History of Transportation
The history of transportation is an interesting thing compared to the progress of other types of machines. If you want to start way at the beginning, you have to think about how people used to get around way back in the day. At the very start, there were your feet and that was about it. People could only get really get around by walking wherever it is they wanted to go. There were no chainring bolts for bikes, no bike stems or bike shops or car places or planes or boats of any sort. There certainly was no steel track frame for a bike or anything of that sort. Without the steel track frame or even the invention of the wheel, you could only get to places by walking with people you knew to make sure you were safe. You have to remember that, back then, even going somewhere that wasn’t your immediate village or within the vicinity of your tribe was incredibly dangerous. There was no concept of transportation at all, let alone the idea of enforcing public safety within said transportation. There was only the wild and those who could survive the wild whether it be through pattern recognition, new ideas, sheer brute strength or blind luck. Blind luck or no, people eventually did leave where they live for any number of reasons and started to leave so they could go out and explore the world. We tend today to forget today just how brave some of those people had to be to get where they were going. That is, indeed, if they had a set destination in mind at all. Many people didn’t even that much and just left to go find a place with more food or better resources for survival. One of humanity’s strongest and most resilient traits has always been their willingness to travel far outside of what they know to search for answers. It might be scary or difficult or painful but humans will always do this no matter who they are or where they are. We always continue to push in new directions out of a desire to learn more, to feel more or just to find a better life. We did it during prehistory and the age of expansion and empires. And eventually in the age of exploration. Really, you can’t understand the idea of transportation, or healthy transportation, without understanding this basic suite of facts.
Transportation as it was and is
Basic transportation, at the start, had no such thing as the steel track frame or anything else of that nature. When transportation did start in earnest, it was entirely animal based, relying on the brute strength of large domesticated animals to move people or goods. It wasn’t exactly efficient but it was all we had, for the most part, and we made use of it where we could. The discovery of this power coincided pretty handily with the discovery of the many uses of the wheel and, of course, the two went hand in hand. The two discoveries took off together but it actually took a little longer than most people think, with many starts and stops in between. Funnily enough, for the next millennia, this type of power was all we really had. It is completely factual to say there has been more change in the past one hundred years of progress in civilization in general than there has been for the last thousand years of human existence. That sounds a little crazy but it is absolutely true. Indeed, until the middle of the industrial revolution, there was no other way to get around. It wasn’t until this time period that inventions such as the bike took off in earnest. Of course, nowadays, bikes are thought as an amazing alternative to save the environment. And they should be. They are much cleaner than most powered transportation and nearly as efficient under the right circumstances. They don’t produce nearly as much pollution as cars do and they can be used with no damage at all to the environment. These reasons are what makes standard riding bikes, the steel track frame and all, such a promising invention in the decades and centuries that are surely to come.
