A parallel thought is that the first airplane is the product of bicycle mechanics and not railway or automotive mechanics. As others pointed out, there are a lot of necessary technologies like rubber, bearings, lubricants, sprockets and chains that need to be developed, but there is also something very elegant about bicycles. If you start to mess around with a 70's era road bikes you get a sense of just how perfectly everything needs to fit together and how everything affects everything else. (You see it more clearly in older bikes because you need to deal with non-standard parts). I think I learned more about bicycles from the royal pain of a 1982 Peugeot than anything else. This is not to say that a car doesn't have similar complexity, but the use of chemical fuel and 4 wheels masks how the tunings fit together. With my current bike there is a serious difference when it is perfectly tuned.