In a 1973 Scientific American article on bicycle technology, Oxford engineering lecturer S.S. Wilson showed that a man on a bicycle “improves his efficiency rating to No. 1 among moving creatures and machines”:

“When one compares the energy consumed in moving a certain distance as a function of body weight for a variety of animals and machines, one finds that an unaided walking man does fairly well (consuming about .75 calorie per gram per kilometer), but he is not as efficient as a horse, a salmon or a jet transport. With the aid of a bicycle, however, the man’s energy consumption for a given distance is reduced to about a fifth (roughly .15 calorie per gram per kilometer).”

(Via Simon Kuestenmacher’s Twitter feed.)

11/18/2018 UPDATE: In 1974 the Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich wrote:

The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent.

(Thanks, Bryan.)

In 1916 Manhattan chauffeur George Boyden patented a new way to navigate: Install a phonograph in your car to play audio recordings through a megaphone in front of the steering column. “The talking machine at the proper times will announce the directions whereby the driver will be enabled to follow a predetermined route.”

How does it know where you are? The phonograph is connected to the car’s wheels and will engage only when you’ve traveled certain predetermined distances. “For example, if it is desired to make a record to guide the driver from Chevy Chase to the Treasury Department, the record among other things would contain the directions ‘U street turn to the left,’ and knowing the distance between Chevy Chase and the corner of 18th and U, for example, [a record of this distance would be registered with the mechanism] and the desired direction spoken into the machine. From a cylinder prepared in this manner a matrix would be made for the production of permanent records.”

10/19/2018 UPDATE: A strikingly similar idea from 1971 (thanks, Alec):

I just thought this was clever: In 1880 Chicago inventor Samuel Gross proposed printing scales on the edges of a map’s reverse side, so the user could measure the distance between two points by turning up a corner.

“In this figure I have placed the scales on the two edges forming the angle at the lower right-hand corner; but it is evident that they may be placed on any one or more edges or parts thereof of the reverse side of the map, as may be preferred.”

This is fantastic — in 1950 Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, designed a mechanical mouse that could explore an arbitrary maze, reliably find a path to the goal, remember it, and then recognize and adapt to changes. He called it Theseus. The mouse itself is only a copper-whiskered bar magnet on three wheels; it’s motivated by an electromagnet under the maze floor, driven by a pair of motors. The thinking is done by telephone relays following a topology theorem.

In 1977, when the editors of IEEE Spectrum challenged their readers to design a self-contained micromouse that could solve a maze through trial and error, Shannon took Theseus down from his attic and put him on display beside his descendants, which could now accomplish the same task using their own onboard processors. Computers were “not up to the human level yet,” he said, but “it is certainly plausible to me that in a few decades machines will be beyond humans.”