Do you know how to ride a bicycle? Probably, yes. Do you know how they work? Think again! The reason is that knowing how these wonderful wheeled inventions work is not as intuitive as learning to ride them. If you are still not convinced, popular YouTuber and science communicator Derek Muller explains it using unrideable bicycles in a video posted on November 28 on his YouTube channel Veritasium. Muller starts with a bicycle with lockable steering, made by his friend Rick, to find if it is possible to ride a bicycle when its steering is locked, allowing it to turn to only one side. In his numerous attempts to successfully execute the allowed turns, he fails. He realises that it is impossible to turn left without first steering right and it is impossible to turn right without first steering left. “This seems wrong,” Muller says, “I think most people believe you turn a bike simply by pointing the handlebars in the direction you want to go. After all, this is how you drive a car.”
Then he explains why it is not the same with bicycles. In bicycles, steering left or right does not just help the rider set the direction of the bike’s motion, but it achieves the most essential component of a bicycle — its balance. To explain further, Muller asked his viewers to imagine they want to make a right turn on a bicycle. The moment you steer the handlebars to turn the front wheel towards the right, the bicycle moves out from under you towards the right.
As a result, sitting on the bicycle, you are leaning to the left. At this point, the only way not to fall to the left is to steer the bike to the left, resulting in a left turn. “If you really want to turn right, you first have to counter-steer to the left, so you can lean right into the turn,” Muller says. According to him, everyone who rides a bike knows this information intuitively but not explicitly. To test it, you could film someone riding a bike and then watch it in slow motion.
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