AThe bicycle is so familiar a sight today that it is easy to assume it has always existed in more or less its present form. In fact, the machine we now recognise took most of the nineteenth century to evolve, passing through a series of strange and often impractical designs before arriving at the efficient, two-wheeled vehicle we know. Its story is one of gradual refinement by many inventors in several countries, rather than a single moment of invention. Indeed, in many cities it is now woven so thoroughly into daily life that few of its millions of users ever pause to wonder where it came from.
BThe earliest ancestor of the bicycle appeared in 1817, when the German inventor Karl von Drais introduced a wooden machine with two wheels in line, which the rider straddled and propelled by pushing against the ground with the feet. It had no pedals. Known as the draisine, or later the "hobby horse," it became briefly fashionable among wealthy young men in Europe, but the craze soon faded, partly because riding it over rough roads was uncomfortable and riders tended to wear out their boots. Von Drais is said to have been prompted partly by a shortage of horses, and for a time his contraption was a popular novelty in fashionable parks.
CSeveral decades passed before the next significant advance. In the 1860s, in France, pedals were attached directly to the front wheel, allowing the rider to drive the machine without touching the ground. This new vehicle, called the velocipede, had an iron frame and wooden wheels, and the ride it gave over cobbled streets was so rough that it earned the nickname "boneshaker." Despite this, it was the first commercially successful pedal-driven bicycle and sold in considerable numbers.
DBecause the pedals were fixed to the front wheel, the machine could only go faster if that wheel were made larger, since one turn of the pedals produced exactly one turn of the wheel. This logic led, in the 1870s, to the high-wheeler, often called the "penny-farthing" after two British coins of very different sizes. With a front wheel sometimes more than a metre and a half across, it could reach impressive speeds, but mounting it was awkward and a fall from such a height could be dangerous. As a result, it appealed mainly to fit, adventurous young men. Riders sat almost directly above the great wheel, so that a sudden stop could pitch them head-first over the handlebars.
EThe decisive breakthrough came in 1885, when the English manufacturer John Kemp Starley produced the "safety bicycle." It had two wheels of equal and moderate size and, crucially, was driven not directly but by a chain connecting the pedals to the rear wheel. This arrangement allowed a comfortable, stable and relatively low riding position while still permitting good speed. Three years later, in 1888, the Scottish inventor John Boyd Dunlop introduced the air-filled, or pneumatic, tyre, which absorbed the shocks of the road and made cycling far more comfortable. The modern bicycle had essentially arrived.
FThe effects of this invention were profound. In the 1890s, a craze for cycling swept Europe and North America. For the first time, ordinary people of modest means could travel considerable distances independently and cheaply, without relying on horses or railways. The bicycle is widely credited with contributing to the independence of women in particular, since it gave them a new freedom of movement; it even influenced fashion, as the long, heavy skirts of the period gave way to more practical clothing suited to riding. Cycling clubs sprang up in towns across the continent, and the bicycle quickly became both a practical tool and a symbol of a more mobile, modern way of life.
GIn the twentieth century, the rise of the motor car pushed the bicycle into the background in some wealthy countries, where it came to be seen mainly as a child's toy or a means of recreation. In many other parts of the world, however, it remained an essential form of everyday transport. In recent decades, growing concern about traffic congestion, physical fitness and the environment has brought about a marked revival of cycling in cities everywhere. Remarkably, the bicycles people ride today differ only in detail from the safety bicycle of 1885 — a testament to how nearly perfect that design was.
AFew ideas are as deeply rooted in popular culture as that of the lone genius: the solitary, brilliant individual who, through sheer intellectual power, conceives a revolutionary idea in a sudden flash of inspiration. We picture Isaac Newton struck by a falling apple, or Albert Einstein deriving the secrets of the universe alone at his desk. It is a powerful and appealing image. Yet many historians of science and creativity now argue that it is also profoundly misleading, and that it obscures the way genuine innovation actually occurs. The notion is flattering, easy to grasp and endlessly repeated, which may be precisely why it has proved so resistant to correction.
BThe myth has deep roots. It owes much to the Romantic movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which celebrated the inspired individual and the originality of the artist or thinker who breaks free from convention. Popular biographies and, later, films have reinforced the same picture, because the story of a single hero overcoming obstacles is far more dramatic and memorable than an account of incremental progress by many hands. Such narratives also make for effective publicity: a discovery is easier to celebrate when it can be attached to a single famous name. The familiar "eureka moment," in which the answer arrives all at once, is a central part of this narrative.
CThe reality is rather different. Almost every significant discovery or invention rests upon a long accumulation of earlier work. New ideas are assembled from existing ones, and even the most original thinkers depend heavily on the knowledge they inherit. Newton himself famously remarked that if he had seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants — an acknowledgement that his achievements were built on those of his predecessors. Creativity, on this view, is less a matter of producing something from nothing than of combining what already exists in a new way. On this understanding, originality consists in forging fresh connections between ideas that are already available, rather than in conjuring them out of nothing.
DPerhaps the most striking evidence against the lone-genius myth is the phenomenon of simultaneous invention, in which the same discovery is made independently by different people at almost exactly the same time. Calculus was developed separately by Newton and by Gottfried Leibniz; the theory of evolution by natural selection occurred independently to both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace; the chemical element oxygen was identified at roughly the same time by more than one investigator working alone; and several inventors raced to patent the telephone within days of one another. The sociologist Robert Merton, who studied many such cases, concluded that when the necessary ideas and tools are available, a discovery becomes almost inevitable — it is, as the saying goes, "in the air." If genius alone were responsible, such coincidences would be hard to explain.
EModern innovation makes the collaborative nature of discovery even clearer. Scientific papers are now routinely written by teams, sometimes numbering hundreds of authors, and major advances emerge from laboratories, universities and companies rather than from isolated individuals. When the existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed in 2012, the paper announcing the discovery listed several thousand authors — about as far from the image of the solitary genius as it is possible to imagine. Even figures remembered as solitary inventors often relied on the work of others: Thomas Edison, frequently presented as the archetypal lone inventor, in fact employed a large team of skilled assistants in a well-organised laboratory, and many of the inventions credited to him were the product of collective effort.
FWhy, then, does the myth endure, and does it matter? It survives partly because it is satisfying: it offers heroes to admire and a simple explanation for complex achievements. But its persistence carries real costs. By focusing attention and rewards on a single name, it renders invisible the many collaborators whose contributions were essential, and it can distort how research is funded and how credit is assigned. It may also discourage collaboration, by suggesting that real brilliance is a solitary affair, and it can leave ordinary creative people feeling inadequate when their own ideas fail to arrive in a sudden, effortless flash. In this way a comforting story about exceptional individuals can quietly shape who receives recognition and support, and who is overlooked.
GNone of this means that individual talent is unimportant. Some people clearly possess exceptional ability, and their contributions can be decisive. The point is rather that such ability does its work within a web of relationships, influences and shared knowledge, not in splendid isolation. Recognising this does not diminish human achievement; if anything, it offers a richer and more accurate picture of how the remarkable things we accomplish actually come about. The genius, it turns out, has never truly been alone. Genius, in short, is not a solitary spark but something that emerges from the connections between many minds.
AAmong the most curious phenomena in medicine is the placebo effect: the measurable improvement in a patient's condition that can follow the administration of a treatment with no active ingredient whatsoever — a sugar pill, an injection of salt water, or even a sham procedure. For much of the twentieth century, such responses were dismissed as mere imagination, the self-deception of suggestible patients. In recent decades, however, the placebo effect has come to be regarded as a genuine and important biological phenomenon, one that offers a rare window onto the relationship between mind and body. Few medical ideas have travelled so far, in so short a time, from the margins of respectability to the centre of serious inquiry.
BInterest in the subject was greatly stimulated by the work of the mid-century researcher Dr Harold Beck, whose influential review concluded that roughly a third of patients given a placebo experienced real relief from their symptoms. For years this figure was widely quoted as evidence of the placebo's remarkable power. Later analysts, however, pointed out a serious flaw in such estimates: many of the patients who appeared to improve might have recovered anyway. Illnesses naturally fluctuate, symptoms that are unusually severe tend to return to more typical levels over time, and some conditions resolve on their own. Once these factors are taken into account, isolating the portion of improvement genuinely attributable to the placebo becomes a formidable challenge.
CWhere the effect is real, researchers generally explain it in terms of two mechanisms. The first is expectation: a patient who believes a treatment will work may, through that belief alone, experience genuine relief. The second is conditioning, a learned association between the ritual of treatment and the experience of recovery, built up over a lifetime of taking medicines that do work. According to the neuroscientist Professor Lena Vasquez, these are not vague psychological notions but processes with a concrete physical basis. Her research indicates that the relief produced by a placebo painkiller is accompanied by the release of the body's own pain-relieving chemicals, and that this response can be switched off with a drug that blocks those same chemicals — strong evidence that something physiological is genuinely taking place.
DIf expectation matters, it follows that the circumstances surrounding a treatment should influence its effect, and a substantial body of research confirms this. The colour and size of a pill, its perceived cost, and the confidence and manner of the person administering it have all been shown to alter how well a placebo works. Dr Thomas Kelder, who has studied these effects extensively, argues that the ritual of treatment — the attention of a trusted practitioner, the sense that something significant is being done — may matter as much as any pharmacological ingredient. An elaborate, convincing procedure tends to produce a larger response than a casual one.
EPerhaps the most surprising of Kelder's findings concerns what are known as "open-label" placebos. It had long been assumed that the placebo effect depended on deception: the patient had to believe the treatment was real. Yet in several trials, patients who were openly told that they were receiving an inert pill, and who understood this perfectly well, nonetheless reported improvements in conditions such as chronic pain. This unexpected result suggests that the benefits of a placebo do not necessarily require a patient to be misled — a conclusion with significant ethical implications for how such treatments might one day be used.
FThe placebo effect also has a darker counterpart, known as the nocebo effect, in which negative expectations produce harmful outcomes. Dr Mariam Saito, who specialises in this area, has documented cases in which patients warned about the possible side effects of a drug went on to experience precisely those effects, even when the substance they received was inert. Studies have shown, for instance, that simply listing a medicine's potential side effects can increase how often patients report them. The nocebo effect poses a genuine dilemma for doctors: the ethical duty to inform patients of the risks of a treatment may, in itself, make some of those risks more likely to materialise.
GFor all the growing interest, it is important not to overstate what the placebo effect can do. Professor Aksel Hoff, a prominent sceptic, cautions that much of what passes for a placebo response is in fact natural recovery wrongly attributed to the treatment, and that the clinical importance of placebos has frequently been exaggerated. Even its strongest advocates concede that the effect operates chiefly on symptoms that are subjectively experienced — pain, nausea, fatigue and mood — rather than on the underlying course of a disease; a placebo will not shrink a tumour or cure an infection. The true significance of the phenomenon may therefore lie less in any direct therapeutic use than in what it reveals: that the brain's expectations can shape bodily experience in concrete, measurable ways.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
1860s: In France, were fixed to the front wheel; the rough ride led to the nickname 'boneshaker'.
1870s: The high-wheeler had an enormous front wheel and could reach high , but it was dangerous to ride.
1885: John Kemp Starley's 'safety bicycle' used a to turn the rear wheel.
1888: John Boyd Dunlop added the tyre, which made the ride more comfortable.
1890s: Cycling became popular and is thought to have helped increase the of women.
Write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A–G, in boxes 14–18 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
Write YES, NO, or NOT GIVEN.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.