I heard somewhere that the greatest innovation (the most impactful at the particular stage of our evolution) was the bicycle, because, it enabled human cross breeding over much larger distances at a much faster rate than possible before.
How affordable was railroad travel? Even assuming there was a railroad in the right place, would people have been able to go back and forth often enough for courtship?
Well, there would be a lot more bicycles and they could go a lot more places a lot faster, no? I.E. They would enable a much faster rate of genetic mutation.
No. Bicycles were heavy, uncomfortable products for the first ~40 years of their existence. Rubber tires and pedals didn’t come to bicycles until the 1860s. By that point the US had >30k miles of extensively linking most of the northern states. The modern bicycle didn’t really come into being until the 1890s.
I’m having a hard time getting numbers for track in Europe, but the UK was the real pioneer and Germany followed quickly.
