page_title: Bicycle and motorcycle dynamics
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Bicycle and motorcycle dynamics / History
caption_attribution_description: Ravensburg, Germany: Rutenfest, Festzug am Rutenmontag, Draisine
context_page_description: Bicycle and motorcycle dynamics is the science of the motion of bicycles and motorcycles and their components, due to the forces acting on them. Dynamics falls under a branch of physics known as classical mechanics. Bike motions of interest include balancing, steering, braking, accelerating, suspension activation, and vibration. The study of these motions began in the late 19th century and continues today.
  Bicycles and motorcycles are both single-track vehicles and so their motions have many fundamental attributes in common and are fundamentally different from and more difficult to study than other wheeled vehicles such as dicycles, tricycles, and quadracycles. As with unicycles, bikes lack lateral stability when stationary, and under most circumstances can only remain upright when moving forward. Experimentation and mathematical analysis have shown that a bike stays upright when it is steered to keep its center of mass over its wheels. This steering is usually supplied by a rider, or in certain circumstances, by the bike itself.
context_section_description: The history of the study of bike dynamics is nearly as old as the bicycle itself. It includes contributions from famous scientists such as Rankine, Appell, and Whipple. In the early 19th century Karl von Drais, credited with inventing the two-wheeled vehicle variously called the laufmaschine, velocipede, draisine, and dandy horse, showed that a rider could balance his device by steering the front wheel. In 1869, Rankine published an article in The Engineer repeating von Drais's assertion that balance is maintained by steering in the direction of a lean.
  In 1897, the French Academy of Sciences made understanding bicycle dynamics the goal of its Prix Fourneyron competition. Thus, by the end of the 19th century, Carlo Bourlet, Emmanuel Carvallo, and Francis Whipple had showed with rigid-body dynamics that some safety bicycles could actually balance themselves if moving at the right speed. Bourlet won the Prix Fourneyron, and Whipple won the Cambridge University Smith Prize. It is not clear to whom should go the credit for tilting the steering axis from the vertical which helps make this possible.
  In 1970, David E. H. Jones published an article in Physics Today showing that gyroscopic effects are not necessary to balance a bicycle. Since 1971, when he identified and named the wobble, weave and capsize modes, Robin Sharp has written regularly about the behavior of motorcycles and bicycles. While at Imperial College, London, he worked with David Limebeer and Simos Evangelou.
  In the early 1970s, Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (CAL, later Calspan Corporation in Buffalo, NY USA) was sponsored by the Schwinn Bicycle Company and others to study and simulate bicycle and motorcycle dynamics. Portions of this work have now been released to the public and scans of over 30 detailed reports have been posted at this TU Delft Bicycle Dynamics site.
  Since the 1990s, Cossalter, et al., have been researching motorcycle dynamics at the University of Padova. Their research, both experimental and numerical, has covered weave, wobble, chatter, simulators, vehicle modelling, tire modelling, handling, and minimum lap time maneuvering.
  In 2007, Meijaard, et al., published the canonical linearized equations of motion, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, along with verification by two different methods. These equations assumed the tires to roll without slip, that is to say, to go where they point, and the rider to be rigidly attached to the rear frame of the bicycle.
  In 2011, Kooijman, et al., published an article in Science showing that neither gyroscopic effects nor so-called caster effects due to trail are necessary for a bike to balance itself. They designed a two-mass-skate bicycle that the equations of motion predict is self-stable even with negative trail, the front wheel contacts the ground in front of the steering axis, and with counter-rotating wheels to cancel any gyroscopic effects. Then they constructed a physical model to validate that prediction. This may require some of the details provided below about steering geometry or stability to be re-evaluated. Bicycle dynamics was named 26 of Discover's 100 top stories of 2011.
  In 2013, Eddy Merckx Cycles was awarded over €150,000 with Ghent University to examine bicycle stability.
caption: Draisine.
exif: {}