Question

Look at pictures of “ penny – farthing”. Why
do you think we don’t ride them today ?

Answer 1

Answer:

Why do people not use a penny farthing anymore?

Some people still ride them, but it’s more of a novelty. Mark Twain learned to ride one and wrote: “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live.”

Penny farthings pretty dangerous for a lot of reasons:

1.) High center of gravity: makes the bike much less stable and easy to fall over or slide out in a turn.

2.) Falling off a tall place: when you fall off a normal bike, you’re a couple of feet off the ground. When you fall off a penny farthing, you fall from a much higher place, which gives your head (and the rest of you) a whole lot more time to accelerate before it hits the ground.

3.) Impractical and difficult to learn: mounting/dismounting is difficult to learn. There’s also only 1 gear.

4.) Face plants: With your center of gravity so high, relatively forward, and with such a big wheel, there’s the very real possibility of going face first over the front of the bike if you hit something. In fact, it was standard practice to put your feet OVER the handle bars if you were coasting downhill so that if you fell forward, you could land on your feet…in theory. I’m not so sure how many people are able to stick a perfect landing getting launched forward at 25mph.

But hey, go for it if you’re feeling lucky.