Could the Bicycle Been Made 300-Years Earlier?

Ajouté : 2026-05-12

[00:00:08]Bicycle is an impressive although a seemingly simple machine which makes you wonder could it have been invented earlier in history. Leonardo da Vinci was a famous inventor known for being ahead of its time with many inventions like the helicopter and the parachute and many more. But did he actually invent the bicycle 300 years before we thought we did? No. Thanks for watching.

[00:00:31]Okay, so the reality is that there is this myth that Da Vinci invented a bicycle based on some sketches found in some of his drawings. The drawings are found on the back of some of his codec pages. Ignore some of the highly detailed anatomy drawings for now. Maybe I'll cover that in a future video explaining if Da Vinci invented the Dicosaurus. However, testing shows it was likely drawn much later than the rest of his sketches. So, the answer is somewhat conclusively that this is something he did not actually invent himself. The sketch is also pretty bad, lacking any real way to even steer it. A little bit of a design flaw. So, Da Vinci didn't invent the bicycle. But what if he did? I bet it'd be a lot better than the sketch. And ironically, he came up with several designs that became key to the invention of the bicycle. So, if applied correctly, he actually might have been able to assemble a bicycle centuries ahead of his time. So, in this video, I'm going to explore if utilizing a few of Da Vinci's actual theoretical designs and inventions could have made a usable bike 300 years before its true invention.

[00:01:31]Let's give it a shot.

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[00:02:43]An energy crisis for horses. In 1816, Mount Tambbora exploded and airborne ash caused the so-called year without a summer. Crops failed and famine was widespread, making it difficult to feed horses. Carl Vandross attempted to solve the transportation issue with his invention, a pedalless bike that you would push with your feet. Several years ago, I explored this concept of inventing a bike earlier in history than it actually was. The bicycle is an amazing machine of huge energy efficient. So its value would be immediate in any period. So with modern knowledge, building one in the past seems pretty feasible. My first attempt though was not ideal. It was pretty early on in the reset series when I had only rough bronze age technologies and limited tools. Just hueing the board for the body was a big challenge and making functional wheels was really difficult.

[00:03:35]queuing and joining a few planks to make a very rough one. I ended up repurposing a stone wheel I made for grindstone for the second wheel just to speed things up. The bike was heavy, couldn't even turn, and was only foot pedal. An interesting experiment, but not the revolutionary invention I was hoping it would be. I've been sitting on these bike parts for a while, intending to upgrade it, and now finally getting around to it. So, let's see what improvements Da Vinci can offer us.

[00:04:00]Before we get to building the actual parts of the bike, let's focus on the Da Vinci elements we can pull some inspiration from. The three designs I'll be implementing are his ball bearings, the chain drive, and the drum brakes.

[00:04:12]First, the ball bearings. These help reduce friction and keep everything spinning smoothly. A modern bike usually has around five different sets of ball bearings for all of the different moving parts. I previously did a video earlier this year exploring the early invention of ball bearings. Ball bearings predate Dainci, but he brought some of his own innovations with the addition of rollers which keep the balls contained. But when I put his design to the test, I did find it was actually a bit inefficient in comparison to even just a plain bearing or loose ball bearings. But this time, I wanted to try with a few improvements and in a real world design scenario. His original design was for a horizontal kind of lazy Susan form of rotation. For the bicycle, I will need to adjust it so it will contain the balls and allow it to sit upright. So need to tweak his design just a touch.

[00:04:59]One of my biggest frustrations with metal casting is it's essentially pass or fail. If anything goes wrong, you're back to square one and start all over again. With some methods like sand casting, it's a little bit more manageable and you can remake a new mold fairly quickly and reuse the same pattern again and again. But for intricate parts, lost wax casting is often the only option. That means carving a detailed model in wax, encasing it in plaster, burning it out in a kiln, and then pouring the metal.

[00:05:25]If that cast fails at any point, all the work is gone and you have to start all over. But thanks to Form Labs, they offered me a new approach, which has made a big difference. Form Labs introduced me to castable resin, and it's a huge improvement for prototyping and mold making. I've experimented some with lost PLA casting before, but the burnout tends to be kind of messy and incomplete, and you're often left with visible print lines. With the FormLabs Form 4 printer, the results are much cleaner, barely visible layers. I can design parts digitally, create multiple variations, and print them overnight.

[00:05:55]Using their clear cast resin, the prints come out with extremely fine and precise detail. After printing, I rinse and then cure them, then invest them in plaster.

[00:06:02]The resin burns out cleanly, leaving a precise cavity ready for casting. The process is still kind of pass or fail, though. On one attempt, after days of printing, and vesting, drying, and the burnout, I managed to drop the mold immediately after pulling it from the kiln, having it just shatter into powder. That was frustrating. But the difference is now I can simply hit print on another in the form 4 and try again.

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[00:06:29]I could have made this ball bearing using traditional wax methods, but it likely would have taken multiple attempts and prototypes and weeks of more labor. This approach saves me a lot of that effort. and excited to see how I can use it in future projects. So far, I've been really satisfied with the Form Labs Form 4 printer. It's really revolutionized my whole casting workflow process, and that's really just the start of what it can do. If you're interested in checking it out yourself, click the link in the description.

[00:07:02]Next is probably the most challenging component, the chain drive. Early bikes had pedals directly attached to the front wheels with a simpler design, but forcing you to pedal a ton while moving at a pretty slow speed. This was overcome by increasing the size of the wheel, giving you a much more comfortable ratio to get to decent speeds. However, this resulted in the hazardously large penny farthing bikes known for toppling over and injuring people. But this changed with the invention of the safety bicycle which used a chain drive to gear up the standard sized wheel allowing the best of both worlds and providing a much safer ride. The reason the penny fartheane was popular for a while though is because manufacturing such a chain drive before refined precision manufacturing was horribly difficult and expensive. Leonardo da Vinci did not invent the chain drive himself. That credit traces back earlier to ancient Greece in the 3rd century BC where a form of it was used in a polyboros siege weapon. But Da Vinci advanced his design in ways that made it surprisingly close to the modern bike chain. Da Vinci shows a variety of different methods for making chains. We went with one of the simpler methods that is actually pretty close to how bike chains are actually made today. Good number of these pieces made out. They're just sheet metal that were cut with a shear and then drilled on either side. planning on making this chain about 50 links with each one of the links connecting to four of these.

[00:08:25]So I have the first side of our very first one started here. Piece of metal rod that is thicker than the holes that we drilled were. That way when I file it so that it's slightly thinner, it can't fall down the piece of steel anymore.

[00:08:44]And then I just rivet over the top. uh kind of peeening that over and locking it in place. So the next step would be to put one another one underneath here and then another one over there and over there and over there and so on. And then doing the exact same thing on the bottom down here so that we have our interconnecting links uh with the crossbar to be able to catch the gearing mechanism.

[00:09:19]Hey, hey, hey.

[00:10:24]Now with the chain made comes the sprockets that would transmit the power through it. Da Vinci's drawings are a bit flawed as they show square rectangular blocks perfectly aligned with the holes, but that gives no clearance for each tooth to rotate out.

[00:10:36]So, I experimented first with rounding the edges, which seem to work better.

[00:10:39]But then I moved on to the more traditional sprocket design, which I think gives the best clearance to prevent it from jamming. So far, everything looks promising, but it is prone to misaligning and jamming. So, potentially, we need to add some kind of guide to the final installation. Once I had settled on a sprocket design, I now just need to cast in my bronze for the final design.

[00:11:06]The smaller gear took only one attempt, but as so often happens, the larger gear ended up taking three more attempts to cast. Fortunately, this piece can be sand cast, so that makes repeating the attempts much easier.

[00:11:20]Heat. Heat.

[00:11:55]Maybe. Hey.

[00:12:01]Lastly, we're going to want some brakes.

[00:12:03]On the same page as his chain drive illustrations is another set of illustrations that are a little debated on what exactly they are. Some suggest it might be something more clock-based, but others suspect it's an early type of a drum brake. Let's assume this is true and see if we can recreate it. The modern drum brake system was invented in 1902 and works by having pads inside of a rotating drum which get pushed outward applying friction to stop the vehicle.

[00:12:28]Da Vinci's potentially earlier design appears to be the reversal, a spring wrapped around an interior drum. A lever holds the spring open, preventing it from contracting around the drum. But once released, the spring clamps down, forcing it to stop. This should be pretty straightforward. First, casting a round drum that the spring will be applied to.

[00:12:56]Next, forging a spring to wrap around it.

[00:13:03]Next, we'll just need to build the actual bike that it's attached to, and we can try it out. With Da Vinci's inventions ready, let's improve the base bike design and apply them and see how effective a 15th century bike could potentially have been. Probably the most obvious improvement and possibly the most challenging will be making some better wheels. Spoked wheels emerged pretty early on, as early as 2000 B.CE., but they've always been a skillful and difficult build. Making wheels alone is a dedicated skill set that of the wheelright. Something challenging I put off attempting knowing it's going to be a struggle to learn how to do the first time.

[00:14:27]Once the spokes and outer rim were all attached, I sanded down and evened out the outer edge until I was able to get a fairly consistent outer edge from the central axle, correcting for any misalignments. The last step is now wrapping the whole thing in a metal band. It should be slightly unders sized and then heated to expand it, giving it just enough room to slip on, cool off, and keep the entire wheel under tension, greatly strengthening it.

[00:15:05]After four attempts at this though, measuring and reme-measuring it to make sure it was just a touch too big, I could still not get it to fit. I was getting pretty frustrating and starting to burn the wood. Perhaps with a team of people and stretching it and some specific tools, I might have been able to get it to work. But in the end, ended up giving up and just clamped down the band as tight as possible to the wheel and then welded it in place. It's not going to quite offer the same amount of strength as it would if it was under constant pressure, but it's better than nothing.

[00:15:41]As I feared, the wheel was a huge pain.

[00:15:44]But now I have them done and we can move on to the next improvement, the frame. I can start with the previous piece of wood for my original bike and plane it down. And I'll cut a slot for the back wheel to go into it.

[00:16:05]Then for the steering, for that I built it as a two-sided frame to hold the wheel in between, and then I put a crossbar above and below where the main body will go in between, allowing it to be held into place and uh for you to actually sit on it without it falling out. This should hopefully allow the main wheel to pivot with ease and steer.

[00:16:26]For the handlebar, I steamed a board and then clamped it under pressure to give it a gentle curve.

[00:16:35]Once dried, jointed, and glued it in place.

[00:16:55]Lastly, added a cross post that will hold the seat and the pedals.

[00:17:42]Let's put that drum brake design to the test and see if it actually works. There you go.

[00:17:53]Then lastly, the actual pedals. Possibly an area where we'll leap a little bit ahead. Even back in Da Vinci's time, foot power was definitely around, but it was often in the form of treddles, where you pump the wheel and slowly build up a speed on a flywheel. It's possible to build a bike with this design. And some early pedal versions look very similar.

[00:18:10]So, we jump a few evolution points further and arrive at the modern pedal design, which is just two cranks on each side.

[00:18:19]To lock the crank arms to the axle, I first filed square holes into the arms, then squared the ends of the axle.

[00:18:36]Then I can just peen them over after inserting, locking them in place so they can be cranked on.

[00:19:28]So, after a ton of work, This is where the bike is at right now. It is uh proven to be a lot more difficult than I expected and everything a lot more challenging. Just kind of just how everything goes these days. Overall, I think cosmetically we're looking pretty good. This looks like a bike and looks fairly decent. Got a very nice retro rustic look. At least cosmetically nice terms of the dandy horse that we made before. Looks a lot better. Has basically all of the functions you would look for with an actual dandy horse.

[00:19:57]This guy is a lot lighter than the stone one. Rolls a lot better, especially with the ball bearings and can even steer. In terms of improving the design from last time, we are miles ahead. But for actually making it a bicycle has been proving a bit challenging and I'm a bit skeptical how well this is actually going to run. The main issue, the chain drive, which has been a lot of work. I expected it to be difficult. There's a reason it came a lot later in history.

[00:20:23]Definitely learning firsthand why this was not mass-produced too early in history. I thought we did pretty good with our design and how we were doing it. We're able to cut and drill a bunch of extra pieces and kind of go through and take just the most accurate ones, the most consistent between them. Seemed to be working pretty good. Even with that, there's still enough inconsistencies and I think mostly just in the peening the gap between the two sides of the link are a little varied here and there. I went through, fixed, and replaced some of the the worst offending ones, which was a huge pain, but there's still enough variation that it's it's enough for it to occasionally jam. I've been tweaking it a lot and experimenting with three different ways to improve the alignment. First tried with rollers to kind of keep them in line and on track and to try and force it to be aligned before it actually hits the sprocket. Kind of worked, but not very well. I then went to these uh wood guides on both the front and back that when the chain starts to get off, it kind of nudges it back in, which works fairly good, but it's not great. Mostly because the width of the chain is not perfectly consistent. So, sometimes it'll still fall in between and jam. Had to go through and touch up all of the teeth on the sprocket. Anytime there's a little too tight, um they'll jam there.

[00:21:39]So, after basically all week of making fine adjustments, approving every little thing, I now got it working, I would say it runs smoothly maybe 90% of the time.

[00:21:49]It's just that 10% cause it to jam up and then and you're in trouble. Um, so I don't think it's really going to work too well to actually bike because you're not able to maintain speed without it eventually jamming at some point. And because it's a fixed gear, if it jams, it's just gonna come to complete stop and knock you over. So, I think to actually test this out, I'm gonna have to rig up some training wheels so that don't have to keep a momentum going and worry about falling over. And then I think occasional jam, it should work hopefully. I would not call this a safety bike cuz I think you're going to get in a lot of trouble if you actually try to use it. After messing with the bike and adding some training wheels and attempting to get it ridable, we were just not having any luck. We can get the chain drive working for decent sections of time, but never long enough to actually get the bike up to speed and moving on its own, and they just remain impossible to actually achieve. So, I think we can say we have proof of concept of all these parts actually working. But combining them all into a functional piece of transportation still remains elusive. But I think we can keep working on this and potentially redesign some elements and hopefully get something more functional in a future video. But for the other components, the ball bearings I think are all really promising. They they work really well.

[00:23:03]I'd say really help keep it smooth spinning with the rollers. It does work pretty good. Ultimately, they don't really improve it that much. And even I think in modern bikes, the general logic is that the more balls you have in your ball bearing are more points of contact that are going to smooth out the friction. So even on a modern bike, it's usually loose balls. So for these end up skipping the rollers just to improve our efficiency just a little bit. And the third Da Vinci device that goes into this is the brake. And I think that shows some real promise. Conceptually, it works pretty good. I think it's kind of an interesting experiment to try it out with some of Da Vinci's inventions.

[00:23:38]And I think they all are plausible. If Da Vinci could have actually built this bike, I think is first a little bit of stretch of the imagination. I think we're taking a lot of liberty and kind of our modern understanding of bikes to actually get this close to it. But in terms of his devices, I think totally possible to implement. I think if he had found like an expert craftsman, an expert blacksmith or clock maker who's really good at precision and maintaining a consistent build, I think he probably would have gotten a better result and maybe something that would have worked, but it probably would have been really expensive. So, I don't think it would have been too marketable to start selling these. I think it going to cost way more than just your standard horse.

[00:24:17]Project has dragged on quite a bit. I'm hoping this video does well and if it does, I'm hope to continue to evolve this um maybe start strapping some engines onto this guy and get it self-propelled. Otherwise, thanks for watching and thank you to all my supporters on Patreon.

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