February 18, 2019 • 39 mins
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 two-parter, 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
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
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
(00:30):
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,
(00:50):
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
(01:13):
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
(01:33):
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
(01:55):
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
(02:16):
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.
(02:36):
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
(02:58):
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
(03:20):
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
(03:43):
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
(04:05):
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
(04:26):
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,
(04:48):
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
(05:10):
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
(05:30):
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
(05:53):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:38):
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
(07:00):
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
(07:20):
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
(07:44):
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
(08:05):
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
(08:26):
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
(08:46):
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,
(09:08):
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
(09:32):
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
(09:55):
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,
(10:17):
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
(10:38):
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
(10:59):
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,
(11:20):
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
(11:43):
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
(12:04):
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
(12:26):
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?
(12:51):
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
(13:12):
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
(13:32):
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
(13:55):
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
(14:17):
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
(14:37):
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
(14:58):
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
(15:19):
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
(15:40):
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
(16:01):
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,
(16:21):
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
(16:43):
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
(17:05):
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
(17:27):
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
(17:49):
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.
(18:12):
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
(18:35):
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
(18:56):
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
(19:17):
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
(19:38):
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
(19:59):
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
(20:24):
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
(20:45):
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.
(21:08):
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.
(21:28):
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,
(21:49):
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.
(22:12):
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
(22:33):
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
(22:56):
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
(23:17):
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
(23:37):
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,
(23:58):
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
(24:20):
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,
(24:43):
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
(25:04):
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
(25:25):
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.
(25:49):
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,
(26:11):
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
(26:35):
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
(26:59):
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,
(27:21):
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
(27:42):
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
(28:04):
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
(28:25):
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
(28:48):
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
(29:10):
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
(29:34):
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
(29:54):
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
(30:17):
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
(30:37):
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
(31:00):
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.
(31:21):
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,
(31:41):
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
(32:03):
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
(32:25):
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
(32:46):
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
(33:08):
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.
(33:29):
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,
(33:52):
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
(34:15):
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,
(34:36):
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.
(35:00):
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
(35:20):
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
(35:42):
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,
(36:02):
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,
(36:24):
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
(36:46):
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.
(37:10):
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
(37:31):
to wage war on a poco stick one of sims.
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(37:52):
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(39:17):
us at contact at invention pod dot com.
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
(00:30):
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,
(00:50):
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
(01:13):
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
(01:33):
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
(01:55):
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
(02:16):
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.
(02:36):
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
(02:58):
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
(03:20):
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
(03:43):
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
(04:05):
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
(04:26):
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,
(04:48):
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
(05:10):
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
(05:30):
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
(05:53):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:38):
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
(07:00):
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
(07:20):
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
(07:44):
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
(08:05):
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
(08:26):
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
(08:46):
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,
(09:08):
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
(09:32):
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
(09:55):
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,
(10:17):
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
(10:38):
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
(10:59):
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,
(11:20):
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
(11:43):
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
(12:04):
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
(12:26):
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?
(12:51):
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
(13:12):
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
(13:32):
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
(13:55):
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
(14:17):
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
(14:37):
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
(14:58):
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
(15:19):
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
(15:40):
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
(16:01):
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,
(16:21):
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
(16:43):
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
(17:05):
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
(17:27):
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
(17:49):
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.
(18:12):
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
(18:35):
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
(18:56):
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
(19:17):
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
(19:38):
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
(19:59):
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
(20:24):
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
(20:45):
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.
(21:08):
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.
(21:28):
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,
(21:49):
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.
(22:12):
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
(22:33):
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
(22:56):
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
(23:17):
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
(23:37):
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,
(23:58):
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
(24:20):
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,
(24:43):
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
(25:04):
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
(25:25):
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.
(25:49):
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,
(26:11):
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
(26:35):
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
(26:59):
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,
(27:21):
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
(27:42):
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
(28:04):
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
(28:25):
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
(28:48):
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
(29:10):
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
(29:34):
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
(29:54):
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
(30:17):
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
(30:37):
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
(31:00):
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.
(31:21):
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,
(31:41):
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
(32:03):
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
(32:25):
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
(32:46):
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
(33:08):
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.
(33:29):
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,
(33:52):
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
(34:15):
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,
(34:36):
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.
(35:00):
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
(35:20):
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
(35:42):
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,
(36:02):
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,
(36:24):
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
(36:46):
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.
(37:10):
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
(37:31):
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
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(37:52):
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That's where listeners gather to discuss with episodes of Stuff
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(38:57):
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Subscribe to Invention wherever you get your podcasts. Huge thanks
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(39:17):
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