The Wheel, Part 1

The wheel is perhaps the most iconic of all inventions, and yet we are often too dismissive of wheel technology. We’ve been reinventing  the wheel for thousands of years and show no sign of stopping. In this Invention episode, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore the earliest examples of wheel technology and discuss why some cultures barely used it at all.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, everyone, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp
and I'm Joe McCormick, and just heads up. This is
going to be part one of a two part episode
because we get going on wheels and we can't stop. Robert,
I thought today we should start with some poll results.
Are you ready to consult the masses with me? Nothing's
more exciting than starting with poll results. Let's do it. Okay,

(00:29):
So in Time magazine and Qualcom, they partnered to do
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.

(00:49):
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

(01:11):
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

(01:35):
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

(01:55):
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,

(02:19):
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

(02:40):
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

(03:03):
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

(03:24):
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.

(03:46):
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

(04:09):
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

(04:30):
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

(04:52):
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,

(05:14):
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

(05:35):
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

(05:57):
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

(06:20):
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

(06:41):
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

(07:03):
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

(07:23):
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

(07:44):
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,

(08:06):
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

(08:26):
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

(08:49):
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

(09:10):
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

(09:34):
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

(09:55):
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.

(10:17):
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

(10:41):
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

(11:03):
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

(11:26):
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

(11:47):
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

(12:08):
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

(12:29):
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

(12:49):
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

(13:10):
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,

(13:32):
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

(13:53):
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.

(14:17):
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,

(14:38):
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

(15:02):
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

(15:25):
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

(15:46):
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

(16:09):
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,

(16:31):
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

(16:51):
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

(17:13):
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,

(17:36):
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

(17:56):
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

(18:20):
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

(18:40):
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

(19:02):
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,

(19:26):
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

(19:48):
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

(20:09):
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

(20:32):
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

(20:52):
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

(21:13):
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

(21:34):
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,

(21:56):
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

(22:19):
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,

(22:39):
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

(22:59):
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

(23:21):
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

(23:42):
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

(24:04):
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

(24:25):
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

(24:47):
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

(25:08):
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

(25:28):
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

(25:50):
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

(26:14):
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

(26:36):
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

(26:57):
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

(27:17):
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

(27:38):
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,

(28:04):
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

(28:25):
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

(28:46):
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,

(29:07):
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

(29:28):
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

(29:51):
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

(30:13):
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

(30:36):
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

(30:57):
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

(31:19):
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

(31:39):
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

(32:01):
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,

(32:23):
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

(32:45):
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

(33:06):
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.

(33:30):
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,

(33:52):
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

(34:12):
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

(34:36):
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

(34:56):
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

(35:17):
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

(35:40):
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,

(36:01):
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

(36:23):
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

(36:46):
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,

(37:10):
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

(37:30):
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

(37:53):
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

(38:15):
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

(38:37):
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

(39:00):
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

(39:20):
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

(39:42):
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

(40:07):
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

(40:28):
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

(40:51):
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

(41:13):
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

(41:35):
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

(41:58):
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

(42:21):
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.

(42:43):
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

(43:04):
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,

(43:26):
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

(43:48):
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

(44:10):
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

(44:31):
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

(44:53):
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.

(45:15):
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,

(45:35):
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

(45:56):
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

(46:17):
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

(46:37):
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

(47:00):
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

(47:23):
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

(47:45):
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

(48:06):
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

(48:28):
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

(48:52):
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,

(49:14):
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

(49:35):
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

(49:57):
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

(50:17):
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.
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(50:38):
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(51:00):
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