Bicycle for the mind and the art of storytelling

Steve Jobs described computers like “a bicycle for the mind”. As part of this story he often referred to an article in Scientific American he read as a child that measured the locomotive efficiency of different species. He described how the condor was top of the list, and humans came about a third of the way down the list, but humans on a bicycle beat were by far the most efficient and beat everything else by a landslide.

Out of curiosity I went through the Scientific American archives to find the original article, written in 1973 by S. S Wilson, and I discovered a few fascinating points in the process.

The first surprise is that condors do not feature anywhere in the study. The leading natural species is actually salmon. There also isn’t really any list that humans came a third of the way down—the results are presented in a two dimensional chart. Last but not least, natural man does indeed demonstrate a so-so performance while “man on bicycle” beats all the other natural species by a large margin.

His takeaway still stands though what I find perhaps just as beautiful as the “bicycle of the mind” metaphor itself is seeing how Job’s chose to masterfully blend all these other details to create a story that most effectively delivered the point, rather than a purely accurate reporting of the facts.