High Wheel HistoryBiking and Sociotechnical Change
Wiebe E. Bijker says in his book Of Bicycles, Bakelights, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change:
...a successful engineer is not purely a technical wizard, but an economic, political, and social one as well. A good technologist is typically a 'heterogeneous engineer'."
Bijker 15
One cannot separate society and its influence on technology and vice versa. In the following descriptions, the technology is the mountain bike rear suspension, the latest development of the mountain bike genre, and society is what Bijker calls relevant social groups to mountain biking.
In comparing the mountain bike to the high wheeler they are not to be seen as linear transgressions, but as technological innovations in their own right. They are all mutations of a 'bicycle' but it is impossible to find a bicycle that does not categorize itself into a more defined group. Current groups include road bikes, commuter bikes, mountain bikes, etc. All of these have developed out of the safety bicycle, but the safety bicycle and the high wheeler essentially developed out of the notion of in-line two wheel motion. Now, instead of the notion being two wheel in-line motion, it is the safety bicycle. Therefore there is a parallel between the high wheel bike and the mountain bike as technological developments of the general notion of the time. When the safety bicycle found the application of off-road transportation, the mountain bike became an artifact in its own right. Furthermore, and what will be used as my examples, is the technology of rear suspension for mountain bikes. In this way I am trying to use the most up to date examples of technology; to use mountain biking directly would be to use a technology of 20 years ago. Using suspension, while about 5 years old, is far more contemporary.
The point then is to compare the sociotechnical change brought about by the high wheel bike and the mountain bike suspension.
Bijker presents 4 requirements for sociotechnical change:
Bijker uses the high wheel bike to illustrate the importance of the first two requirements for sociotechnical change. The relevant social groups and interpretive flexibility "show that the development of technical designs cannot be explained solely by referring to the intrinsic properties of artifacts" (Bijker 270). In this perspective the mountain bike parallels the high wheeler as will be further explained.
While the high wheel bike is an example of his first two requirements, it falls short of the last two. Not surprising, the last two are necessary for it to last, and consequently the high wheel bike did disappear shortly after its high point in the 1880's. However the mountain bike, a creation of the 1970's, has been around longer and I feel has accomplished the first and second point and nearly completed the third and fourth. As a result mountain biking is nearing its completion as a sociotechnological change in a way that the high wheeler was never able to do.