Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Joe McCormick, and this is gonna be part two of our first foray into the exploration of the Wheel, the ultimate technology, the one everybody goes to when they're asked to think of an invention. Uh, the thing that they tell you, let's not reinvent, when in fact, people reinvented all the time, and thank god, they do, the very technology that Anthony Zerbe was so down on in The Omega Man talking about did he hate the wheel?
I thought they rode on cars and stuff. Well, the wheel was for them. Like, Okay, if you haven't seen The Omega Man, based on Mathieson's excellent I am legend it is a kind of a sad reworking of it. Yeah, it's it's a corny Charleton Heston. Uh lead this redundant
the sentence you just said. Nineteen seventies um post apocaly oiptic film in which Charlton Heston is seemingly the last human and then you have these pale vampires that are ruling the night and scientists exactly, He's a scientist that's like Christ like scientists battling the vampires, and the vampires like see the wheel as a symbol of everything that humanity got wrong. At some point, that's kind of a shaky premise. They tell him he stinks of oil and
electric circuitry. He did look a little oily in that, I have to say, but any rate, but but it was corn oil. So yes, we're continuing our discussion of of wheel technology. Uh, we're not quite as down on wheel technology as the as the future of vampires are. So let's jump back into our discussion. So how does the wheel and the wheeled cart change things? How do
these technologies change the world. Well, one thing I would say is that the legacy and impact of wheeled transportation and has been much more profound and say, the last four or five centuries than it was for the you know, most of the time wheeled vehicles have existed, their impact
was less profound. Basically, you know, they made it easier to move some stuff around in places where you could use them, right, and the ultimately that that's one of the main advancements here, is that it was for the transportation of goods and and people to a certain extent as well. You can also make, of course the argument for the use of chariots in a military s areo or the move using moving around say large scale siege equipment, etcetera.
Though though after the age of chariots, wheels basically sort of fell out of use in a military context and were replaced largely by heavy cavalry. Yeah, by by sheer horsemanship. Yeah. Now, another important the impact of the wheel is just the stimulation of carpentry and road technologies like the the because that's something to keep in mind too. To have like a really functional, useful car, you've got to have a certain level of carpentry employ for that thing to even exist.
And then you're gonna need to up your game with with roads so that you can get it all the places you need to get it, so that it can actually transport goods and people or you know, equipment from
one place to the other. Yeah, Bullet wrights about this a lot about the So he's got a section of his book where he talks about um the fact that the wheel shaped to the modern world, and that these influences were highly contingent not just on the wheel existing, but on the different types of wheels we're talking about.
Like he explores how fixed wheel sets like the early steam engine locomotive wheels, and then axles with independently rotating wheels like we saw on the more versatile carriages and modern cars had very different impacts on the world. And he mentions road design, and so think about how we
were talking about roads in the last episode. When the first carriage roads UH came about, they were usually based on old roads that have been used for centuries by foot and you know, animal transport, whereas the first railroads had to be of a completely different design. They had
to be built a new into the landscape for obvious reasons. Example, early trains with fixed wheelsets couldn't handle sharp turns or steep grades down a hill, and this meant that the landscape had to be altered to accommodate them to allow a train to pass through UH. And they also required the intervention of government authorities to help manage things like right of way and scheduling of use. And this was not originally the case for carriage roads, which you know
eventually became automobile roads. But funny enough, a lot of aspects of the design of railroads were then later recreated when interstate highway systems and their worldwide equivalents like the Auto bonn were born. Yeah, just the idea that, oh, we're gonna we're gonna be able to road from point A to point b Uh. There's a hill in the way, we're not going to go around it, We're not gonna go over it. We're going to go right through it.
And that means that building a tunnel, we're going to do it, or we're just gonna cut a massive, uh, you know, slice out of that hill. And we see this all over with certainly with their trains but also with our interstates. Yeah, but also avoiding stops, avoiding sharp turns of what you know, doing doing all that kind of stuff you would see in railroad design. But now it's to get lots of cars through all at once.
Another story Bullet tells about road design that I thought was interesting was about the Scottish guy named John McAdam, who was born in seventeen fifty six, who came up with a new design for carriage roads. So you had a traditional way of building roads, which was essentially based on the Roman road design. You'd have like flat paving stones on top of a layer of cement that went on top of a layer of smaller, looser stones. This is great for foot traffic. You're you know you want
to march a bunch of legionaries through, that's fine. But heavy carriages and carts with iron rimmed wheels would crush these roads. They would break the flat paving stones and ruin them. And at one point even the Roman emperor Theodosia uh set weight limits on wheeled carts. This was in four thirty eight CE to prevent damage to the road systems. But by the sixteenth century, when carriages were becoming really popular in Europe, it was clear that an
inverted design worked better. So you'd have larger stones or blocks on the bottom, and then you'd cover it with smaller stones like you could use streambed gravel that could better survive the assault of wheeled carriages. But and even better design, supposedly was this guy John McAdams, and this was roads paved with small stones, not tiny pebbles, but small stones that had to be of a certain small
size and sharp edged rather than round. And when it comes down to the size bullet rights that uh quote, building supervisors sometimes put them in their mouth to check. But the sharp edges of the stones actually mattered because that meant that when traffic went over them, it would pound the stones into each other and sort of compas act them, rather than pushing them out to the sides of the road as often happened with smoother stones and
bullet rights. That McAdam became known for insisting that the best way to make sure stones were the correct size and shape was to have a bunch of workers sit alongside the road and use hammers to break rocks, and this led to the common image of the chain gang of prisoners breaking rocks on the side of the road. Huh, I had no idea. But of course, as we discussed in our our Road episode, it's not. The changes are not just to the way you get from point A
to point B. There. They actually change the cities and towns that you're traveling to. Oh, they completely change it, and they change urban culture. I mean, have you ever seen like old city centers from very old cities across the Middle East and North Africa where there will be the city centers there are amazing. They're they're gorgeous and
they are not made with wheeled vehicles in mind. And it's great because so they've got like staircases in the middle of the city roads, and they they can be very narrow, sometimes bullet rights that even some city like city roads in city centers have ladders in them, and this is fine, you can deal with this on foot,
but they're just not made for cars. And so the carriage revolution of the sixteenth century lead to city designs with straighter roads, wider roads that were better paved, and with sort of regimes to keep obstacles out of the middle of the road. And this had a really profound effect on culture. Like do you ever think about the irony of what it means to be street wise or
life on the streets? Like I think what we use that to mean is being out in public, mingling with people and strangers, right, but that doesn't literally apply because like if you're you're not mingling with people in the street unless I guess there's a festival going on or something like cars are going by. You need to get
out of the way. Maybe that's the one of the appeals of street festivals and probably like these various fun runs as well as like where you're retaking the street for what they originally were used for for for us to move around, uh, devoid of these uh you know, murderous uh machine housings that we use all the time.
I mean, traditionally, streets in most cities are a place for people to walk and sometimes for people on horseback to travel, but also there are a place for public commerce there, for the public square to take place in. So you'd have people in the streets mingling, talking, having public events, buying and selling things. And this changed somewhat with the carriage, and then it changed a huge amount
with the motorized car. The motorized car with the car, you know, and I think you can see an inverse relationship between the amount of wheeled vehicle traffic on a road and the amount of public commerce, economic and social that takes place there. Bullet rights that without wheeled vehicles, quote a street or lane can bring neighbors together instead of keeping them apart. That's kind of sad, you know. I I get kind of sad because when I see like kids in a neighborhood playing in the street, my
instinct is they should get out of the street. That's dangerous, when what I really should be thinking is like we shouldn't be driving here. Yeah, I mean, it's a sad defect of of of certainly American history where you see, for instance, railroads and other certainly railroads but also major
streets used as a divide between racial populations. Yeah and or yeah, like bullet rights about that, our railroads and highways very often did become like dividing lines for along class lines, along racial segregation, all kinds of cruel segregation
that took place in the creation of modern cities. So while I don't really love what like cars have done to our cities, on the other hand, there are some really interesting ways that uh well, I don't know if you'd say this is for the better or for the worst. It's certainly just in at least a neutral way. Our way of thinking about the world has been largely changed by wheeled vehicles, and one of those is the arrival
of standard Dice time. Yeah, Like, without wheeled vehicles, we probably would not have standardized time because before before trains, different villages and towns would you know, the clock at the main clock in the village might read a different time. People would keep a different general local time. It would probably be close to the same as other villages nearby,
but wouldn't necessarily be exactly the same. And on railroads, arrivals and departures have to be timed very carefully, and in some cases mistakes and scheduling could even lead to like collisions of trains, so everybody had to be on the same time, even at distant points along the tracks. The railroads have been crucial in the development of the idea of standardized time across distance, and sometimes wonder without
without standardized time, where things better or worse? Like I'm sure people spent just a lot more time waiting around for things to happen, or waiting around for to meet somebody or something. Well, this is this is actually something I think we could come back to in a future episode where we deal with the standardized time and time keeping and discussing, you know, as we always do. What was it like before this innovation? What was it like
in a in a world without rigorous timekeeping? And I think, you know, there's an argument that you may that you still you still can go to places where you experience something more like our our traditional uh you know, unaltered experience of time. Yeah, I mean sometimes as simple as going on a vacation or going they're also you know, there's an argument to made maybe certain cultures put less of an emphasis on rigorous timekeeping, and other cultures put
too much emphasis on rigorous timekeeping. Yeah, like maybe rigorous timekeeping might be uh, it might help the efficiency of your economy or something, but it might not be as psychologically healthy. Yeah, I mean, how ultimately it is an exercise? And how had the rate at which time is leaking out of your hands? Right? And how useful is that across the board? Now that we're talking so much about time. I also can't help but notice that I think of time as a wheel because the clock face is circular
and the hands go around. It recurs again and again every day, the same way a wheel spends. A wheel is sort of like an indispensable physical metaphor of of tons of things that happen every single day. Yeah, it's just an irresistible model upon which to interpret the human condition. And again, like the unseen movements of cosmos and divinity
and nature. Um, you know, the wheel is a symbol of cycle of eternal return, arguably a means of understanding the very way that you know that that early people understood the very shape of their lives, that the pan Indian cyclical nature of time in which everything comes back
around to the same place have you carried on? In Buddhism and Jainism, UH, particular note is the wheel of sam Sara, which charts the movement of the soul through various incarnations and phases of life, and it's part of the you know, the ongoing effort to break free from
the wheel and uh to achieve liberation. We also see this in the largely medieval idea of the wheel of fortune, the road of fortuna uh, you know, carrying, and this carries over to the into the occult as well, that the forces of fate are bringing us high and bringing us low again. And then there is a circular nature to how this works that seems to lead even to like the idea of a cycle of myth that functions
as a wheel. And then there of course a whole host of other symbols used in various cultures around the world. There may not be a wheel per se or a circle per se, but there is some sort of uh you know, like a spiral design to it. There's some sort of implied motion. And then, of course we already talked about the breaking wheel a little bit. The just to drive home the idea that no matter what the
the invention is. No matter what new spin we take on the technology, somebody is going to figure out a way to use it as an instrument of torture and death. Uh, that's just that just comes with the territory. Now, let's not end on that sour. Now we should think about So we've talked about four wheeled carts and some of the challenges they face. We've talked about trains cars, We've talked about two wheeled carts. We've talked about the one
wheeled wheelbarrow. But if you really want to get down to like the true form of the one wheeled vehicle, I think we should take one final look at something called the mono wheel. I would love to ride in a mono wheel. I don't know if I would actually because it seems like it could easily end in in a tangled metal death. But a mono wheel, if you've never seen one, is a sort of experimental or novelty
type of vehicle. It's not actually all that useful compared to other types of vehicle, but it is a single wheeled vehicle, sort of like a unicycle. But when you're on a unicycle, you sit up above the wheel in
a monowheel. The driver generally sits inside the wheel. So think about like you're sitting inside a hula hoop frame, and then on the outside of the hula hoop frame there is a wheel and you can power it somehow with I don't know, pedals or with a motor, and obviously because there's only one, well, this is going to be very difficult to steer, doesn't It sounds like fun? Though it sounds like fun. I've I've seen, I've run across a number of cool images of these, uh these vehicles.
I've never actually seen footage of one in motion or I assume one falling over which, if you it looks like something that would be be easy to wreck. Yeah, I mean, I guess one way around that is like you can make the center of it more of like a a spherical cage and then just have a single wheel that rolls on the outside. I think I've seen some designs like that. I'm surprised. I can't think of
any science fiction treatments of this offhand. I'm sure they're out there, like some sort of a futuristic vehicle that is essentially a mono wheel because it lends itself well to that kind of vision I feel. I know I've seen it in some sci fi movie and I can't remember what it is. I think maybe one of the men in Black movies has one, because it feels very Tron. But I'm pretty sure they're not in Tron. I could be wrong. Somebody's working on the next Tron sequel. We're
placed the light cycles with light mono wheels. Yes, and if you're not working on the Nextron sequel, please work on the Nextron sequel. I would love to see another one. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more on wheels, and we're back now. It's also worth noting and all of this that early notions of celestial mechanics, you know, the movement of of of
planets and the spheres uh. You know, some of the models that were employed saying in Greek antiquity, uh certainly benefited from an understanding of the wheel, the wheel as uh you know, as a metaphor as well, along with the geometric metric circles and spheres like. Knowledge of these things helped the minds of the day try and figure out what was going on in the observable universe. Yeah. The one thing that's interesting is that the orbits of
the planets began to resemble true wheels. More we had an accurate understanding of like the heliocentric model of the Solar System. Because when you had the geocentric model of the Solar System, the planets didn't just go in a straight circle around the Earth. They had to regress and stuff. So you'd see him to go across the sky and then go backwards. Yeah. And as you move towards the heliocentric model, Uh, then you begin to to to see these things that are, due to your point, more like wheels.
It's almost as if we while we were becoming better at using physical wheels within civilization, uh, more of our metaphorical models or physical models of the universe came to incorporate wheels. You know, the orbit of the planets, while slightly elliptical, you know, they're not perfect circles, they're pretty
close to circular. Uh say that then the models that weren't perfectly accurate, but like the orbit of electrons around the atomic nucleus and all that, Yeah, exactly, And uh, you know another area we see wheels utilized to really I think spectacular effect are in various wheel based creatures, beings, and artifacts from religion. We may have touched on one or two other examples already, but but I don't think we even mentioned the Old Testament examples of say, uh,
you know the the vision from Ezekiel. Oh, yeah, where he saw the wheels and the fiery wheel, the thing that got like Eric von Danikin all excited all the ancient aliens. People say, look this story and Ezekiel he talks about wheels in the sky. It's got to be flying saucers, right, Yeah, And the Sherebims lifted up their wings and mounted up from the earth in my sight,
and when they went out, the wheels also were beside them. Now, I want to be clear, we're not advocating the ancient aliens theory here, no, But I know because I have one thing I don't think you have to. Because as we've pointed out, like the wheel was already established as this this thing in the human mind, and and and it's one of the one of these forms you might turn to when conceptualizing, you know, visions from heaven or the will of the gods, et cetera. Yeah, it's one
of the is platonic forms. Almost you would expect to see it turn up in visions. In fact, you could expect to see maybe wheels show up as alien transport in hallucinations for the same reason in the twentieth century exactly. And well they end, well they did. Now. Another creature that I just mentioned mostly in passing here is the demon bure described in Johan Vyers fifteen sixty three Grimore
pseudo Monarchya Demonum sounds like a good read. Well, yeah, if you're into if you're into summoning various demons, it's certainly a good text to pick up um. But there there have been various illustrated versions of these over the years, and you know, there are some phenomenal woodcuts that went along with these. But the demon bure Is is described
as the great President of Hell. Now, like all these different demons have different roles and positions in Hell, and this one's most notable because it looks kind of like a uh an evil lion's head with what five different goat legs kind of rotating or it's like rotation is implied anyway, with the different goat legs poking out of him. He looks you know, what he looks like is an overbalanced wheel, which I'll talk about in the second. Yeah, some people might remember this guy because I believe he
was also on a Black Sabbath album cover. I don't remember that, or maybe it was an Aussie uh solo album cover, but any rate, uh. It certainly has shown up in um in metal likeonography a few times. Right. And then of course there's the there's the idea of the juggernaut. Uh so this is you know, in modern English, this word often refers to like a large, impossible to stop force that's on motion, or a complex machine, you know, like this company is a juggernaut, or this uh or
I don't know, this football team is a juggernaut. You know, it just can't be stopped. Meanwhile, in uh in British usage, you'll find that it is often used to describe to say, just a large truck. But all I would expect it to be someone who explores juggers. What actual it doesn't have any connection to the to those word routes because it it derives from seventeenth century British observations of the wheeled altar cart processions at the Jaganatha Temple in India.
See that's so that's where we get a juggernat jagganava um and and this is basically just a situation where we could have carts, really ordinate carts with big wheels, and they would carry statues of like the Hindu deity Jaganatha, along with a couple of other key figures and h they observed this, and they were even like these, uh,
you know, erroneous accounts. So from for instance, the fourth fourteenth century text The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which said that Hindus would cast themselves before these great wheels as a sacrifice. But that's not true, and that's not true. It's just just a parade, a procession of of sacred altars upon wheeled vehicles. Now this is interesting because it kind of connects to the idea of the wheeled funerary carts.
So we're discussing in the last episode where there were apparently cultures that didn't there's no evidence that they used wheels all that much, just for normal everyday work, but there might have been wheeled carts to like take a body to its final resting place. It seems a similar kind of ceremonial or religious significance for the use of the wheel. I wonder if there's something I haven't seen this mention in any of the texts that we've been
looking at. But I wonder if we're missing something very basic about the sacred nature of a wheeled cart, just by virtue of it being everywhere and having been everywhere in human history for so long. But like, if you're building a wheeled cart and to say you're the first to do it, imagine yourself being the first to create this. What have you done? You've created an artificial scenario in which a horizontal space is no longer set in in
time and space. It can be moved. Um. Which you know this sounds like an outrageous overstatement of the obvious, But but if you think about it for a second, you really think, and you you try and put it in a context where this is Uh, this is not just an everyday occurrence, but an anomaly like something that us an amazing invention, like think of the you know, the metaphorical power of that, the religious power of that, the idea that like that which cannot walk, be it
um statue of a deity or the body of the dead. Uh, that the entity cannot move, but we can move the ground upon which it is it is reduced. That's really interesting, And there's another way to think about it, which is that, because we talked about it in the last episode, there is no wheeled locomotion in nature, except you might talk about like the bacterial flagellam working kind of like a propeller, But there is no animal with wheels, so you would
never see this in nature. The closest thing you might see is like a dung beetle rolling a circular pill of dung around, but that's not a wheel with an axle. So the wheel and axle moving a fixed substrate is literally, in some ways like un natural or other worldly as a form of locomotion that might I don't know, maybe I'm reaching here, but you the place where you see the disks wheeling around the sky, the sun and the moon, I mean, it's it's easy to see how you could
think of wheeled locomotion as this other worldly thing. Yeah, yeah, I mean certainly in terms of just like a horsh horizontal space that is is an emotion. Uh. You know, you can look to rafts certainly that would have have predated the cart, but still the wheels allow a raft to move across the ground with you know, rather smoothly, depending on you know, exactly what sort of wheel set up you're using. That is really interesting to think about.
I think we should keep that in mind. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back. All Right, we're back. Let's get rolling now. One thing I was reading about that seems kind of interesting to me is that also if we want to sort of like get into the realm of the unnatural to look at other world lead types of wheels. Perhaps the most famous design for a supposed perpetual motion machine is known
as box Sara's wheel, or the over balanced wheel. Now, I know we're focusing primarily on wheels for transportation, but
I think this is too interesting not to mention. We could easily do a whole episode, and I think we should in the future about failed attempts to build perpetual motion machines, because the the idea of the perpetual motion machine is sort of a perfect test case where the earnest ambition or dishonest cunning of inventors and self proclaimed inventors sort of crashes head first against the laws of physics.
So who was Boxer? So there was this guy Boxer a too, also known as Boxer the Learned, and he was a twelfth century Indian mathematician and astronomer. He was a pioneer of the use of the decimal number system, and he was the chief astronomer of a of an observatory ugine. And the wheel model named after him is also some times described as the overbalanced wheel. As I said, the basic idea of an overbalanced wheel is that it's
a wheel that is covered with shifting weights. And these could be glass tubes of liquid, or that could be slots with weighted disks that can slide back and forth, or that could be like metal balls on hinges. You've probably seen some form of this or another at some point, but the key is it's anything that allows a significant amount of mass to transfer from one side to the other.
Of this, of these things that are all around the wheel and on the overbalanced wheel, these weights are angled to shift so that one side of the wheel is always heavier than the other side, or so that parts of the wheel on one side of the axle are always providing greater torque, which should in theory keep the wheel spinning forever, right, But Robert, I know we've looked at a few perpetual motion machines in the past. Never really seems to work out, does it. Yeah, it does.
It doesn't quite work because, unfortunately, we now know that you can't make a machine like this. They're supposed to stay in motion forever without any input of energy from the outside. But we know this is impossible due to the law of conservation of energy, which says that energy is never created or destroyed, It just gets transferred from one form to another. So the wheel can't make its
own energy. And then the other thing is that that you've got the second law of thermodynamics, which means that within a closed system, usable energy or order, such as the angular momentum of wheel, gets transformed into unusable energy or disorder, which is heat. And no machine, no wheel, no, nothing is perfectly efficient. There's always going to be some amount of usable energy, like angular momentum that a spinning
wheel just loses over time. In this case, the spinning wheel is gonna lose its angular momentum to friction on the axle. You know that turning around the axle is rubbing and it's heating up and it's changing that momentum into heat until finally the wheel just becomes balanced. No matter how hard you try to keep it to design it so that it stays unbalanced forever, eventually it will balance out at its lowest point and just stop turning.
And there's a reason patent offices generally don't grant patents for perpetual motion machines, even if it looks really convincing. You know, no matter what, there's a flaw in the design, something is not actually working as intended. I should have looked this up before I came in, but I just wondered, now, I wonder if there are like recreational engineering nerds out there who are constantly just trolling patent offices trying to
get perpetual motion machines issued patents. Maybe and maybe they're even listening to this podcast, and they can write in and let us know. Yeah, if you have experience, let us know. Speaking of patents, I also came across an interesting story about wheel patents in a Smithsonian dot com article by Megan Gambino, where she mentions this story that around the year two thousand one, the country of Australia they tried to put in place this new system for
patent applications. They're like, okay, well we'll make it all Streamline, will make it easy on the user. Right, So they allow inventors to draft their own patents without the advice of legal counsel. And so a patent lawyer named John Keo wanted to argue that the new system for patent applications was flawed, and he did so by applying for and being granted a patent for quote, a circular transportation facilitation device. Uh. He apparently was issued a patent for
his invention the wheel. Oh. I bet he probably didn't go get too far with that one though, in terms of just like you know, trolling everybody and uh and causing chaos and you know, going out and insisting that everyone bade him royalties on his wheel. No, I assumed this probably just showed that something was wrong with the system. Well, let's let's let's talk a little bit about tires. What do you say, Robert, I am so ready to get tired? All right? Well, you know, Scott Benjamin, the Great Scott
Benjamin helps us with research for this show. Scott, of course, previously co host of the long running Car Stuff which was I think finally just parked in the garage, what a year or so ago. It's on hiatus for the foreseeable future. But Scott's doing great stuff right now. Yeah, he's. Scott's busy with all sorts of grizzly happenings. But he also has all this wonderful knowledge about automobiles automobile history.
So of course he brought some interesting tires to our attention. Uh. One of them that I was particularly amazed with is is the idea of the role the rollergon tire. Yeah,
these were really interesting. Yeah. So what you have with the rollergn tire is imagine a steam roller and instead of like just a big like the rollers, imagine instead of it being this this hard crushing uh material, you know, this big steel wheel, imagine instead that it is this soft, inflatable substance like a you know, like a partially deflated kickball. That that's That's about what the the the rollagon tire
consisted of. The classic image of the roller gun tire is an image of its inventor, William Hamilton Albe being joyfully run over by his own invention and like giving a smile and a thumbs up while it's on top of him. Right now. It's primary feature It was not that it could run over it's an own inventor without killing him, but rather that yet with these low pressure rollers, you could roll across soft or uneven terrain. And so
the origin story to this is pretty pretty cool. It was ninety five and Albie was teaching in a small Eskimo village in the Bearing Strait and he saw some of the locals. They're using bags of swollen seal skin like like essentially seal skin balloons, uh, And they were using these to hoist a boat out of the water, a boat that was filled with about four tons of meat and roll it up a hill, right yeah, yeah, So essentially these were like wide tires. There were sort
of like low pressure balloons made out of tough material. Yeah. So in nineteen fifty one Albi ended up a dad acting this concept using nylon rubber bags on rollers. A good Year actually manufactured them based on his plans, and the Rollergne was born. And it does sound like a creature from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Does the U.
S Army actually use these in Korea? It was it was a successful concept, and it's still used today in some forms, but they were ultimately too expensive to make and certainly to to mass produce or to even mass market. You a very specialized tire, the roll agane. Yeah, and I think it's a really interesting variation on the concept of a wheel or a tire, because normally you want kind of narrow, high pressure tires to reduce friction and
improve efficiency of steering and movement. Like you might notice in your car that if your tires are running at low pressure, it's a little bit harder to steer the car. Yeah, so yeah, this is another kind of thing you would take out on the highway. No, no, no, no, But wider, lower pressure rollers taken to the extreme here can be more forgiving. The terrain is undependable, right, they can just
sort of roll over whatever. They're not gonna get jostled around too much, and so a machine like this could never be built for speed or for efficiency, but it's great for rugged environments. Now, another design that Scott brought to our attention the twheel. Yeah, this is great. So what is tweel is kind of what it sounds like, right, if you take a tire and a wheel and you remove most of the tire, so it's just the tea left. Well, you have a twheel modern airless radial tires. They're you
use for generally things like golf carts, but also construction vehicles, lawnmowers. Um. Basically, it's all rubber spoke virtually little no a little to no tire or another way to think of it would be it kind of feels like a toy cars wheel and tire scaled up to it's like usable form um. Another interesting take on the tire. This has been described as the tire of the future, the spherical maglev tires. Uh. And these were these were produced by a good Year
I believe as well. Uh. The idea is that you have a tire and you transform it essentially into a sphere and then you kind of use kind of a kind of something that's like a computer mouse ball, uh insert socket. That's how you would line these up on the bottom of a vehicle, you know, four and just like you would have four tires, and it would enable crazy mobility because you could you could you could really just maneuver this thing like an ikea shopping cart. You
can only the castors on your office chair exactly. Yeah, so you could do like all sorts of amazing parallel parking and the sky's the limit. But of course you'd also need a computer to help drive these things, because like an ikea shopping cart, you could the things you could just careen out of control, um and then you
have to you know, flee the store. But but you and you'd certainly need a computer to help driving if you were doing anything other than just traditional driving, if you had it in you know, anything besides just sort of typical automobile mode. But the other crazy the thing about it is not only the spherical nature of the wheels, but the car would essentially float above these tires via
magnetic levitation, thus the maglev we talked about. So it's just another example that yes, we continually reinvent the wheel, we continually reinvent tires. I want to see this episode lead to a revolution in everyday language. I think people should stop using the phrase let's not reinvent the wheel, not only because a lot of times when people say it, they're actually just like trying not to get you to do something that is important, but also because it doesn't
make sense as a phrase. The wheel is constantly reinvented. The wheel and the infrastructure that supports it had to be reinvented or we wouldn't have the vehicles we have today. It's ridiculous, Robert, this has been really interesting, but obviously we've touched on so many things we're gonna have to come back to in the future. I think tires. Tires
are are more fascinating than you might imagine. Yeah, this is one of these inventions that really, I mean, it's not just one invention, it's multiple inventions, legacy of inventions, and then spiraling off from from it are all these different diversion technologies and necessary um, you know, supporting technologies. So I I I'm pretty sure we're not done with the wheel yet. Uh and and neither is is human civilization.
We are still reinventing the wheel, um constantly. I predict that by all human civilizations will have transitioned to motorized pogo stick. Well, what wouldn't that be nice? It's hard to wage war on a poco stick one of sims. All right, Hey, if you want to check out more episodes of Invention, head on over to invention pod dot com. That's the that's the mothership for this show. That's where we find all its various episodes and links out to
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