Читать книгу The Modern Bicycle and Its Accessories - Julius Wilcox - Страница 10

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Reversion to type—a well-known phrase of the scientific evolutionist—means here a return to earlier and once-discarded forms of construction. Very few notice the process, yet it constantly goes on. The inquirer for novelties often has the old presented to him and is satisfied, supposing he is looking on a new up-to-date production; it is a common experience to find alleged new devices brought out and rapturously received by the quidnuncs which the veteran instantly recognizes as among the things he saw tossed, years ago, into the refuse of the scrapheap.

That unhappy and irrepressible person, the “born inventor”—one of whom, like the “sucker,” is born every minute—is perpetually doing this in cycle matters, because the cycle is so much in the public eye that it draws him as the lamp flame draws the moth; he cannot keep away from it. Twenty years ago, at the very beginning of the bicycle in this country, he was eagerly on hand with his multiple-speed, mile-a-minute contraption; he has been doing the same ever since, and is just as industriously as ever reinventing the old folly; the Patent Office is flooded with his lumber. This, however, is repetition rather than reversion.

Reversion to old forms comes about for several reasons. We must always remember that the bicycle, like the piano, the violin and some other things which could be cited, belongs to nobody. Nobody invented it; it is the product of many minds, and has been wrought out by a long and gradual evolution, in which every step, freaky ones excepted, has been suggested and tested by practical use. Hence a device may be abandoned in the hope of escaping the inevitable drawback which besets all earthly things; or a device may be dropped because it cannot be made well enough or easily enough in the existing state of the art; or the conditions of public demand, or the state of the roads, or the caprice of fashion may change. Changes also come about to gratify the craving for novelty, and when the list of possibles comes to its end the maker goes back to or toward the beginning again, like the preacher who tips over his barrel of sermons and starts in afresh on the other end.

THE “ORDINARY”—1878.

For illustration, suppose the following: The chain has some drawbacks, and therefore it is gradually displaced by the bevel-gear and entirely goes out. That gear develops drawbacks in turn, provoking fresh complaint, and after some years of suffering under it, some maker brings out a chain wheel, which is hailed with delight, and widely written up as the novelty of the year. One by one makers follow suit, until the gear is again quite displaced; improvement has then gone around and has come back upon its own path, the disadvantages of the old form having been found by trial to be less than those of the newer. This supposed case, which is partly real, would illustrate progress by reversion.