Why Did It Take So Long To Invent the Wheel?

Hugh Pickens writes "Wheels are the archetype of a primitive, caveman-level technology, and we tend to think that inventing the wheel was the number one item on man's to-do list after learning to walk upright. But LiveScience reports that it took until the bronze age (3500 BC), when humans were already casting metal alloys and constructing canals and sailboats, for someone to invent the wheel-and-axle, a task so challenging archaeologists say it probably happened only once, in one place. The tricky thing about the wheel isn't a cylinder rolling on its edge, but figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder. 'The stroke of brilliance was the wheel-and-axle concept,' says David Anthony, author of The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. To make a fixed axle with revolving wheels, the ends of the axle have to be nearly perfectly smooth and round, as did the holes in the center of the wheels. The axles have to fit snugly inside the wheels' holes, but not too snug, or there will be too much friction for the wheels to turn. But the real reason it took so long is that whoever invented the wheel would have needed metal tools to chisel fine-fitted holes and axles. 'It was the carpentry that probably delayed the invention until 3500 BC or so, because it was only after about 4000 BC that cast copper chisels and gouges became common in the Near East.'"

Comments

Environment

[MichaelSmith]

But also the wheel needed an application. While people lived in small villages, there wasn't much of a need to move things over large enough distances to require vehicles. And when things were moved across the countryside, there may not have been surfaces for wheels. Most of us could build a wheel and axle to use on a modern road, but how about building one for a narrow, muddy track through the forest?

Re:Environment

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who invented wheels were not using them for wagons, but originally as pottery wheels. Wheels for wagons came a little later, and further north, in Central Asia, where the wide flat grasslands made it easier to use wheeled wagons (at least in summer), and the availability of large trees made the wood needed more accessible.

Re:Environment

[green1]

When I read your post, the first thing to come to mind is that you don't need long distances to make a wheel useful, wheelbarrows are very useful tools used generally for quite short distances. However on further thought it occurs to me that those sort of applications may have been more likely invented as an application for the wheel, rather than the other way around. You do however have a good point about the surfaces required, it is actually only quite recently that it has made sense to ship large shipments or long distances over land, even 200 years ago every effort would have been made to ship by water instead if at all possible. (obviously not always possible, but there's a good reason that the population of many countries is concentrated on the coasts and along major waterways.

Re:Environment

[arth1]

For garden work, I still find it easier to drag stuff using a "sled" of two long sticks rather than using a wheelbarrow. Especially when the ground is soggy, uneven or steep.
It would be even more so for those owning a large farm animal or slaves, I would think. Until they had somewhere to use the wheels more efficiently than their donkey/cow/horse/slave, why would they want wheels? It may have been a solution looking for a problem for a long time.

Re:Environment

[msobkow]

More to the point, there is a much older invention called a "travois", which is basically a pair of long sticks with a basket or netting between to carry the cargo. The travois was used for centuries before the invention of the wheel, if not thousands of years.

Contrary to popular modern understanding, the friction of dragging a travois was little or no worse than early wheels which were poorly fitted and poorly lubricated. It wasn't until axles could be turned on lathes and the joints properly greased that the wheel actually had any significant advantage over the travois for the average person.

Far earlier than the wheel was the simple and basic concept of placing logs under heavy loads and letting them roll under the load. Log rollers didn't require special machining tools, they could handle incredibly heavy loads, and as a result, there was no real NEED for the wheel until technology made it more efficient than what people had been using in the past.

It's like compilers. Sure we can't imagine computing without them nowadays, but for 10-20 years in the early days of computing, there WERE NO PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES. It wasn't until computers were powerful and "cheap" enough to make the concept of an abstract language cheaper to code than raw machine code that the compiler and programming languages really took hold.

What do you mean by 'wheel'

[arisvega]

That's a bit of wordplay- same story as to when the boat was invented: it was whenever someone had wood, and noticed that it can take a load (and still float)

Now a shaft going through a firm hole that stays in place while it rotates and has a wheel attached yes, it is a different kind of invention, but the concept of "wheel" was there already- heavy things were carried by rolling them onto logs. True, not the most elegant solution, but beats the hell out of having your slaves die of exhaustion.

Puns aside, what puzzles me more is a) why kites where not used more excessively for lifting objects, especially since the sail was known (perhaps they just dinae think of it?) and b) why there was no industrial revolution after Ancient Greece since they had steam engines

Re:What do you mean by 'wheel'

[tsa]

You need a lot more than a prototype of a steam engine for an industrial revolution. For starters you need a reliable way to make huge quantities of iron. For this you need enormous amounts of iron ore and coal (or another fuel). For these you need mines and the knowledge and technology to mine them. Furthermore you need other metals, wood, paint, and a whole lot of other chemicals and things, all readily available in huge quantities. If one of them misses you have a big problem. England is probably the only place in the world where all of these things were available in large quantities very close to each other.

Re:What do you mean by 'wheel'

[thomst]

Rakishi opined:

The Roman empire was based on slavery to it's very roots. They conquered to gain slaves to do work for them. When that cycle stopped is when Rome started to collapse.

All advanced (i.e. - "city-building") ancient civilizations were based on slavery (or serfdom, as in the Egyptian fellahin). Rome was not at all unique in that regard. However, Rome did not conquer to gain slaves, per se. In fact, the goals of Roman conquest evolved over time. Initially (which is to say, "during the early Republic"), the goals were to preserve territorial integrity, and to create buffer zones against potential invaders. Later, the goal changed to providing sources of tribute in the form of taxes. An occasional fresh source of slaves, to be sure, was a desirable and welcome bonus, but the primary attraction was the ongoing source of revenue new conquests created.

When the Roman Empire exceeded its maximum governable size, and was forced to divide itself in two, those new sources of revenue were taken out of the equation. The end came as Roman currency became progressively debased, causing rampant inflation, and a currency collapse that, in turn, made it increasingly difficult to finance the basis of Roman power - its standing armies. By the time Alaric and his Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, the armies that allowed Rome to project power had all but disappeared. When Odoacer claimed the Western Principate in 476 - because no meaningful Roman military machine remained - Rome then altogether ceased to matter as a regional power.

Why create the wheel?

[br00tus]

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has written some interesting things about early society. One thing he notes, is that there was an "original affluent society" of sorts - hunter gatherers from 40,000 years ago often worked less hours a week than, say, a worker in a Foxconn factory making iPhones, or even say a network administrator being paged at 3 AM because the network is down. From the hunter gatherers of then, to the few surviving bands in South America, Africa and Asia today, the hunter gatherers often have to work less hours per week to provide for themselves than the people with their hands on the most sophisticated technology we have available today. One may ask why the wheel should be invented in the first place.

Another interesting thing Sahlins points out is this. Occupy Wall Street and the like protests against "the 1%", which in many cases are heirs of the type portrayed in the documentary "Born Rich" or the like. People, like say, the UK's royal family, where it has been so many generations since anyone worked, that those ancestors are lost in memory. In other words, there are people who do no work, and are living (and often living quite a high life) off of the wealth they take from the work time of those who do work. This would not be possible without surplus. If I am a hunter gatherer, and all of the work I do is to feed myself, my children, and perhaps the very elderly in my band, there is no surplus left over. But once the agricultural revolution happened, there was inevitably surplus, and thus the possibility of a class of priests, kings and such who did not need to work. Sahlins point is the agricultural revolution was not needed for this surplus to exist. Hunter-gatherers CAN work 80 hours, and support idlers who do not work. But hunter-gatherers simply don't do this - everyone able bodied works. And as many anthropologists etc. have pointed out - the agricultural revolution is a mystery, because the techniques of hunting/gathering had advanced sufficiently by 10000 years ago that they were far superior, in the short-term back then, then farming. Farming back then was a much worst way of getting food than hunting/gathering. It took many, many years to breed say teosinte grasses into maize/corn, domesticate animals and that sort of thing.

Why should the wheel be created. I am watching the TV debates and hearing about "job creators", which I guess are rich people. Then I watch birds flying around and realize they don't need anyone or anything to create jobs for them, they are self-sufficient. It's the majority of humans who in are social structure are dependent on these wealthy "job creators" to create jobs so that they can survive. A bizarre concept which early hunter-gatherers didn't have to worry about either - they were as free as birds in being self-sufficient and not dependent on these technology-empowered "job creators". No wonder the wheel wasn't invented for so many years.

Re:Why create the wheel?

[andymadigan]

Why the heck would the agricultural revolution be a mystery? The Levant had the first known sedentary culture (born of a land of "milk and honey" - seriously, there was so much food available in the immediate area that they didn't need to migrate constantly). Then, the climate changed, and the Levant starting moving towards the much more desert-like area it is today. Naturally, people who had been living a sedentary lifestyle for generations would try to preserve that and so it seems inevitable that at least a few of them would come up with a solution.

If you think I'm making this up (or pulling it from the bible) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natufian_culture .

Actually, I personally believe that some form of this eventually became the "Garden of Eden" story.

Re:Why create the wheel?

[RichPowers]

Jared Diamond wrote a famous article to that effect: "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race."

"One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. "

"Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the [Native American] farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor."

Why is the wheel considered so important?

[identity0]

Why is the wheel considered so important?

I suspect it's a western-only or maybe American-only thing, as the Japanese do not seem to consider it "the most important early invention", at least to the extent Americans do.

It was really strange seeing "the wheel" used as an example of "the beginning of technology" in a lot of American cartoons, which you don't see in Japanese ones. I kind of suspect it has something to do with American car-centric culture, and them assuming primitive wheels were as important in their time as they are today.

What countries do you guys have experience in, and do they consider the wheel as important as Americans do?

Reuleaux triangle

[AliasMarlowe]

you could make a shape with several thousand sides and patent that

Actually, the concept was employed by Poul Anderson in his story The three-cornered wheel, in which a constant width polygon (the simplest being a Reuleaux triangle) was employed to circumvent a religious prohibition on circular objects.

There is also a three-dimensional equivalent (constant-width polyhedron). A version of the Reuleaux triangle with rounded corners is occasionally encountered in industrial design. People keep reinventing it, just like square wheels, etc.

Re:America

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Let's not leave out the credit to all those other religions, who did the much, much worse. What makes Christians unique is that they managed to hold back enough for science to be conserved and even improved upon.

Read Jared Diamond's book to see just how bad things are. Whether we're talking muslims, buddhists, mayans, Incas, or whatever the religion on the pacific and Indian ocean islands were called. Each and every one managed to destroy close to every last iota of written text they could get their hands on. Some, like the mayas and muslims, got quite far ... and then destroyed their progress. Even atheist states aren't innocent in this regard, as ancient athens at one time voted on the order to destroy every book that claimed objects sometimes move in a straight line (only circular trajectories were allowed). Likewise they voted several times to destroy mentions of particular parts of history.

The Christian world by contrast, even in the dark ages, was covered in Libraries containing much more than just the bible, and this was maintained by Christian monks. Even more unique amongst the world's religions : they actually copied non-christian works verbatim, even where they disagreed with canon. This was obviously mentioned in commentaries, but they didn't rewrite the books like muslims did (for example, so did hindus and buddhists). Some muslims go so far as to say that the version from muslim scolars from the middle ages are "really" the original versions.

Some western scholars hold that even the quran itself is such a very badly copied book, a copy of the bible, made in a language of the early companions of the prophet. These guys then proceeded to get nearly all of themselves killed in wars they started, resulting in the stupid fact that they didn't have anyone who spoke the original language (Arameic) the book was written down in. Then they transliterated, picking whatever word was the closest arabic word in a systematic manner, the result of which was written down. Some stories do indeed match word-for-word with ancient eastern bibles, but it is often hard to find these things, because they re-ordered the sentences (from long to short), and left >95% of them out entirely (which is why the quran is such a short and horribly unreadable book). See also, Christopher Hitchens.

Sadly, when it comes to religions, Christians are the top of the line. Which of course doesn't mean that they're particularly supportive of science, just that they can usually resist the apparently very strong human temptation to burn, kill or crucify anyone remotely suspected of having independent ideas.