SUPERSTRUCTURE
May 11, 2020
3 minutes
By KEVIN CAMERON
Photography by
JEFF ALLEN
The safety bicycle, which exploded into a popular craze around 1895, can be regarded as a confluence of technologies that matured at that time—the ball bearing, pneumatic tire, seamless-drawn steel tubing, roller chain and sprocket drive, and super-strong hard-drawn steel wire. A final ingredient might be the production and shaping of thin metal sheet by rolling.
The last two together made possible one of the most efficient structures known to mechanical engineering: the tension-spoked wire
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