Where the Machine Starts — In a Land Without Gears.
Riding the Line: Experiments, Notes, and Hacks of an Engineer Biking Across America
I descended through Winter State Park, Pennsylvania having summited my last climb of the day of the Appalachians into a 40-mile long valley. I continued cycling and it looked like most of the farmland I’d seen before — only with some more wagon wheels than one would expect. I was moving at a good clip at that point, and found myself approaching this in the road:
Here I was in the Amish community of Rebersburg, Pennsylvania. In the slight grade downhill, I passed by the buggy, only to find the horse-drawn carriage passing me on the subsequent hill. I was naturally a little embarrassed… joke was on me!
This leapfrogging with the buggy continued for a few miles, until a much bigger hill, where at mile 100 of the day I was starting to bonk. Peddling up the grade next to a farm, I climbed out the saddle and peddled hard with a side-to-side sway when an Amish farmer who was tilling his plot waved to me and called me over to his fence.
“Where are you headed?” asked the farmer.
“State College.”
“Well that’s about 30 miles are so away. You must be tired. Are you hungry?”
“Well yes,” I grinned.
“Let us grab you a cookie” — He called for his son who fetched a cookie.
I unwrapped it — which revealed a decadent, homemade snickerdoodle cookie sandwich, filled with frosting. Made from scratch with local ingredients of course — it was like jet fuel, giving the glycemic boost I desperately needed for the last twenty miles. We chatted about my journey and he showed me his garden and sent me on my way.
Rediscovering the Gear
As I mounted my bike, and continued up the hill — a boy passed by me on kick-scooter.
As I watched him kick up the hill and zip by me, I took a closer look at the machines around me.
They were simple. Just levers, and wheels… but no gears.
In a community that values hard work and labor, there seemed to be an invisible line drawn in the types of devices that were used — and it made me wonder -where does the body stop and the machine start?
The line had been drawn somewhere between the boy on the scooter and me on a bike.
Magically Efficient
People like to use bikes as metaphors for life ….
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” — Albert Einstein
“Computers are like bicycles for our mind.” — Steve Jobs
Why does everyone like these bike analogies? Perhaps because they’re magically efficient.
The latter one had always stuck in my mind… and Jobs was referring to the famous September 1976 issue of Scientific American that chronicled the evolution of the bicycle.
Compiling data from several studies, the Scientific American team looked at the number of calories used to move a gram in body weight a kilometer by various modes of locomotion and transportation.
While the horse beat out humans in terms of efficiency, when a human on a bike was tested, it was the most efficient means of transportation by a long shot.
I had a lot of time to observe and feel my power transfer and there are three things that really seem to unlock bicycles efficiency:
1.Freewheeling and Ratcheting Hubs: If you’ve ever ridden a fixie, you’ve felt the momentum of the bike as you stop pedaling, going down hills or coasting are limited how fast our legs can pedal, limiting how much kinetic energy can be captured going down a hill.
2. Gear Ratios: Much like a car, gear ratios allow us to trade off between high rotational speed for flat ground and high torque for climbing hills and choose the optimal balance.
3. Levering. The pedal allows us to use both muscle strength and body weight to amplify our torque or rotational speed.
Where Body and Machine Meet
The value of this drivetrain became clear in Illinois when my rear deurailieur shifter cable snapped, and I was stuck in one gear, 45 miles out from the nearest bike hop which would be in St. Loius. Any moderate hill would have required dismounting and walking my bike. Had it not been for the relative flatness of Illinois, it could have been worse. It was at this moment, the true efficiency of the bike was revealed, the ability for the bike to adapt to my surrounding terrain for maximum efficiency.
I grew up running — and racing track and cross country and I still do marathons today — but when I have the choice, there’s nothing more liberating than touring on a bike.
Clipped into the pedals, my leg and feet seamlessly transitioned to the geared drivetrain of the bike, optimized to extract all the power of every down and upstroke of my legs and translate it into a mechanical advantage with gears.
Bikes are one of the most beautiful machines, elegantly simple, but unlock your own ability to vast distances solely under your own power.
You become one with the bike, one with the machine.
Riding the Line: In the summer of 2018, I spent five weeks riding solo and self-supported 3358 miles from Boston to San Francisco — fulfilling a boyhood dream, and raising funds for STEM Education programs at the Lemelson-MIT Program. As an engineer, with many hours to myself on the bike, I found my mind naturally wandering to trying to make sense of the physical world around me, and how to ride more efficiently.
