Apple’s late leader Steve Jobs loved to liken the computer to the bicycle (“the computer … is the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds”) and there are two films of him recounting a fact he’d picked up from Scientific American. Below I’ll quote from the article Jobs was referring to – which showed that a person on a bicycle was more energy efficient than a condor in flight and many times more energy efficient than a person in an automobile – but first here are the films, clearly shot some years apart:

“I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
Steve Jobs

The “somebody” at Scientific American was S. S. Wilson and the eleven-page article in question, on bicycle technology, was printed in the March 1973 edition of the magazine. Wilson was a lecturer in engineering at Oxford University and a fellow of St. Cross College. S. S. Wilson said: “My interest in bicycles dates back to school days. I have always owned and used a bicycle; during World War II, I several times cycled more than 100 miles in a day as a means of transport.”

Wilson was also an enthusiast of human-powered flight and, had he been alive today, he would have no doubt worked on solar-powered flight. For all of the bicycle’s efficiencies, as stated by Wilson, the bicycle is nowhere near as