1Hi, it's Jay.
2I love my bicycle,
3but I've never ridden a bicycle like this.
4These are Olympic athletes competing in the women's BMX freestyle event,
5where riders perform incredible tricks on bicycles.
6It's dangerous, only for experts, but watch what these bicycles can do.
7Amazing, right?
8Someone named Brooklyn has a question about bicycles.
9Let's give Brooklyn a call now.
10Hi, Jay.
11Hi, Brooklyn.
12I have a question for you.
13How are bicycles invented?
14That's a great question.
15When I wanna learn more about an invention, I start by thinking about its purpose.
16What the invention helps people do?
17I wonder if you have any ideas about the purpose of a bicycle.
18Why do people use bicycles?
19Great inventions often help us do more than one thing.
20When I was a kid, I learned to ride a bicycle mostly because it was fun.
21But when I got older and went to college,
22I started using my bicycle for a different purpose.
23It started with a problem.
24I didn't like how long it took to walk to my engineering classes,
25but I didn't have a car.
26My bicycle solved my problem.
27I rode my bike to get to class fast.
28And, maybe, you thought of other things bikes can help people do, like delivering things or exercising.
29But what if I told you that the bicycle wasn't invented to help people exercise, or have fun, or even get places without cars?
30What if I told you that one of the earliest bicycles might have been invented because of a volcano?
31This is a volcano in the country of Indonesia called Mount Tambora.
32More than 200 years ago in 1815, Mount Tambora erupted.
33The explosion was enormous.
34The ground rumbled and shook,
35lava rolled down the sides of the mountains,
36and a huge cloud of dust, ash, and gas shot up into the sky.
37The cloud grew so big, it started to block light and heat from the sun.
38From China to Vermont, the sky darkened,
39the air grew colder, and it stayed that way for months and months and months.
40A lot of people had no idea why the weather had changed, or if it would ever go back to normal.
41They started calling it the Year Without Summer.
42The cooling weather caused real problems.
43Farmers had a hard time growing food.
44Many people had very little to eat and very little money.
45So this is awful, right?
46But you might be wondering, "What does any of this have to do with bicycles?".
47The Year Without Summer was a sad and scary time for a lot of people,
48but many people also responded to those sad and scary times by coming up with new ideas,
49new ways of doing things to solve the many, new problems.
50For example, in the country of Germany, there was a problem with horses.
51In those days, horses were really important.
52There were no cars or buses or subways yet,
53so people used horses to travel long distances.
54But during the Year Without Summer, a lot of people didn't have enough money to buy and care for a horse.
55And if you didn't have a horse, you had to walk everywhere you went,
56even if you were traveling a long, long way.
57That was exhausting.
58Seeing this problem, an inventor in Germany named Karl von Drais came up with an idea.
59The problem he knew wasn't really about horses,
60it was what the horses help people do.
61Travel long distances that were tiring to walk.
62Inventions that help people move their bodies weren't new.
63Early wheelchairs, for example, already did that.
64But Karl von Drais adapted this idea
65to create something that would help people without horses go long distances without getting tired.
66He invented the Laufmaschine, which means running machine in German.
67The Laufmaschine looked a lot like a bicycle,
68but there were still a few things missing.
69Take a look. You might be able to notice what's different.
70Over time, as more people use Karl's Laufmaschine, they encountered new problems.
71Some people thought it took too much energy to push the Laufmaschine with their feet.
72New inventors solved this problem by adding pedals,
73which made it easier to go faster.
74The faster the machine went, the more riders crashed into things.
75New inventors solved this problem by adding brakes, which made it easier to stop.
76Some ideas were better than others.
77This version called the penny-farthing had one big wheel and one tiny wheel.
78It looks fun, but imagine what it would feel like to ride.
79Really tippy and hard to use.
80Still, through years and years and tons of new ideas and changes,
81the Laufmaschine slowly became something even better.
82It became a bicycle.
83And bicycles led to other changes too.
84Around the year 1900, bicycles started becoming popular in the United States.
85At that time, American women had to deal with a lot of unfair treatment.
86Men often had more power and more money.
87Because horses and carriages were expensive, they were mostly owned by men.
88So if a woman wanted to go somewhere,
89she often had to ask her father, or husband, or brother to lend her money or lend her his horse.
90If he didn't want to give it to her, she might just have to stay home.
91That wasn't fair.
92But because bicycles were cheaper than horses, a woman could afford them.
93Lots of women started buying bikes.
94Owning a bicycle meant a woman could go where she wanted, when she wanted.
95She could ride her bicycle to the movies, even to a movie her husband didn't want to see.
96She could ride her bike to a job, even if her father didn't think girls should have jobs.
97Riding bikes gave women more freedom to decide how to live their lives.
98So, in summary, inventions like the bicycle help us do things in new ways when the old ways don't work.
99When Mount Tambora's eruption meant many people couldn't travel by horse,
100Karl von Drais invented a machine to help them get around in a new way, on wheels.
101Over time, people change the invention, and the invention helped people change their lives too.
102And this process continues.
103Just as the bicycle was invented during the dark times of the Year Without Summer,
104inventors today are adapting bicycles to meet tough modern challenges,
105like pollution and the COVID-19 pandemic.
106What do you wish a bicycle could help you do today?
107Maybe your ideas will shape the inventions of the future.
108That's all for this week's question.
109Thanks, Brooklyn, for asking it.