic ran this great
article a few years ago about just how much of
a game changer bikes were for women. It closes on
this really beautiful sentiment that I wanted to share. It's
from the author, Adrian Lefrance, and this is what she writes. Quote,
Imagine what it must have felt like in an age
when American women were still decades from the right to
vote and inundated with men's opinions about their ankles for
(13:39):
a women to go outside, hop on her bicycle, and
ride as fast as she could wherever she wanted, leaving
the rest of the world wondering where she might go next.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yeah. I mean, maybe she's out looking for freckle cream.
But maybe she's not. It's still really a mystery about it.
But all right, let's talk about another public good that
bikes are good for, which is they make perfect ambulances
for ingested cities. So one of the first people to
demonstrate just how effective a bike ambulance unit could be
was this guy named Tom Lynch. And so what's interesting
(14:08):
is that Lynch is a pro BMX rid turned London
Ambulance driver. This really isn't that long ago. This was
back in the eighties and nineties. Lynch was basically the
Tony Hawk of BMX, but as he got a little
bit older, he wanted what he considered, you know, a
normal job, and for Lynch that meant training with the
London Ambulance Service and becoming a licensed EMT, which he
(14:29):
did in nineteen ninety four. But the more time Tom
spent stuck in traffic on his way to a call,
the more frustrated he became. So he often told his
colleagues how much faster they'd be able to respond to
calls if only they could use bikes instead of vans.
No one else thought much of this idea, but Tom
kept pushing it until finally, in nineteen ninety nine, Tom
(14:50):
got permission to launch a trial version of the Ambulance
Cycle Responsive Unit or CRU, which is just a great idea.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Yeah, I love that. You finally just kind of wore
everyone down by talking about it all this time.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Yeah, so yeah. Anyway, Tom used his connections in the
bike industry to make sure all the top gear was
on hand for his big trial run and He loaded
up his bikes with all sorts of customized equipment, including
a siren, special medic bags, and there was this fifty
pound defibrillator, which are much lighter these days of course.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
And so you know, he set up the system like
what are his metrics for success? Lay like, what's the
goal of this? Exactly?
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Well, basically to be able to successfully answer nine to
nine to nine calls in the West of London. And
if you asked Tom, he says that he could tell
early on that the new approach was definitely going to work.
He told one interviewer, I was based around the West
End and the calls were coming in and I was
doing my best to ease pressure on the ambulance cruise.
I would race the incidents, flying past traffic, cycling where
(15:49):
motor vehicles couldn't go, and getting to patients quickly. I
went to five incidents within one hour. I treated patients,
canceled the ambulances and used other medical centers as opposed
to the accident and emergency. And that last part is
really the key in all of this, Like the bike
EMT's free up ambulances to respond to the calls that
(16:09):
actually require hospital treatment, not just the on site care. Yeah,
super interesting. And one group that benefits from this big
time is their heart attack victims, like where every second
you're not breathing counts so much and so it really
helped a ton on that front.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
So where does this cycle crew operate? Is it mainly
like a London thing or has it expanded?
Speaker 2 (16:30):
No, the unit Tom found that is now composed of
several teams that operate all over London. More than one
hundred paramedics and trained volunteers are involved. But other similar
teams have started popping up in major cities across Europe,
some of the US, even China and Japan. So each
of those cycle response teams now responds to thousands of
calls every year. And it's all because a big hearted
(16:51):
bmx or just couldn't stand being stuck in traffic.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
I love that. Well. I know we wanted to circle
back and talk about the neuroscience behind biking, but that
was such a feel good story. I just want to
bask him the glow for a minute. Why don't we
take another quick break and then we can jump right
back in. Welcome back to part time Genius. Okay, Well,
(17:22):
so today's show is clearly all about bicycles. But nonetheless,
I have to tell you about something amazing I found
out about this week, and it's all about unicycles.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
M you know, this is a bike episode, so I'm
not sure that's a little Frankenstein fack no unicycle and
Loell is definitely shaking his head. But I actually because
he's doing that, I kind of like breaking Loll's rules.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
So if you insist, let's hear the story. Okay, So
here's my fact. Unicycles have basically become a cornerstone of
Japan's educational curriculum.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Is Japan like really into clowns or something? I've just
somehow never noticed this. How did that happen?
Speaker 1 (17:57):
I don't know that there are any countries that are
still really into In Japan's case, the real apeeal is
that unicycling can be a good way to teach and
improve both motor skills and balance, and the idea to
use unicycles in schools with the result of a series
of studies done in Japan in the nineteen eighties, I
guess researchers found that children who learned to ride a
unicycle were more successful at school and in their home
(18:19):
lives than children who didn't.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
It's pretty interesting. So did they figure out why that
would be the case?
Speaker 1 (18:24):
I guess the leading theory is that it's because the
high level of concentration that it takes to ride a
unicycle like that kind of focus engages a different area
of the brain than other physical activities, including biking.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
So, based on these findings, Japanese schools started teaching kids
to ride unicycles.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Yeah, I guess the Ministry of Education added unicycling to
the p curriculum in all of the country's elementary schools.
But Japan's schools aren't the only place you actually find this. Today,
there are unicycle programs in schools across the US, and
more and more educators are starting to see unicycles as
a tool not just for brain development, but for character development.
So you think about people like the psychologist and Angela
(19:01):
Duckworth who talks about like the most important metric for
a person's successes is grit, because that's kind of what
makes you keep trying when you fail instead of giving up.
So riding a unicycle is so unnatural and so awkward
and hard that the kids in these programs fall off
dozens of times before they finally start to get it,
and it's sort of like thought to reinforce that perseverance.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of that famous Samuel
Beckett quote. I think it was try again, fail again,
fail better, but away. Speaking of well known phrases, you
know the old cliche about how once you've learned to
ride a bike, you never forget right. Sure, well, it
was always a strange saying to me because it seemed
to imply that riding a bike is super simple, like
you could pick it up anytime in life and just
(19:45):
nail it without practice. But the truth is that riding
a bike is incredibly complex as a task. So, according
to the author and world class endurance athlete Christopher Bergland,
riding a bike quote requires seamless coordination, dexter, and an
intuitive ability to subconsciously calculate algorithms that take into the
account the forces of gravity, velocity, and momentum. Makes me
(20:08):
feel so smart that it can ride a bike? No,
and then I'm doing all of this.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah, I mean, as we talked about at the top,
there's a lot that goes into it that we don't
even think about. So in that sense, it's not that
riding a bike is actually easy. It's more that our
brains process all this information so efficiently that riding a
bike seems easy to us.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Yeah. Yeah, But here's the thing, like, despite all that
hard work from our brains, it turns out that we
can absolutely still forget how to ride a bicycle.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
So not only is it cliche, it's also inaccurate.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
It is definitely inaccurate. And we know that partly because
of this oddball experiment that a guy named Destin Sandlin
did a few years back. We of course worked with
Deston some when we were at Mental Flaws, But he
has this this show called Smarter every Day. It's a
channel on YouTube, super popular channel, and if you haven't
seen the video, it's called Backwards Brain Bicycle. And the
gist of it is that Deston took a bicycle and
(20:58):
basically inverted the steering direction of the handlebars, So if
you turn the handlebars right, the front wheel would go
left and vice versa. So in that scenario, all the
automatic motor skills that a person develops from years of
riding a regular bicycle, all of a sudden those are
just worthless. And the effect is that anyone who tries
(21:19):
to ride the backwards brain bike pretty much tips over
or falls off the bike before they've even gone two feet.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
So Deston spent months riding only this backwards bike, and
little by little he slowly got used to the inverted
steering of it all.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
It is one of those things like I actually saw
a clip of someone riding in and thinking like, oh yeah,
I could like think around that challenge. It doesn't seem
that difficult, but clearly it is. So it is confusing though.
It feels like this isn't so much about forgetting how
to ride a bike, it's more kind of learning how
to ride a different kind of bike.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yeah, I mean that part is true, But that's where
this gets weird because when Deston tried to switch back
to riding a normal bicycle, he couldn't do it. Like,
he fell over again and again until finally something clicked
in his brain and he was able to ride his
bike again. So the takeaway is that you can indeed
forget how to ride a bicycle, but the good news
(22:13):
is that if you practice, you'll probably be able to
relearn the automatic motor skill pretty quickly the next time around.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
All right, Well, since we're talking about the logistics, and
science of bicycling. I think it's only right that we
spend a minute on what's probably the biggest mystery in
the whole field, and that is, of course, how did
they get Kermit to ride a bike in the Muppet Movie?
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Totally, that is the biggest mystery.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Yeah, for anyone listening. If you don't know, we'veeeing him
talking about pauses, go watch the Muppet movie, the entire
Muppet movie, and then come back.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
I can watch the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
We'll wait. In the beginning of the flick, Kermit's riding
his bike across town, and in the context of the story,
it's this incredibly simple moment, right, But when you watch it,
it's pretty mind blowing, partially because they keep zooming in
on his feet, like you know on some level that
Kermit is a puppet and that he's being controlled by
Jim Henson or what I off the screen, but you
can see Kermit's whole body and you can see his
(23:04):
feet actually turning the pedals, and this blue audiences away.
When they first saw it back in the seventies, the
Muppets had actually never been seen in the real world
like this before. They had always been tethered to a
stage or studio. But what's interesting is the technology that
made it happen was also very simple. There's no audio, animatronics,
there's no green screen, none of that. Instead, the Kermit
(23:25):
in the scene is just a regular marionette with nearly
invisible strings attached to his body and limbs. The other
ends of the strings are connected to a camera crane
that's suspended above him out of shot, so as the
bike moved forward, the crane would move along with it,
and Kermit and his bike would stay upright and balanced,
which is super simple. But according to the puppeteer Dave Goles,
(23:45):
it wasn't the original approach. The crew had actually assembled
what he said quote was a very sophisticated bicycle rig
that was made from a little radio controlled car that
was mounted in the bike between the front and rear wheels,
but it actually broke before the shoe, so they ended
up rejiggering it with three strings from a camera crane.
It is also possibly Kermit's best line in the world,
(24:07):
or at least my favorite Kurmit line. And what's that
He almost gets to his accident with his giant construction
equipment and his bike gets demolished, and you'd think he's toast,
but then you realize he's jumped out of the way,
and he says, that's pretty dangerous building a road in
the middle of the street. If frogs couldn't hop, I'd
be gone with a shwin. A terrible fun but also
(24:28):
one of my favorites.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
I could keep shaking my head for the rest of
the episode, but instead, why don't we jump straight into
the fact off?
Speaker 1 (24:44):
So here's a quick one. I remember from an article
we did in Mental plus years ago. But apparently bikes
had a huge effect on romance and specifically long distance courtships. So,
according to Julie Winterbottom, when the prices on bikes dropped
in the eighteen nineties, suddenly it opened up this whole
new world of dating, like people could finally date outside
their family's friend circles or their churches or parishes. And
(25:07):
it was the first time this has kind of happened.
And according to British geneticist Steve Jones, this widening of
the gene pool had a huge impact on humanity. In fact,
he calls the bicycle quote the most important event in
recent human evolution.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Wow, that's a big claim. All right, well, I've found
this amazing NPR interview with a guy named Daniel Kish
who is blind but not only rides a bike, he
rides it through traffic. So basically he uses echolocation, which
we've talked about several times in previous episodes. So he
clicks his tongue and uses the reverberations to create spatial
(25:42):
awareness of buildings and vehicles and other things around him.
I mean, it's pretty remarkable, but he doesn't really see
it that way, as he told reporters. Quote, when a
sighted child gets hurt, we consider it to be unfortunate,
Kish says, when a blind child gets hurt, we consider
it to be tragic. It's a double standard that disadvantages
(26:02):
a blind child, he says, which you know, I guess
that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
So here's one about an Italian cyclist named Alfredo Binda.
Have you ever heard of this guy? I have not.
So apparently he was just dominant in the sport and
at winning the Giro, which I guess is the tour
of Italy that they have. He won it over and
over in nineteen twenty five, nineteen twenty seven, twenty eight,
twenty nine. And so this is like Italy's version of
(26:25):
the Tour de France, and it was good for the
newspaper business initially, right, like he's this like underdog, his hero.
Then he keeps winning, and his wins become bigger and
bigger and so regular that the paper's sales start declining.
So the organizers actually offered to pay him the equivalent
of the winning sum not to race.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
So did he accept it?
Speaker 1 (26:46):
He did, I guess he quickly calculated that he could
buy two more houses with the winnings, so he took
the money and used it for this great investment. But
he did come back to win the race again a
few years later.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Oh that's pretty cool. Yeah, it's funny that you brought
up Italian cyclists, because I've got another Italian I wanted
to talk about. This is Gino Bartali, who won the
twur Defrance in nineteen thirty eight. But then he made
the surprising move of not dedicating his win to Mussolini. Instead,
he decided to work for the resistance, so he helped
Jews escape the country by stuffing counterfeit identity papers into
(27:21):
his handlebars and his bike frame. Basically, he would fill
up the insides of his bike with papers and then
go on these long training runs in order to deliver them.
And if he was ever stopped for a police search,
he was famous enough that he'd ask the cops not
to mess with his perfectly calibrated bicycle. I mean, it
was the perfect cover. It's just brilliant. According to an
(27:41):
article in Mental Flaws, by the time he eventually went
into hiding, quote, he had cycled thousands of miles to
help hundreds escape.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
That is a great story and I think you just
earned yourself the trophy with that one. Although I might
pay you not to compete the next time a round.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Well, I'll consider it if I can buy a house.
But all right, well, thank you to the bicycle for
givings better dating options, freedom for women, and the greatest
joke the Muppets ever told. That's going to do it
for today's Part Time Genius for myself, Mango, Gabe, and Lowell.
Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with
another episode. Part Time Genius is a production of iHeartRadio.
(28:31):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite show.
Part-Time Genius News
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
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