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

So there you have it

[tsa]

That's why it took so long to invent the wheel.

Re:So there you have it

[lennier1]

Am I the only one who expected this to be about some company which tried to patent the wheel?

Re:So there you have it

[maxwell demon]

No, the shape was decided on quite early. However they couldn't agree on the colour.

Re:So there you have it

[Hittman]

Someone did patent the wheel, in Austraila in 2001. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn965-wheel-patented-in-australia.html He was trying to point out how poorly Australia new patent system worked.

obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Since there was no patent law, there was no incentive to innovate, and technological progress stagnated.

Re:obvious

[Sulphur]

Since there was no patent law, there was no incentive to innovate, and technological progress stagnated.

That in turn was caused by a lack of highly trained lawyers to run the patent mills, and sturdy politicians to promise support.

So....

[Anonymous Coward]

THAT'S why they're always telling me not to reinvent it...

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

[tinkerton]

Infrastructure is more important than the technological challenge.

Richard Bulliett In "The Camel and the Wheel" explains how the camel came to replace the wheel in the middle east for almost 1000 years, an evolution in reverse. Carts with wheels may be more economic for moving things, once you have good roads. But if you have to calculate in the cost of the road and road maintenance then carts easily become more expensive, especially if the cart owner has to pay directly in the form of toll. You can't demand the same toll from the camel owner because they can easily find an alternative path.

Re:Environment

[professionalfurryele]

This strikes me as very likely. I work on legged robotic systems and one of the mantras is 'legs are better than wheels'. Pack animals are much better suited to transporting goods over rough terrain than wheeled vehicles, especially if the wheeled vehicles don't have something like an ICE or battery. Even if you don't have a inorganic power source, on the wrong terrain a primitive wheeled vehicle is probably more of a burden to a pack animal than just putting the material you want to haul on it. Not to mention that if you don't have pack animals your power source (i.e. humans) is even worse suited to the task. In the absence of modern roads, etc. most of the places people would want to live, hunt and move between are the 'wrong terrain'.
Moreover there is a lower hanging technological fruit, boats. Food is already concentrated on the river so why wouldn't you take advantage of natures highways before bothering to work out how to build vehicles to go on your own.
While there are other uses for 'wheels' such as grindstones and turntables, the thing we traditionally think of as a wheel is, in most parts of the world where ancient peoples lived, useless without infrastructure. A sled is much better if it snows, or if it is flat but tends to get muddy.A boat is better if you have a river. A pack or a pack animal if the terrain is uneven.

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.

Re:Environment

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you've never used a wooden wheeled wheelbarrow; a wooden wheel works fine.

Over hard but uneven surfaces like rocks and tree roots a larger diameter wooden wheel actually works better than a small diameter rubber tire. The only real problem with a large diameter wheel is that it has to be way out in front of the load you're carrying (for clearance) which means you bear more of the weight.

Thankfully we didn't invent the patent until later

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

We'd either have to pay tribute to the patent maker, be sued for it, or be driving around on octagons.

Priorities.

[Kenja]

Its because everyone was spending their time in the bath, getting hair cuts and discussing what to do with their wealth after making leaves the official currency. What's more, the story glosses over the most important part of the process, deciding what color the wheel should be.

Re:Priorities.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which wiseguy modded this offtopic?

"And the wheel," said the Captain, "What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."
  "Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there."
  "Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
  The marketing girl soured him with a look.
  "Alright, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be."

(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy)

Hand in your nerd cards, etc...

I know, I know, pick me!

[xx_chris]

Because the installed base of Luddites were still using Firefox 3.6.x?

Not so fast there partner!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah - except you don't...
There are many ways to construct a wheel/axle combination that don't require precision tooling...
Use of slots rather than holes... Forked branch style notch rests.. etc
Extend the axle past an over size slot then mount a disk tied/lashed.pegged over the end for alignment
Older systems used a wedge arrangement in the axle to give an adjustable attachment/brace for the end bearing plate

Durability of these however might continue to be an issue

Re:Not so fast there partner!

[arth1]

you also don't need metal tools to create a round hole. Rotate a rock in the hole and before long, you have a perfectly round hole.
How to make the axle? Same principle, but rotate it in a hole in a rock. No, the hole doesn't have to be round, the rotation will cause the rotated object to be round. You don't even need a hole - a wedge will do.

No rocks? No problem. Rotate a wooden peg in a hole while pouring sand on it, and you create a round hole and a round peg at the same time. The people who invented fire were almost certainly familiar with this effect.

I think the real reason the wheel became popular so late wasn't that it wasn't invented, but because there were no roads to use them on. Wheels aren't too useful on a forest trail, flood plain, sand dune or stairs. You need a relatively flat, wide and hard surface. When we started living in towns, and traded between them, we also got roads that wheels could be useful on.

Re:Not so fast there partner!

[Zontar The Mindless]

Bah - except you don't...
There are many ways to construct a wheel/axle combination that don't require precision tooling...
Use of slots rather than holes... Forked branch style notch rests.. etc...

Just like on Fred Flinstone's car, no less.

For that matter, who needs metal to drill holes? Archaeological literature is full of references to "stone drills".

Re:Not so fast there partner!

[deathguppie]

The problem here is not with how to make a wheel/axle combo, and you are both probably right, a solid wheel/axle combo under a slotted bushing is the most likely way to build a cart. However the real issue is not how to create the axle or the bushing or putting the wheel on the axle. It's creating the wheel itself. With only stones, you aren't going to be making a spoked wheel. A flat wheel made of a tree cut out, again is difficult without a metal saw. They didn't go buy planks at the store and nail them together, so they had to cut it out of a solid piece of wood. Not exactly impossible to do with stone, but very, very difficult. One must take into account the amount of labor saved by building the device vs the amount of labor it takes to make it. No one is going to want to spend the time to pound out round wooden wheels with a sharp rock given the amount of time it would take. A purpose made blade that you could use to accurately cut away at a piece of wood with out splitting the grain would more than likely be incumbent upon the wheel creators to possess.

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'

[khallow]

why kites where not used more excessively for lifting objects

How are they going to make a kite? It's not just a sail, it also requires a lightweight frame and a strong tether. Making a kite heavy enough to lift things that are difficult for humans, is going to require a lot of fancy engineering and materials.

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."

Re:Why create the wheel?

[thsths]

> 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.

No, it is not a mystery, and for the reasons that you gave. Farming produced a surplus (can't be that inferior then), and most of all farming meant that babies could be weaned earlier and were more likely to survive. And if that is not incentive enough to take up farming, it still leads to the fact that farmers out-bred the hunter & gatherer groups. It is all well understood and not really a mystery.

Farming then enabled the formation of a stratified society, leading to the early high cultures. Sure, not everybody was well of, but it beats being chased by a lion, and for humankind it was a huge step forward. It was the beginning of civilisation as we know it.

Re:Why create the wheel?

[should_be_linear]

I think reason for this is more constant, albeit smaller, amount of food produced by agriculture. Human organisms need foon on daily basis, and if you cannot hunt/gather for 2 days, for whatever reason, your family is starving. Agriculture provides less food for more work, but variability in production is lower and doesn't depend so much on luck or skills.

Re:Why create the wheel?

[argStyopa]

"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....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."

And this is the sort of cosseted, indolent speculation that leads to absurdities like the OWS protests. Seriously - the only way that people who are by and large comfortable, healthy, well-fed, well-clothed, most college-educated, and wealthy could possibly motivate themselves to protest the 'unfairness' of a system is to contrive some sort of fantastic utopian ideal about the conditions they SHOULD be living in, and then wallow in their own self-pity about the system not conforming to this ideal.

Part (I believe) of the problem is that the citizenry today in the West are so insulated against risk and discomfort that they quite literally have forgotten how life works.

For the OP quoted above, he/she looks at hunter/gatherers and even birds, and actually wonders "why would have anyone bothered"?

My answer is: you've obviously never really survival-camped. Does that seem tangential? It isn't.

I believe that survival camping is the closest we can reasonably come to living the lives of our primitive ancestors - to appreciate what a shitty, hard existence life was and (most importantly) to appreciate what a magnificent accomplishment is today's civilization.

(Please note, I mean camping with a minimum of frills. If your definition of "camping" involves a popup trailer, a generator, swathing yourself in modern hyperengineered synthetics and footwear, and dining on foil-packs of carefully-designed and packaged trail foods...well, you might or might not "get" what I'm saying.)

Life - in a primitive setting - sucks. Not just "oh I can't go down and get a Latte because Starbucks is closed today" sucks, but really, really suck in a life-shortening way.

First, for a large portion of the time you're simply not comfortable; either too hot in the day and trying to find shade, or too bloody cold. A significant amount of time you're wet - which leads to cold, but also is simply uncomfortable over long spans in its own right. Even finding a place to SIT can be a challenge. You sit on the grass in a park or your yard and think "ok, this isn't so bad"...except that there are lots of places that aren't covered by a nicely manicured cushion of grass. Ever sit on rock in Wyoming in July? Not super-comfortable. Try to find a place to sit in a forest, and usually the ground is wet or at least damp, so you try to find a comfortable section of fallen tree which can be surprisingly challenging. You may think 'comfort' is a trivial thing...but after hours and days and weeks it's bad enough; I can't even begin to fathom how nearly-constant discomfort would impact you over years. The pleasure of simply being dry, comfortable, and sitting in a comfortable chair inside a structure is almost indescribable, especially if one was recently in difficult (cold, wet) conditions.

Second, as a indolent, probably overweight Westerner, it's probably understandable if you don't quite comprehend the grinding, overarching necessity of food and water. Generally, whatever you want to eat (barring what must have been the almost-heavenly luxury of Autumn when everything was fruiting) is as hard to get as it can accomplish. It's either trying to run away from you, kill you in turn, or protected by defenses that will at least discourage you (ie thorns, or things that make the retrieving of the food-bits prohibitively difficult or painful) or possibly kill you (like mimicry - is

Steam engines?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dodn't you read the wikipedia article?

Hero of Alexandria's Aeolipile had nothing to do with "Ancient Greece", it was invented/constructed in what we call the first century AD, during the ROMAN era, about a thousand years ago. The Aeolipile was little more than an executives desk toy, made to show a principle. There was no way to take a drive off it and the system has little torque and so can't power anything.

The Romans, let alone the Greeks before them didn't have the technology to cast and forge large iron objects essential to constructing the parts of even an ineffective steam engine. Look at the history of guns, a "similar" pressure vessel system. Gunpowder entered Europe in the Middle Ages and at the beginning it was only possible to cast small iron guns, often full of fatal (to the gunners) flaws. Some cannon were even made of wood, bound with iron hoops like a barrel, perhaps why a gun barrel is called a gun barrel...

The technology to cast large bronze and iron artefacts, with any degree of precision only developed in the 15th-16th centuries (again mainly driven by war), and the tools needed to manipulate large masses of metal took even longer to appear, so its not surprising that what we call the industrial revolution showed its first glimmerings of life towards the end of the 16th century and matured slowly during the 17th and 18th centuries, towards the end of which, the steam engine appeared.

Industrial revolutions depend on a lot more than a Graeco-Romano philosophical desktop toy!

Re:Thankfully we didn't invent the patent until la

[Anonymous Coward]

They would still be sued, as Apple has shown that you can patent shapes. And an octagon still has the look and feel of a circle, so they are doubly fucked.

Because somebody has their dates wrong.

[Daniel Phillips]

Oldest example of wheel and axle ca 5100 BC. And it is a safe bet older examples will be found. By the way, the Wikipedia article usefully points out taht the value of a wheel is greatly diminished without well constructed roads to run it on.

We had higher priorities

[MrEricSir]

Sex and alcohol were both invented before the wheel. Once we had those, everything else could wait a few thousand years.

Re:America

[Anonymous Coward]

It took so long because the Earth is only 6000 years old, not billions of years like scientists want you to think.
It was invented in 4000 B.C. and we're in year 2000. You do the math. Hint: the answer is 6000.

I think this proves once and for all that God exists and created the Earth. It also debunks evolution and probably more science conspiracies. A good day for Christianity.

Re:America

[symbolset]

The wheel was invented several times, but the first few inventors didn't have practical implementations in mind. So it took many patent expiration generations for it to find common use.

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:Thankfully we didn't invent the patent until la

[Teun]

Ah the octagon. :)

When the wife of the chief complained about the 8 bumps per revolution making her sick he invented the square wheel, it causes only half the bumps per turn!

But when the next tribe's chief's wife saw it she wanted something similar or better and they came up with the triangular wheel.
Story goes some dofus tried a wheel with only two bumps per turn but it never got off the drawing board.

Re:In the IT department...

[TheRaven64]

The wheel has been reinvented quite successfully several times. The most successful reinvention was the addition of spokes using the tensile, rather than compressive, strength of the material for support. A modern bike wheel is more similar to an arch than a pillar in terms of support, while earlier wheels are the opposite - you can make a bike wheel using elastic bands as spokes. Pneumatic tyres probably also count as reinventing the wheel.

The problem is not that people try to reinvent the wheel, the problem is that they try to make it square.

Re:America

[Half-pint HAL]

The wheel was invented by Apple (Adam and Eve's tech startup), but unfortunately was rendered useless because Eden was a walled-garden ecosystem, and they lost access to all their apps when the site moderator brought the banhammer down on them...

Re:America

[hairyfeet]

More likely they simply had a much better invention...slaves. Same reason why all the basics were there to make steam power during the height of the Greek and Roman empires but it was only used to make parlor tricks and toys for the tables of the rich. When you have slaves to do the toting for you why bother? I wouldn't be surprised if that is why so many of our earliest leaps of technology came from desert lands like Syria and Egypt, lots of desert plus nomadic tribes equals less chance to capture slaves and a lot more work to feed the ones you have.

To me the more interesting question is 'How many times have we had to reinvent things?' because we see all these dark periods where some religion, or some plague or other disaster comes along and we end up taking these huge stumbles backwards that take centuries to recover from. for example we know now that during the height of the Roman empire they had VERY advanced mathematics, used gold sutures to help prevent infection (even if they didn't know why it worked), used lithium in the form of baths to treat the mentally ill, even had taxis that charged by the mile. Then came the rise of the Christians who promptly destroyed anything that didn't have the word Jesus on it and we were sent backwards by centuries. Not knocking the Christians as it seemed like every religion did the same thing, hell we see the Muslims trying their damnedest to do the same even today.

hell I wouldn't be surprised if the first couple of guys that came up with the wheel weren't promptly strapped to it and set on fire for being witches, would be about right considering here we are in the 21st century and we still have people killing each other over what some goat herder wrote on a piece of sheep's ass 1000+ years ago.

Re:America

[Intrepid imaginaut]

In fact, oddly enough, without hermaphrodites, wheels were unlikely to ever be more than toys.

...what?

Re:America

[cashman73]

What's this reference to Christianity? Everybody knows that 4000 B.C. is when every Civilization founds their first city. Sid Meier says so.

Re:hunter gatherers

[Oligonicella]

I hunt. I also live on the edge of the Mark Twain Forest. You cannot pull a cart through the Mark Twain Forest and it ain't laws that stop you, it's trees. And no, those "paths to the forest" weren't and aren't smooth. Ruts. Smooth is totally modern. Not even roads in the US were smooth until after WWII. Read up.

"I am guessing you never hunted. you drive to where you hunt, walk around and kill things, drag them to your cart, load up the bodies and then drive home."

One, that's not hunting for a living, that's recreation. The giveaway is the "drive to" you mentioned.

Now, when Ugh and Arrgh hunted, they walked. They also walked ***all the way home*** instead of back to their car.

"When they could not bring 40 slaves to carry all the dead animals, they needed a cart. plus you did not go on a 1 week hunting trip with just your pointy stick."

Because all primitive hunter/gatherers were slave holders? No. You have no clue as to primitive life. U and A were also in far better shape than you and porting a 150lb carcass wasn't all that much.

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.