The Wheel, Part 1

a survey. They pulled more than ten thousand people across seventeen countries to find out some views about invention and inventiveness. And there's some interesting questions here we might want to come back to in the future about public opinion about how invention happens. But uh, they asked people to rank. As one of the questions here, what are the most important inventions of all time? And three got singled out in the results here. You had the Internet, all right,

you know it's a great eight invention. A terrible invention is the Voldemort of inventions. Okay, Yeah, it's like odin it's wise and tricksy, it's great and terrible. Yeah, I mean that that's all inventions. Really, any kind of any kind of fabulous new technology is going to bring at least equal portions of both. I got the second one is electricity. I'd say that's a really good qualifier that should be near the top. Yeah. Uh. Then the third

one singled out as the most important is the wheel. Now, these three are all strike me as very different because electricity is not a technology. We invented the technology to utilize electricity and to harness its power. Uh And and likewise, as we'll discuss, similar with the wheel, the Internet, we're still trying to figure out how to actually harness it and keep it from you know, shocking us. Yeah, there

is no internet in nature, is there? No? Not? And people might say there are no wheels in nature, though you could make an argument either way on that, and we'll come back to that in a minute. But it's true that people really do often single out the wheel as like the most important invention in history. Right. It's it's in all the Gary Larson cartoons for a reason. No, Yeah, they're there, at least they're they're probably more than two. But I ran across at least to Gary Larson cartoons

about caveman inventing the wheel. We're trying to invent the wheel, generally getting something drastically long wrong, like like riding strapped to the outside of it because you're about to go down the hill. There's so many it is, there's so many bits of fiction that have explored the idea of

inventing or reinventing the wheel. The Hulu show Future Man recently explored this with a time traveler going to a post apocalyptic future and and and having a job in this primitive society as a wheelmaker, and so he keeps trying to improve upon the design and it's you know, there's they're they're catching on fire, they're they're they're falling

over until he finally gets the design right. Well, yeah, I love how it's it's this cliche that it's the quintessential example of like an already perfected technology that you don't need to mess with anymore. Right, Like the the cliche is, let's not reinvent the wheel, meaning let's not waste time overthinking something right, sort of equivalent to if

it ain't broke, don't fix it. Though I think this is ironic given what we're going to talk about in today's episode because throughout history the wheel has undergone lots of reinventions and refinements that make it work better or adapt it to a particular use. Let's not reinvent the wheel is actually a really stupid saying, because we're constantly reinventing the wheel, and we're much better off for those reinventions. Yeah, like in this episode, we're not even going to really

get into the tire all that much. But certainly the next time you need a new tire for your vehicle, just go to the mechanic and ask for a wheel. Give me one of those wheels. It's it's it hasn't been improved upon since medieval or or prehistoric times. Right, just just throw a wheel on there. I don't care how what kind, Just just put it on their stone, would doesn't matter. Well, this brings up a really good point that we should make at the beginning. It's a

caveat that we must raise. While the wheel is in a way a simple machine, it's simple and principle, the history of the wheel is a vast, complex subject, full of questions that aren't yet and may never be answered or solved, like where and when the wheel was truly first invented that. We'll talk about some ideas about that today. Uh, there's just obviously not a chance we can do justice to the entire history of the wheel in a single episode.

So I think today we're gonna have to consider this sort of a a first foray, trying to cover some of the basics, some interesting observations or things that seemed interesting to us, and leave ourselves the opportunity to come back and visit more the particulars from the invention history of wheel technology in the future. For example, as you say about tires, a you know, we we wouldn't have the wheeled vehicles we have today without tires, and that's

just something that we didn't even get into. Now. We typically consider wheels, again, the product of human ingenuity alone. Yet the basic form pops up in nature as well, and not only in the form of creatures that can curl up into productive balls. What's your favorite creature that curls up into a protective ball, I mean, sonic, the hedgehog. Um. Actually, there are there are a few that come to mind.

I'll get to get to one in a second. Um. One animal we do have to focus in on is certainly the rhoda for the microscopic aquatic animal whose very name is Latin for wheel bearer. Okay, so does it have wheels? Does it roll around in the microscopic world? Not exactly, but it's the name is a reference to the crown of cilia around the rhodofer's mouth, which move rapidly to aid locomotion and feeding. But contrary to its name, they don't. They themselves don't actually rotate, so it's more

kind of like circle bearer. Yeah. Now you do have creatures like the mount Lyle salamander and the mother of pearl caterpillar, both of which curl their bodies into hoop type forms in the little ball all like forms and can roll away from threats in their hilly environments. Yeah, likewise the Robert Have you ever seen video of the wheel spider? Oh? I don't think I have no. This is really cool that it shows up in some documentaries. So it's a spider that's native to the Namib Desert,

and the wheel spider is it's a groundwalking spider. Obviously it's in the desert. It's a huntsman spider. It's not a web spinner, but it burrows down in the sand dunes of the desert, and it has a mortal enemy, a parasitoid wasp. Now, even if you don't like spiders, if you don't know much about parasitic wasps, watching what a parasitic wasp does to a spider can be. This is worse than any horror movie. It's like the most

horrifying thing. If you're sympathizing with the spider. If you're on team Spider, which I guess you are, Joe, I guess I am. You're you're into just like putting an egg on something that ends up eating that thing. I know your general proclivities. I'm well, I'm on team Wasp whenever it's wasp versus Spider. If it's Spider, this is pretty much anything else. I'm intamed spiders. Well, I guess that's the other way to think about it, that the wasp is a miracle of nature that is really awesome.

So yeah, So the parasitic wasp lays an egg on the spider after paralyzing the spider, then the egg hatches and the larva can eat the spider at leisure, sometimes sort of from the inside out. Uh So, when a wasp attacks, obviously this spider is desperate to escape. It doesn't want to get paralyzed and eaten by a larva. But it can't crawl across the dunes fast enough to get away from the wasp. So what does it do

if it can? The wheel spider cart wheels down a sand dune, rolling away at high speed to escape becoming a host. And I've read that it can travel it like more than forty revolutions per second. That's awesome. And again this is this is dependent though upon a hilly environment, you know, some sort of um slope down which it may roll. Yeah, and the spider being near the top when it gets attacked, right like if it's at the

bottom when it gets attacked, no dice. But of course these rolling in almost in a way or not true wheels in a technological sense, because when humans use wheels, what's crucial is that the wheel is paired with an axle, and that the wheel and axle together provide continuous rotational force that can be used to move a fixed body.

So it's not just a wheel rolling by itself. Right with thag and the Gary Larson cartoon tape to the outside of a round stone rolling down a hill, So the question is is there anything more like a true wheel in the natural world where something rotates around a fixed body to move it. I mean, there's nothing quite like a wheel uh in nature. But there is a rare example of a similar movement that takes place, and that's with bacterial flagellum uh structure found in species such

as E. Coli. Uh. The flagellum essentially amounts to a long helical screw that rotates to propel the bacterium through its environment, much like a boat's propeller. Yeah, and a boats propeller isn't pretty much a wheel, I would say, yeah, depends on the same sort of movement. Now, of course, lots of things in the natural world that are not alive also roll. Oh yeah, I mean snowballs are going to roll downhill and get bigger. Um, pebbles are going

to roll uh. So that you know, these are certainly examples that early people would have been in various cases, had had access to they could have seen in action and seen what rolling consists of. But another one we often forget about is the rolling world of poop. Yeah. I mean, consider, for instance that the near constant poops of the goat are essentially self hiding rolling away from these hill roamers, which gives them an advantage against stalking

predators with a nose for their scent. And then on the other end of the spectrum you have the poop of the wombat, that is, that is more cubicle in shape. And one of the theories here is that since their poop is an essential calling card for other members of their species, like essential for you know, territory and mating and so forth with the wombat, it pays for these poops to not roll away and hide themselves, and thus

they have this kind of cubicle structure to them. Um. And then in addition to poop, various seeds and fruit as well, uh certainly roll away after they have fallen and outside of the actual uh you know, movement of rolling. We should also note that the basic form of the

wheel is but what a circle a disc? And one needs only glimpse the sun or the moon in the sky or see various other circular forms in nature to grasp the idea of if not a disk in rolling motion, then at least a disk like you it's not it's it's it's essential shape can be found fairly easily in

the natural world. Absolutely. Now, one of the things I think we have to also acknowledge upfront is that when people say that the wheel is like the most important invention of all time, I think what they're usually thinking of is the wheel for transportation. But we should also know acknowledge that, like the wheel is like way bigger than just transportation applications, even in technology. Are you saying like they could be a complete psychopath and they're like, well,

the breaking wheel obviously the greatest invention. How did we ever strap people down and break all their limbs before that? That is, no, they they're missing out on that. But no, I was thinking more of, uh, we like the milling wheel or the Potter's wheel. I mean, these these are incredibly important inventions, but I think they're not usually what

people have in mind when they think of the wheel. Right, So we're not going to really explore the like milling wheel Potter's wheel in this episode, but just to give you everybody an idea of the time frame we're talking about here. The Potter's wheel was common in Mesopotamia in the Near East from thirty five hundred BC onward, and

introduced into Egypt and the Aegean region around BC. And this is simply the basic idea here is it's a centrifugual force that allows the potter to squeeze and shape uh. The the the the the item that they're crafting here allows for better and faster production of pottery, and I would guess more uniform as well. Right. Yeah. And then of course we have wheels that exists purely for religious purposes, such as the prayer wheels of Tibet, where it served

as a mechanical manifestation of the Wheel of Dharma. And up until the twentieth century I've read virtually this was virtually the only Tibetan use for the wheel as it and it was just a device for activating mantras to beat. After all, is a mountainous region where you can imagine that the carts and chariots would be of of limited use. That being said, Buddhist concepts, including the Wheel of Dharma, entered Tibet by way of India, where the wheel dates

back you know, many thousands of years. Uh, and this would have the Buddhist concepts would have entered into Bat around the seventh century. See. I mean it is interesting the extent to which the idea of the wheel has permeated culture and language like that, I can scarcely think of the idea of something recurring without recourse to the image of the wheel. Yeah, and that's something that we're

going to keep coming back to again and again. It's like, the technology of the wheel travels, but so does the idea of the wheel. The symbolic legacy of the wheel, you know, ancient technology that we can then use to try and understand the human experience, or the passage of time, or the cosmos, or the machinations of the gods. Yeah. Well, I mean I have no way to prove this, but I have to wonder, like, do do cultures that use wheels? Are they more likely to think of history in terms

of recurring cycles than cultures that don't. Well, certainly this was the older way of looking at you know, at time, was the cyclical nature of it. So so it does it does make sense that those two would go hand

in hand. Now. Of course, the important thing to note about all of this is that even though the wheel is an ancient invention and it's hard to nail down exactly when it comes about, there was a time in various cultures before the wheel, or at least before the wheel was something that could really be utilized, but before even the simplest wheel vehicle load was limited by the back. Then in snowy climates, sled and ski technology developed because

you don't need a wheel for that. You just need something you can drag through the across the surface of the snow. Um other in other areas, you're limited by animal carrying capacity. Right if you've domesticated a you know, a horse or an ox or some other creature that can that can carry things on its back for you, so you do not have to carry them on your back draft animals or pack animals. Yes, though certainly these

were advanced cultures. They had they had they had their technology. Well, this is going to be something that will come back throughout the episode, which is I think we want to somewhat challenge the idea that the main uh sort of bottleneck in the die option of wheeled technology is the invention stage. I think actually we were gonna see some pretty good evidence that you could perfectly understand the concept of a wheel and even use it in some contexts

without transitioning your culture to wheel based transport. In general, because it's not as useful to you as it might be to somebody else. Now, before the wheel, if we're gonna try and imagine the the the precursor to the wheel, it's likely a sledge type operation where and and this would have worked exceedingly well in the snow. And this was the kind of technology that was likely used to haul stones to stone hinge. Yeah. We we've talked about the building of the Pyramids on stuff to blow your

mind before. And one of the amazing things about the Pyramids is the idea that we all the evidence seems to indicate the Pyramids were built without wheels, you know, the moving these gigantic blocks of stone across the desert and and stacking them without the use of wheel. How

did they do it? Well, there's some evidence that they they use teams to move them across the sand, dragging along and then sometimes I think one of the insights that's come along recently is that archaeologists believe that they had this process of wetting the sand in front of the loads as they would be dragged along through the across the ramps and through the desert. But that just

shows you you can do amazing things without wheeled transport. Yeah, and certainly we can all Like if we were just thrown into a random backyard with no access to wheels and we had to move a bunch of lumber around, I think we could all happen upon the technology of the sledge pretty easily. You know, where you just need some some horizontal beams kind of a fix together. You can pile stuff on that, and then you can just

you can drag it. And then if you get to a point where you're stuck in mud or or snow or what have you. Uh, something you could do is to roll some timber underneath there. Uh, you know, put it, put a kind of like a round, you know, limbless portion of a tree log or something under the front, and then pull it over and then collect your log from the back and then put it back in the front again. Um, you know, so you're feeding it like that.

And then the next logical step beyond that is to set these logs, these timber rollers in place between pegs and so this would be you know, basically a wheel

design without a true axle. And this would have been like the the very earliest sort of immediate precursor to a wagon and I think there are some examples of early wheeled vehicles that, while they had wheels and an axle, rather than the axle being locked to the vehicle in some kind of like a closed clasp, instead they sat beneath grooves and the weight of the cart would be would keep them in the grooves. Yeah. I was tempted to say, it's kind of like the cars that the

Flintstones had, but but they have something completely different. They seem to have an axle, right, but then it's a roller for the front wheels and the rear wheels. Of course, you know, I'm embarrassed to say I am just failing to picture a flint Stones car right now. I can't think of it. Okay, well this we'll have to come back to this later. The Flintstones car, to what extent does it or does it certainly not fat into any uh any level of of of wheel innovation over the

course of human history. Well, you know, one of the things about the Flintstones car that actually is going to be useful is the idea that the Flintstones car, while being a wheeled vehicle, is powered by humans. And plenty of wheeled vehicles throughout history have not been powered by animals,

but have been pushed or dragged by human beings. Isn't it odd though that the not to spend too much time on the technology of the flintstones, but they utilized um animal labor in pretty much every other aspect of their society, Like their garbage disposal is a small dinosaur. You know, every household gadget is an enslaveive dinosaur. And yet for their cars they just run around, they use their own foot powers. It's a bit odd. I think I am picturing their cars now. If I'm picturing correctly,

their wheels are too wide. There'd be way too much friction. Surely there's been a MythBusters one. Alright, well, let's take our first break, and when we come back, we're gonna try and trace down the origin or origins of the wheel. Alright, we're back, Okay. Now, As we said early on, the fact is nobody knows for sure when the wheel was first invented. We do have some evidence about the times in history when it was first appearing in wide use.

We have some archaeological evidence, some you know, visual pictographic records, um. But still the question is not fully settled. Who first invented the wheel and when and where. The only thing we can really be sure of is that Gary Larson is is probably wrong. It was probably not a Stone Age technolo oology. More likely this is something that is emerging uh as as humans are are leaving the Stone

Age for the Bronze Age. Right. Yeah, pretty much all the experts, I think tend to put it somewhere within the boundaries of the fourth millennium BC, so like three thousand BC to four thousand BC. And we'll be discussing a couple of books that offer different theories about this now.

While we will be talking about the wheel as an invention, I think one thing we want to emphasize is that we shouldn't necessarily assume that any place and time in history where we find a lack of wheel technology, whether that's you know, the whole world earlier on or cultures that didn't use a lot of wheel transport even more recently, that we should attribute that to the lack of the ability to come up with the idea of a wheel.

Because to the contrary, I think there are lots of good reasons to believe that many cultures throughout history perfectly understood the concept of a wheel, like we already touched on the tibett An example, and and we'll be coming back around to the the South and meso American example exactly. So they, yeah, they understood the idea of a wheel

just fine. They simply didn't have much use for it in transport and could meet their transport needs better in their environment with humans and animals than with wheeled vehicles. Uh so, And just as a quick analogy, this isn't a perfect analogy, but just let's play a little imagination game. Imagine yourself suddenly dropped into a Neolithic context because the

world without highways and all that stuff. How useful now is your extremely advanced twenty first century car if you want to move stuff around, And that's a car with rubber tires and suspension and all this stuff that the earliest four wheeled vehicles didn't have, right, you would have to even assuming you had a four wheel drive vehicle, a nice you know, like just the the most urbust rural, mudd in truck you could possibly um, you know, acquire fire, and you took that with you back in time. You

hook that up to the flux capacitor. You know, the only certain environments would really uh really work for you and then only until you ran out of gasoline. Yeah. True, Well, okay, let's ignore the gasoline and say your cars being pulled by horses or pushed by humans, or even you need to need garbage to put in there, like the flux capacity exactly. Yeah, You're you're going to run into problems very quickly, especially if you want to go in different

kinds of places with it. You. Let's say you get to some uneven terrain or some mountains, or some mud or some swamp. I mean, they're just suddenly you are met with the reality that Earth is not made for cars, and you can extend that principle to say that really Earth is not made for wheels. Environments that are friendly to wheels are generally environments we've made with wheels in mind.

This is sadly where I feel like the Mad Max movies, especially a thunder Road, have really they've really done as a disservice imagining a future in which these vehicles just see to roam everywhere. But I guess a desert environment has depicted in those films like that would maybe be an example of the kind of environment where yes, post apocalyptic vehicles could run wild and a you know, essentially a a civilization that's sliding back towards neolithic times. Yeah,

and they've got modern technology on their wheeled vehicles. Remember, they got like dune buggy tires and stuff. And they've got old, decaying roads to drivers. Not not exactly perfect, but yeah, I I know what you're saying, but I'm just saying, imagine yourself traveling across the wilderness with cargo, uh, in a in a place without paved roads? Would you rather have a cart with wheels or a team of pack mules. Now, humans carrying loads and animals carrying loads

have inherent advantages that wheeled vehicles just don't have. They can go around obstacles, they can you know, take their time with uneven footing and all that. They're just tons of context where a wheeled vehicle, even a pretty advanced one,

is not super useful. Now. On the other hand, while we don't have to assume him that lack of inspiration was the main impediment to the adoption of wheel technology at points throughout history, obviously the idea did have to occur to people, and so it is fun to think, like, what were those moments like where ancient inventors were struck with this idea. I just have to mention, I don't know, I don't know how good of an idea this is.

But I at least found one very interesting and weird looking paper on this subject, which was um by Gerhard Schultz in Contributions to Zoology in two thousand and eight, called Scarab the beatles at the interface of wheel invention in nature and culture. Of course, I mean the dung beetle. But exactly yes. That when I at the time, I almost interrupted to say, like I'm going to talk about poop. I'm so excited, but I didn't. Okay, So here's how

it comes in. Schultz writes in his abstract quote, the combination of rotation and the use of low friction resistance of circular and smooth surfaces to transport a heavy load as is seen in scarab beetles rolling dung pills is the close this degree of similarity to a wheel found in nature. I think he's obviously he's excluding the like the bacterial flagellum, right right, I mean this would be

an animal. This would be an example in nature that that ancient people would have seen Yeah, see you with the naked eye. Yeah, populations of dung rolling scarabs may have benefited from the early domestication of large mammals in the Middle East. I suggest that an increased opportunity to observe pill rolling scare beetles has inspired humans to invent

the wheel. Now, who knows if that's actually true, if he's right at all about what he's saying about scara beetles, but it's not hard to conclude that observing one form or another of rolling behavior in nature could possibly have helped inspire the idea of rolling wheels and technology. Yeah, I feel like I mean, he could be right. It's a it's a fine hypothesis, but I would tend to lean more towards is probably a number of things right right.

It's seeing the scare of beetle, It's noticing the shape of the sun in the moon. It's uh, it's just kicking stones around and pebbles around and eventually uh, toying with some of the more constructed forums here. Now, we do have some evidence that the wheel was not invented just once, but was independently invented at different times and

places throughout history. Yeah, I was reading about this in um in a book by anthropologist Brian M. Fagan along with the number of Collaborators titled The Seventy Grade Inventions

of the Ancient World. He talks a good bit in there about the wheel and he points out that, yeah, it was probably invented at least twice, first somewhere between Mesopotamia and the the in the Danube around the fourth millennium BC, and then also somewhere in Mesoamerica between two hundred BC and two hundred C. Right, And those are just cases where we know that they were invented separately because there would have been no contact in between there

to share the wheel technology. Right. Uh. And when we were looking at the Old World wheeled vehicle evidence, we're basically looking at three different types of evidence. We're looking at depictions of vehicles or things, depictions that were pretty sure vehicles, because obviously you get in you get into problems with that. We've talked about that before, like is this an image of a mythological horse monster or just

a horse in motion that sort of thing. Is this actually a mythical unicorn that we're looking at, or is this a profile drawing of an oryx with the two horns lined up exactly. The second bit of type of evidence, we have clay models, usually clay of wagons or their wheels, and of course when we're getting into models, uh, sometimes it's a question of is this is this a toy? Was this a real is just or is this a

small version of a real thing. And then the third bit of evidence is actual vehicle remains, and it's it's actually I was really surprised at some of the reasons why we find some of these vehicle remains. We'll get into it. And of course in all of this we're not talking about like one particular model of wheel use.

There's there's not one wheel technology, but multiple wheel technologies. Yeah, exactly. Now, a book that I was reading to prepare for this episode is called The Wheel Inventions and Reinventions by Richard W. Bullet, Columbia University Press, and this book is really interesting. A Bullet identifies three classes of wheels, actually three basic streams of technology that that go in different directions and start

at different times. First of all, you've got the wheel set, and what makes this is that the wheels are fixed to the end of an axle and they turned together when the axle turns, so this would be a wheel set. It looks like a you know, like a barbell, and the wheels don't rotate independently. The other version would be you've got an axle and wheels do rotate independently, so they can spin at different speeds and all that kind

of thing. And then finally you have this this thing that doesn't show up until the modern world, which is casters like you have on an office chair or a shopping card, and this rotates on an axle. But also so pivots in a socket above the wheel. These are very useful if you want kind of omnidirectional rolling. Yes, types one and two bullet rights were He agrees that they were invented sometime between three thousand and four thousand b C. The caster came into use only about three

hundred years ago. Uh and bullet has a has a hypothesis. He makes an argument that I'll get into the details of in a minute that the first wheels to see major you swore wheel sets like like you would see on a train, you know, with the fixed wheels on the ends of an axle, and they were used in the copper mines of the Carpathian Mountains of eastern Europe around four thousand BC. And we'll get back and explore

that in a minute. But one of the things that we should acknowledge is that each of these different types of wheels will ignore the castors for a bit because they're much more recent. Each of the other two types have different advantages and disadvantages, Like wheel sets are easier and cheaper to build. You can just you know, basically have like a square plank and then put round wheels on each side with square holes to stay put. And they're also less likely to have a wheel like come

off and have the cart turnover. But wheel sets have a big problem, which is just imagine trying to move a heavy cart with wheels on a fixed axle. Now try to imagine turning it. Oh yes, yeah, this is a pain in the butt. Like you, this is gonna be a real problem. So independently rotating wheels are much much better at turning, basically better at doing anything other than going in a straight line. But of course there

you know, they have their own drawbacks. The wheels can come off, there's more problems with like friction and wear and tear on the axles. And all that. Of course, cars used independently rotating wheels. Trains early on tended to use wheel sets. Because they were on tracks, it's easier to ensure that they would only be steered through a turn very gradually. Because there was no manual steering, all the turns could be dictated by the placement of the tracks.

Another thing that Bullet points out this pretty interesting is that he says, basically throughout history, if you look all around the world in places in times where wheels were used, the two wheeled cart was much more common than the four wheeled card. And the main reason for this is that the two wheeled cart is easier to steer and has less friction. Yeah, Like, basically a two wheeled cart is kind of like a hybrid of of human and wheel or animal and or animal and wheel, whatever is

is pulling or pushing the contraption. But when you have the four wheeled cart, yeah, it's it's it's almost like all machine. And then of course you may have something you're gonna have something pulling it as well. But that's essentially when in this whole episode is we're talking about the emergence of wheel technology. We're talking about the emergence of cart technology. But the cart is the real invention.

Here way various designs that use a pair of wheels or four wheels or more more as a means of transporting goods, people, et cetera. Now we've touched on this already. But of course wheels are great if you have a smooth surface, like a smooth hard surface, like just like

a flat rock face or something. Right, if you're in the desert of the Mad Max movies, you know, the near the gifts, you're doing pretty well, but just throw in just a little mud in the situations gets gets worse, thus limiting the use of wheels and making the road unnecessary invention. Yeah, and just last episode we were talking about roads. Of course, we'll have a few more things

to say about roads today. Now, when we look back to the first actual wagons, we're looking at evidence around b C. We're looking at the stuff in Kish and or you're looking at a narrow, two seaters, fixed axle drawn by some sort of a beast. And most most experts favor Mesopotamia as the birthplace of all the cart. Well, it disagrees with this, but this I think has been the consensus for a while this is this is the general consensus, but again this is not something that we

can be certain of. But the thing is, though the earliest evidence doesn't actually prove this out. Um there there's evidence of Neolithic wheels in what's now Poland from UH fifty to thirty one hundred b c. Ceramic vase vases that depict four wheeled vehicles attached to a V shaped yoke. And then we have clay models of four wheeled vehicles from Hungary same period. Would wheel remains from Switzerland and

Slovenia from around the same time as well. We also have some five hundred burials of the Novo Titovka culture, which would have been somewhere between d and three thousand b c. Uh And and here we have actual wagon remains,

really considerable vehicle remains from surrounding cultures as well. And accordingly, according to anthropologist Brian Fagan his book I said it earlier, along with the invention of the wheel, you also have the language of the wheel in es since you have the software of the wheel traveling with the hardware of

the wheel. And this is actually an interesting way that people sometimes used to try to figure out what was going on in ancient cultures when we don't have archaeological remains, is looking at traces of what people had words for at different places and times, right, and so there's this whole, uh, there's this whole practice of sort of of of tracking the language for wheel looking at how for instanceance Sumerian it's something like gurger, and in Hebrew it's something like

gal call, and in Georgian it's something like gorgo um. What wagon technology would have reached India by the third millennium BC and China by one thousand BC, though by that point chariot technology had actually outstripped it, reaching China around twelve BC. So you know, you can just sort of imagine the chart in your mind, a map of Eurasia and the Middle East and all these various, uh, you know, lines of communication as wheel technology and various

versions of wheel technology spread with trade and warfare. Now, you might wonder, despite what you said earlier about about two wheeled carts being more popular, why then do we see more ancient four wheel carts in some of these uh, these remains. Well, I wonder if that might have to do with just the circumstances through which they're preserved exactly that. Fagin suggests that it may be due to the fact that the four wheeled cart was a status vehicle for burial.

It's like being buried in your lexus. Yeah, and I mean also, I mean, how do you want to ride to your grave? You know, perhaps wrapped up or even put into some sort of a box. Do you want to be in a two person cart or you're just gonna fall out? No, you want to You want to be you know, up there laying nice and proper in a four wheeled cart. It it makes a certain amount of sense. Um, ancient mummy in a shop card. Yeah, here's something else that Fagan adds. Quote but the ownership

and use of the vehicles is far from understood. There is ethnographic evidence. This suggests that when vehicles have been introduced to non vehicle societies, they may have become communal property and require constant decision making concerning their use. Um. So this is interesting because it does make us. It forces us to rethink, like how a cart or a wheeled um, a bit of technology would have even fit into an ancient culture. Um. You know, certainly we we

we end up looking back in time. We want to apply that Flintstone model right where we're just thinking about modern cars in the way that uh, we use modern cars now. And then also, i mean you can throw into the way we're using modern cars now is already changing. We're getting into this whole rideshare culture that is drastically different. Uh So Fagan also, you know, he spends a fair

amount of time with this. He also writes that it's possible that the use of funeral cards in the late fourth and early third century BC were so widespread that quote, their religious purpose outweighed any functional constraints to maintain them. Alternatively, they may have had such short use lives that their ritual wastage in burial may not have appeared so costly. Yeah, so that's an interesting way of thinking about it as well.

It's like they didn't even have to work all that good. Yeah, I mean all you have to do it, All it has to do is just take you from say that you know, the temple grounds to the grave pit. Uh and it as long as it doesn't fall apart, or if we go off the side of a cliff between those two points, you're good. Like, how good does the construction on a coffin really have to be exactly now

this is this really blew me away? Uh, some of you might be wondering, Well, you've talked about two wheeled carts, we've talked about four wheeled cards, but what about the one wheeled card? What about the mighty wheelbarrow? Yeah? And now one thing that might strike us as odd is that in a Western context, I think we almost always think about the wheelbarrow as a tool of getting work done. You know, you put mulch in it or something and roll it away. And the wheelbarrow is a wonderful, simple

little invention. It combines the wheel with the lever, Right, you get leverage by lifting up against the wheel, and you don't have to carry all of the load and roll it off to wherever you need it. But it's not always just forgetting work done, that's right. It's easy to begrudge the wheelbarrow really and think of it as just this this crude but necessary step in like moving

mult or something around. Right. Um, But but when you look at what was done with the one wheeled cart in in China, for instance, it feels like the term wheelbarrow is inappropriate because because we're we're really limiting the things that they did. The Chinese are actually the inventors of the wheelbarrow, according to Fagan Uh and they attribute its invention to one Zoo Lang, a third century CEE

general inventor, and of course wizard Um. It was known as the wooden ox with blighting horse, and then were several different varieties that they mastered, including both push and pull wear wheelbarrows, passenger wheelbarrows, systems that had better traction. And check this out. A wheelbarrow with saals. Yes, sales a sixteenth century invention at least, it may have gone

back further than that. And it had five to six foot or one and a half to one point eight meter sails to deploy when to rain and winds permitted. So this is a land sailboat. Yeah, essentially. Yeah, but I would never have thought of the wheelbarrow like reaching such heights of technological advancement. Again, it's it feels unfair to even call that a wheelbarrow. Now, I think you'd have to. I would assume you'd have to have a human steering it, right, Yeah, I would assume they'd have

to be a human in the midst there. Now, otherwise you're in for a wild ride. Well, with the wind involved, it seems like it could get a kind of wild for sure. All right, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back. And we're back now. We mentioned earlier, you know that the emergence of of wheels in the New World in UM in South and meso

America for example, and UM. A lot of our main evidence here revolves around models from El Salvador in Mexico from two hundred BC to two and on through the Spanish conquest as well. And what these are the evidence we're looking at here are small scale wheeled animal toys. So they don't look like carts, they're not toy wagons. There are things like dogs and deer and even alligators

with just simple wheels. Yeah. So an example would be there's like a clay wheel dog from I think about nineteen hundred years ago that was made in what's now southern Mexico and the old met culture. So it's it's a clear sign that the concept of the wheel existed.

It was just it was for toys. It was not something that was utilizing It's not like there were people saying or some kid is like, father, why don't you make this into a vehicle of war and then the father's laughing and saying, oh no, no, no, that's kids stuff. We would never But of course the question remains, like why why didn't they take this technology that they clearly

had his understanding that they had and scale it up. Now, one common explanation that's been given for this, I think this was also given by the historian Jared Diamond and like guns, germs and steal that author, his idea was that the indigenous American culture is never really developed wheeled transport at any kind of scale because they didn't have large draft animals to move the wheeled vehicles around. Uh.

That book I mentioned by Richard Bullet. Bullet doesn't think that's a very good argument because he points out that the human was very often the creature that moved we old Vihoh yeah, I mean, let's just think back to the wheelbarrow example. We were just given that the human can be the power behind various forms of the cart and and certainly give and the brutality of human history. The human may be doing so willingly or under durest. Yeah.

So this brings us to this interesting question. We we know that there are examples of places in places and times in human history where people had invented the wheel, they had the concept, like they knew how to make it,

they just didn't really use it. Like historians are very often wanting to answer the question of why so many civilizations around the world never adopted widespread use of the wheel, and Bullet sort of argues that the reason is it's not that they didn't have the idea, it's not that they like didn't know how to use it, they were just not impressed with the usefulness of wheeled vehicles for transport when human and animal transport generally worked just fine.

And Bullet points out that almost all cargoes that people are trying to move can actually just be separated into loads of manageable size that can then be carried by humans or pack animals, or can be dragged along on a sledge, and instead, he argues that we should flip the question around their way, what made wheeled transport especially useful at the times and places when it was widely adopted,

not why didn't everybody else widely adopted? And so this is bullets theory, he says, quote the wheel was invented for use in copper mines in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe, and the four wheeled mine cars in that region were pushed by miners and equipped with wheel sets, that is, wheel assemblies in which the wheels are fixed to the ends of the axle, with the entire assembly

rotating together. In other words, he's saying that the wheeled vehicle, the first widespread use of the wheeled vehicle was as a local solution to a particular transportation problem, rather than this huge revolutionary breakthrough which would be of immediate and obvious importance everywhere. So this is flipping on its head the idea that, like, you know, how people answer these surveys, they say, oh, yeah, the wheel, that's the greatest invention

of all time. He's actually saying, no, no, no, the wheel is not immediately and obviously useful in lots of contexts. It was immediately useful in a very particular context. Another way of thinking about it is the first widespread use of the wheel arose not as an example of engineering genius, but as an example of the particular mechanical usefulness of

wheels in a very specific work environment. Okay, so how does he make this case, Well, Bullet argues that the most accurate calibrated carbon dating of archaeological evidence shows that the wheel was being used in some places in Europe at least as early as the archaeological evidence for wheels in Mesopotamia. And we discussed a little bit about this earlier. Uh He says that the earliest known archaeological evidence of

a wheeled object is also a toy. Like we've been saying, it was a this this zebra striped bull with horns mounted on wheels from from a an ancient culture that existed in western Ukraine in the Carpathian Mountains, and the object is dated to some time between thirty nine fifty and thirty six fifty BC. Now, again, as we've been discussing, the existence of a toy with wheels does not necessarily mean that the culture that produced it used large wheeled vehicles.

Some people's obviously understood the concept of wheels for toys, but didn't have much use for them as transport. But of course it could be a bit of evidence if coupled with some other evidence. So Bullet asks the question, was there anything unique about the transportation needs of this mountainous region around four thousand b C. And he says, yes, it was the emergence of tunneled copper mining in the Carpathian Mountains. So he's saying that there's this period in

history known as the Copper Age. It predates the Bronze Age. Before we're making a lot of bronze stuff. There was this Copper Age, which he said began around fifty b C. In Serbia. And this was a metal working age that where copper or was was separated into pure metal and

used to fashion copper tools and trinkets and objects. But well, it says by the late Copper Age, most of the low hanging fruit had been picked, like their surface copper deposits around the world, but those had already been depleted because copper became valuable, and so people found all of the exposed copper and mind it and is the demand for copper remained or increased while surface copper supply decreased. There was this incentive to dig tunnels into the rocks

to find deeper and deeper veins of copper to exploit. Uh. And so he says copper ore is valuable, but it's really dense, and he writes that it weighs about a hundred and forty pounds per cubic foot. That's really heavy, and most of the ore is waste, Like, most of that weight that you're going to be moving around doesn't actually turn into the metal that you can use. Stuff you're gonna have to chip away and refine later, yeah,

or get or burn off. Yeah. So a cubic foot of ore yields only about one to three pounds of the refined metal, and it's a hundred and forty pounds of stuff you've got to take out of the mine. So he says, inside these mine tunnels, you would have to be constantly carrying baskets of this extremely heavy ore back outside, so they could be melted down in fires to separate the copper from the waiste product. And so then he's like, okay, think about the properties of these

mine tunnels. They could be small, and sometimes the entrance into them would have to be a vertical shaft before you get to the tunnel part, which meant you probably couldn't bring pack animals like oxen into the mines to carry your ore baskets back out to the entrance for you. On the other hand, the inside of the mine shaft would have a relatively smooth rock surface that traveled in

a straight line as the floor. So Bullet argues that this is what made late coper age minds the perfect environment for the first four wheeled vehicles in regular use for transport. The loads were very heavy, pack animals were not practical, and smooth stone surfaces on the floor of the tell we're friendly to wheeled baskets or mine carts rather than being you know, covered in mud and obstacles and uneven terrain that that made wheels impractical. And a

lot of other environments. This is fascinating because it reminds me of of more modern examples of tunnel environments where wheels become a necessity. So I mean certainly large scale mining, but I'm also thinking of smuggling tunnels, and even I want to say, it's been a while since I read The Great Escape, but I believe they had to they use some sort of wheels in that, didn't they. Oh, I don't know, I've never read it. I may have that wrong. I have to check by that back end man.

Maybe have to remove that section if I got that wrong. But but but certainly, yeah, if you're in a cramped little tunnel, and you need to move even yourself along much less cargo. Uh, there's no room for animals, there's limited rules, room for slinging anything over your back. The cart begins to make perfect sense, and we see analogies to this in later technology that we have much better records of, like the my environment was crucial to the

development of railroads. Like rail based travel later on developed when people were trying to get or out of minds, in fact, minds figuring to all kinds of stuff. Just coincidentally, you know, the steam engine was also one of the first big uses that it was developed for was not for moving stuff around, but was for pumping water. Yeah, minds would flood and you had to pump them out, and that's what the steam engine was for a little preview of perhaps the future episode on steam technology. It's

a fast there's a fascinating history there as well. Absolutely, Yeah, I'd love to come back to that. So anyway, I just want to say in summary, we don't know that bullets hypothesis here about the origins the wheel set is correct, but I do think it's really interesting and if you'd like to read his full argument where he presents a whole bunch of evidence. You can check out his book.

But if bullets argument is correct, the invention of the wheel is truly a case of necessity being the mother of invention, and that it's not that there was something special about the inventor, but the is something special about the problem the inventor faced and the environment in which that problem arose, not necessarily like unique genius or creativity,

but unique necessity. All right, So we're gonna leave it there for this episode, but please join us for the next episode of Invention because we're going to discuss even more about wheels and this and the next episode is going to be the one where we get into the legacy of wheels. In the meantime, if you want to check out more episodes of Invention, head on over to invention pod dot com. That's where you'll find all those episodes. You'll find links out to some social media accounts that

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our excellent audio producer, Tari Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback about this episode, it or any other, to suggest a topic for the future or justice say hello. You can email us at contact at invention pod dot com, m