Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick, and just heads up. This is
Speaker 1: going to be part one of a two part episode
Speaker 1: because we get going on wheels and we can't stop. Robert,
Speaker 1: I thought today we should start with some poll results.
Speaker 1: Are you ready to consult the masses with me? Nothing's
Speaker 1: more exciting than starting with poll results. Let's do it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So in Time magazine and Qualcom, they partnered to do
Speaker 1: a survey. They pulled more than ten thousand people across
Speaker 1: seventeen countries to find out some views about invention and inventiveness.
Speaker 1: And there's some interesting questions here we might want to
Speaker 1: come back to in the future about public opinion about
Speaker 1: how invention happens. But uh, they asked people to rank.
Speaker 1: As one of the questions here, what are the most
Speaker 1: important inventions of all time? And three got singled out
Speaker 1: in the results here. You had the Internet, all right,
Speaker 1: you know it's a great eight invention. A terrible invention
Speaker 1: is the Voldemort of inventions. Okay, Yeah, it's like odin
Speaker 1: it's wise and tricksy, it's great and terrible. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that that's all inventions. Really, any kind of any
Speaker 1: kind of fabulous new technology is going to bring at
Speaker 1: least equal portions of both. I got the second one
Speaker 1: is electricity. I'd say that's a really good qualifier that
Speaker 1: should be near the top. Yeah. Uh. Then the third
Speaker 1: one singled out as the most important is the wheel. Now,
Speaker 1: these three are all strike me as very different because
Speaker 1: electricity is not a technology. We invented the technology to
Speaker 1: utilize electricity and to harness its power. Uh And and likewise,
Speaker 1: as we'll discuss, similar with the wheel, the Internet, we're
Speaker 1: still trying to figure out how to actually harness it
Speaker 1: and keep it from you know, shocking us. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: is no internet in nature, is there? No? Not? And
Speaker 1: people might say there are no wheels in nature, though
Speaker 1: you could make an argument either way on that, and
Speaker 1: we'll come back to that in a minute. But it's
Speaker 1: true that people really do often single out the wheel
Speaker 1: as like the most important invention in history. Right. It's
Speaker 1: it's in all the Gary Larson cartoons for a reason. No, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're there, at least they're they're probably more than two.
Speaker 1: But I ran across at least to Gary Larson cartoons
Speaker 1: about caveman inventing the wheel. We're trying to invent the wheel,
Speaker 1: generally getting something drastically long wrong, like like riding strapped
Speaker 1: to the outside of it because you're about to go
Speaker 1: down the hill. There's so many it is, there's so
Speaker 1: many bits of fiction that have explored the idea of
Speaker 1: inventing or reinventing the wheel. The Hulu show Future Man
Speaker 1: recently explored this with a time traveler going to a
Speaker 1: post apocalyptic future and and and having a job in
Speaker 1: this primitive society as a wheelmaker, and so he keeps
Speaker 1: trying to improve upon the design and it's you know,
Speaker 1: there's they're they're catching on fire, they're they're they're falling
Speaker 1: over until he finally gets the design right. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I love how it's it's this cliche that it's the
Speaker 1: quintessential example of like an already perfected technology that you
Speaker 1: don't need to mess with anymore. Right, Like the the
Speaker 1: cliche is, let's not reinvent the wheel, meaning let's not
Speaker 1: waste time overthinking something right, sort of equivalent to if
Speaker 1: it ain't broke, don't fix it. Though I think this
Speaker 1: is ironic given what we're going to talk about in
Speaker 1: today's episode because throughout history the wheel has undergone lots
Speaker 1: of reinventions and refinements that make it work better or
Speaker 1: adapt it to a particular use. Let's not reinvent the
Speaker 1: wheel is actually a really stupid saying, because we're constantly
Speaker 1: reinventing the wheel, and we're much better off for those reinventions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like in this episode, we're not even going to really
Speaker 1: get into the tire all that much. But certainly the
Speaker 1: next time you need a new tire for your vehicle,
Speaker 1: just go to the mechanic and ask for a wheel.
Speaker 1: Give me one of those wheels. It's it's it hasn't
Speaker 1: been improved upon since medieval or or prehistoric times. Right,
Speaker 1: just just throw a wheel on there. I don't care
Speaker 1: how what kind, Just just put it on their stone,
Speaker 1: would doesn't matter. Well, this brings up a really good
Speaker 1: point that we should make at the beginning. It's a
Speaker 1: caveat that we must raise. While the wheel is in
Speaker 1: a way a simple machine, it's simple and principle, the
Speaker 1: history of the wheel is a vast, complex subject, full
Speaker 1: of questions that aren't yet and may never be answered
Speaker 1: or solved, like where and when the wheel was truly
Speaker 1: first invented that. We'll talk about some ideas about that today. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's just obviously not a chance we can do justice
Speaker 1: to the entire history of the wheel in a single episode.
Speaker 1: So I think today we're gonna have to consider this
Speaker 1: sort of a a first foray, trying to cover some
Speaker 1: of the basics, some interesting observations or things that seemed
Speaker 1: interesting to us, and leave ourselves the opportunity to come
Speaker 1: back and visit more the particulars from the invention history
Speaker 1: of wheel technology in the future. For example, as you
Speaker 1: say about tires, a you know, we we wouldn't have
Speaker 1: the wheeled vehicles we have today without tires, and that's
Speaker 1: just something that we didn't even get into. Now. We
Speaker 1: typically consider wheels, again, the product of human ingenuity alone.
Speaker 1: Yet the basic form pops up in nature as well,
Speaker 1: and not only in the form of creatures that can
Speaker 1: curl up into productive balls. What's your favorite creature that
Speaker 1: curls up into a protective ball, I mean, sonic, the hedgehog. Um. Actually,
Speaker 1: there are there are a few that come to mind.
Speaker 1: I'll get to get to one in a second. Um.
Speaker 1: One animal we do have to focus in on is
Speaker 1: certainly the rhoda for the microscopic aquatic animal whose very
Speaker 1: name is Latin for wheel bearer. Okay, so does it
Speaker 1: have wheels? Does it roll around in the microscopic world?
Speaker 1: Not exactly, but it's the name is a reference to
Speaker 1: the crown of cilia around the rhodofer's mouth, which move
Speaker 1: rapidly to aid locomotion and feeding. But contrary to its name,
Speaker 1: they don't. They themselves don't actually rotate, so it's more
Speaker 1: kind of like circle bearer. Yeah. Now you do have
Speaker 1: creatures like the mount Lyle salamander and the mother of
Speaker 1: pearl caterpillar, both of which curl their bodies into hoop
Speaker 1: type forms in the little ball all like forms and
Speaker 1: can roll away from threats in their hilly environments. Yeah,
Speaker 1: likewise the Robert Have you ever seen video of the
Speaker 1: wheel spider? Oh? I don't think I have no. This
Speaker 1: is really cool that it shows up in some documentaries.
Speaker 1: So it's a spider that's native to the Namib Desert,
Speaker 1: and the wheel spider is it's a groundwalking spider. Obviously
Speaker 1: it's in the desert. It's a huntsman spider. It's not
Speaker 1: a web spinner, but it burrows down in the sand
Speaker 1: dunes of the desert, and it has a mortal enemy,
Speaker 1: a parasitoid wasp. Now, even if you don't like spiders,
Speaker 1: if you don't know much about parasitic wasps, watching what
Speaker 1: a parasitic wasp does to a spider can be. This
Speaker 1: is worse than any horror movie. It's like the most
Speaker 1: horrifying thing. If you're sympathizing with the spider. If you're
Speaker 1: on team Spider, which I guess you are, Joe, I
Speaker 1: guess I am. You're you're into just like putting an
Speaker 1: egg on something that ends up eating that thing. I
Speaker 1: know your general proclivities. I'm well, I'm on team Wasp
Speaker 1: whenever it's wasp versus Spider. If it's Spider, this is
Speaker 1: pretty much anything else. I'm intamed spiders. Well, I guess
Speaker 1: that's the other way to think about it, that the
Speaker 1: wasp is a miracle of nature that is really awesome.
Speaker 1: So yeah, So the parasitic wasp lays an egg on
Speaker 1: the spider after paralyzing the spider, then the egg hatches
Speaker 1: and the larva can eat the spider at leisure, sometimes
Speaker 1: sort of from the inside out. Uh So, when a
Speaker 1: wasp attacks, obviously this spider is desperate to escape. It
Speaker 1: doesn't want to get paralyzed and eaten by a larva.
Speaker 1: But it can't crawl across the dunes fast enough to
Speaker 1: get away from the wasp. So what does it do
Speaker 1: if it can? The wheel spider cart wheels down a
Speaker 1: sand dune, rolling away at high speed to escape becoming
Speaker 1: a host. And I've read that it can travel it
Speaker 1: like more than forty revolutions per second. That's awesome. And
Speaker 1: again this is this is dependent though upon a hilly environment,
Speaker 1: you know, some sort of um slope down which it
Speaker 1: may roll. Yeah, and the spider being near the top
Speaker 1: when it gets attacked, right like if it's at the
Speaker 1: bottom when it gets attacked, no dice. But of course
Speaker 1: these rolling in almost in a way or not true
Speaker 1: wheels in a technological sense, because when humans use wheels,
Speaker 1: what's crucial is that the wheel is paired with an axle,
Speaker 1: and that the wheel and axle together provide continuous rotational
Speaker 1: force that can be used to move a fixed body.
Speaker 1: So it's not just a wheel rolling by itself. Right
Speaker 1: with thag and the Gary Larson cartoon tape to the
Speaker 1: outside of a round stone rolling down a hill, So
Speaker 1: the question is is there anything more like a true
Speaker 1: wheel in the natural world where something rotates around a
Speaker 1: fixed body to move it. I mean, there's nothing quite
Speaker 1: like a wheel uh in nature. But there is a
Speaker 1: rare example of a similar movement that takes place, and
Speaker 1: that's with bacterial flagellum uh structure found in species such
Speaker 1: as E. Coli. Uh. The flagellum essentially amounts to a
Speaker 1: long helical screw that rotates to propel the bacterium through
Speaker 1: its environment, much like a boat's propeller. Yeah, and a
Speaker 1: boats propeller isn't pretty much a wheel, I would say, yeah,
Speaker 1: depends on the same sort of movement. Now, of course,
Speaker 1: lots of things in the natural world that are not
Speaker 1: alive also roll. Oh yeah, I mean snowballs are going
Speaker 1: to roll downhill and get bigger. Um, pebbles are going
Speaker 1: to roll uh. So that you know, these are certainly
Speaker 1: examples that early people would have been in various cases,
Speaker 1: had had access to they could have seen in action
Speaker 1: and seen what rolling consists of. But another one we
Speaker 1: often forget about is the rolling world of poop. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, consider, for instance that the near constant poops
Speaker 1: of the goat are essentially self hiding rolling away from
Speaker 1: these hill roamers, which gives them an advantage against stalking
Speaker 1: predators with a nose for their scent. And then on
Speaker 1: the other end of the spectrum you have the poop
Speaker 1: of the wombat, that is, that is more cubicle in shape.
Speaker 1: And one of the theories here is that since their
Speaker 1: poop is an essential calling card for other members of
Speaker 1: their species, like essential for you know, territory and mating
Speaker 1: and so forth with the wombat, it pays for these
Speaker 1: poops to not roll away and hide themselves, and thus
Speaker 1: they have this kind of cubicle structure to them. Um.
Speaker 1: And then in addition to poop, various seeds and fruit
Speaker 1: as well, uh certainly roll away after they have fallen
Speaker 1: and outside of the actual uh you know, movement of rolling.
Speaker 1: We should also note that the basic form of the
Speaker 1: wheel is but what a circle a disc? And one
Speaker 1: needs only glimpse the sun or the moon in the
Speaker 1: sky or see various other circular forms in nature to
Speaker 1: grasp the idea of if not a disk in rolling motion,
Speaker 1: then at least a disk like you it's not it's
Speaker 1: it's it's essential shape can be found fairly easily in
Speaker 1: the natural world. Absolutely. Now, one of the things I
Speaker 1: think we have to also acknowledge upfront is that when
Speaker 1: people say that the wheel is like the most important
Speaker 1: invention of all time, I think what they're usually thinking
Speaker 1: of is the wheel for transportation. But we should also
Speaker 1: know acknowledge that, like the wheel is like way bigger
Speaker 1: than just transportation applications, even in technology. Are you saying
Speaker 1: like they could be a complete psychopath and they're like, well,
Speaker 1: the breaking wheel obviously the greatest invention. How did we
Speaker 1: ever strap people down and break all their limbs before that?
Speaker 1: That is, no, they they're missing out on that. But no,
Speaker 1: I was thinking more of, uh, we like the milling
Speaker 1: wheel or the Potter's wheel. I mean, these these are
Speaker 1: incredibly important inventions, but I think they're not usually what
Speaker 1: people have in mind when they think of the wheel. Right,
Speaker 1: So we're not going to really explore the like milling
Speaker 1: wheel Potter's wheel in this episode, but just to give
Speaker 1: you everybody an idea of the time frame we're talking
Speaker 1: about here. The Potter's wheel was common in Mesopotamia in
Speaker 1: the Near East from thirty five hundred BC onward, and
Speaker 1: introduced into Egypt and the Aegean region around BC. And
Speaker 1: this is simply the basic idea here is it's a
Speaker 1: centrifugual force that allows the potter to squeeze and shape uh.
Speaker 1: The the the the the item that they're crafting here
Speaker 1: allows for better and faster production of pottery, and I
Speaker 1: would guess more uniform as well. Right. Yeah. And then
Speaker 1: of course we have wheels that exists purely for religious purposes,
Speaker 1: such as the prayer wheels of Tibet, where it served
Speaker 1: as a mechanical manifestation of the Wheel of Dharma. And
Speaker 1: up until the twentieth century I've read virtually this was
Speaker 1: virtually the only Tibetan use for the wheel as it
Speaker 1: and it was just a device for activating mantras to beat.
Speaker 1: After all, is a mountainous region where you can imagine
Speaker 1: that the carts and chariots would be of of limited use.
Speaker 1: That being said, Buddhist concepts, including the Wheel of Dharma,
Speaker 1: entered Tibet by way of India, where the wheel dates
Speaker 1: back you know, many thousands of years. Uh, and this
Speaker 1: would have the Buddhist concepts would have entered into Bat
Speaker 1: around the seventh century. See. I mean it is interesting
Speaker 1: the extent to which the idea of the wheel has
Speaker 1: permeated culture and language like that, I can scarcely think
Speaker 1: of the idea of something recurring without recourse to the
Speaker 1: image of the wheel. Yeah, and that's something that we're
Speaker 1: going to keep coming back to again and again. It's like,
Speaker 1: the technology of the wheel travels, but so does the
Speaker 1: idea of the wheel. The symbolic legacy of the wheel,
Speaker 1: you know, ancient technology that we can then use to
Speaker 1: try and understand the human experience, or the passage of time,
Speaker 1: or the cosmos, or the machinations of the gods. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean I have no way to prove this, but
Speaker 1: I have to wonder, like, do do cultures that use wheels?
Speaker 1: Are they more likely to think of history in terms
Speaker 1: of recurring cycles than cultures that don't. Well, certainly this
Speaker 1: was the older way of looking at you know, at time,
Speaker 1: was the cyclical nature of it. So so it does
Speaker 1: it does make sense that those two would go hand
Speaker 1: in hand. Now. Of course, the important thing to note
Speaker 1: about all of this is that even though the wheel
Speaker 1: is an ancient invention and it's hard to nail down
Speaker 1: exactly when it comes about, there was a time in
Speaker 1: various cultures before the wheel, or at least before the
Speaker 1: wheel was something that could really be utilized, but before
Speaker 1: even the simplest wheel vehicle load was limited by the back.
Speaker 1: Then in snowy climates, sled and ski technology developed because
Speaker 1: you don't need a wheel for that. You just need
Speaker 1: something you can drag through the across the surface of
Speaker 1: the snow. Um other in other areas, you're limited by
Speaker 1: animal carrying capacity. Right if you've domesticated a you know,
Speaker 1: a horse or an ox or some other creature that
Speaker 1: can that can carry things on its back for you,
Speaker 1: so you do not have to carry them on your
Speaker 1: back draft animals or pack animals. Yes, though certainly these
Speaker 1: were advanced cultures. They had they had they had their technology. Well,
Speaker 1: this is going to be something that will come back
Speaker 1: throughout the episode, which is I think we want to
Speaker 1: somewhat challenge the idea that the main uh sort of
Speaker 1: bottleneck in the die option of wheeled technology is the
Speaker 1: invention stage. I think actually we were gonna see some
Speaker 1: pretty good evidence that you could perfectly understand the concept
Speaker 1: of a wheel and even use it in some contexts
Speaker 1: without transitioning your culture to wheel based transport. In general,
Speaker 1: because it's not as useful to you as it might
Speaker 1: be to somebody else. Now, before the wheel, if we're
Speaker 1: gonna try and imagine the the the precursor to the wheel,
Speaker 1: it's likely a sledge type operation where and and this
Speaker 1: would have worked exceedingly well in the snow. And this
Speaker 1: was the kind of technology that was likely used to
Speaker 1: haul stones to stone hinge. Yeah. We we've talked about
Speaker 1: the building of the Pyramids on stuff to blow your
Speaker 1: mind before. And one of the amazing things about the
Speaker 1: Pyramids is the idea that we all the evidence seems
Speaker 1: to indicate the Pyramids were built without wheels, you know,
Speaker 1: the moving these gigantic blocks of stone across the desert
Speaker 1: and and stacking them without the use of wheel. How
Speaker 1: did they do it? Well, there's some evidence that they
Speaker 1: they use teams to move them across the sand, dragging
Speaker 1: along and then sometimes I think one of the insights
Speaker 1: that's come along recently is that archaeologists believe that they
Speaker 1: had this process of wetting the sand in front of
Speaker 1: the loads as they would be dragged along through the
Speaker 1: across the ramps and through the desert. But that just
Speaker 1: shows you you can do amazing things without wheeled transport. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and certainly we can all Like if we were just
Speaker 1: thrown into a random backyard with no access to wheels
Speaker 1: and we had to move a bunch of lumber around,
Speaker 1: I think we could all happen upon the technology of
Speaker 1: the sledge pretty easily. You know, where you just need
Speaker 1: some some horizontal beams kind of a fix together. You
Speaker 1: can pile stuff on that, and then you can just
Speaker 1: you can drag it. And then if you get to
Speaker 1: a point where you're stuck in mud or or snow
Speaker 1: or what have you. Uh, something you could do is
Speaker 1: to roll some timber underneath there. Uh, you know, put it,
Speaker 1: put a kind of like a round, you know, limbless
Speaker 1: portion of a tree log or something under the front,
Speaker 1: and then pull it over and then collect your log
Speaker 1: from the back and then put it back in the
Speaker 1: front again. Um, you know, so you're feeding it like that.
Speaker 1: And then the next logical step beyond that is to
Speaker 1: set these logs, these timber rollers in place between pegs
Speaker 1: and so this would be you know, basically a wheel
Speaker 1: design without a true axle. And this would have been
Speaker 1: like the the very earliest sort of immediate precursor to
Speaker 1: a wagon and I think there are some examples of
Speaker 1: early wheeled vehicles that, while they had wheels and an axle,
Speaker 1: rather than the axle being locked to the vehicle in
Speaker 1: some kind of like a closed clasp, instead they sat
Speaker 1: beneath grooves and the weight of the cart would be
Speaker 1: would keep them in the grooves. Yeah. I was tempted
Speaker 1: to say, it's kind of like the cars that the
Speaker 1: Flintstones had, but but they have something completely different. They
Speaker 1: seem to have an axle, right, but then it's a
Speaker 1: roller for the front wheels and the rear wheels. Of course,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm embarrassed to say I am just failing
Speaker 1: to picture a flint Stones car right now. I can't
Speaker 1: think of it. Okay, well this we'll have to come
Speaker 1: back to this later. The Flintstones car, to what extent
Speaker 1: does it or does it certainly not fat into any
Speaker 1: uh any level of of of wheel innovation over the
Speaker 1: course of human history. Well, you know, one of the
Speaker 1: things about the Flintstones car that actually is going to
Speaker 1: be useful is the idea that the Flintstones car, while
Speaker 1: being a wheeled vehicle, is powered by humans. And plenty
Speaker 1: of wheeled vehicles throughout history have not been powered by animals,
Speaker 1: but have been pushed or dragged by human beings. Isn't
Speaker 1: it odd though that the not to spend too much
Speaker 1: time on the technology of the flintstones, but they utilized
Speaker 1: um animal labor in pretty much every other aspect of
Speaker 1: their society, Like their garbage disposal is a small dinosaur.
Speaker 1: You know, every household gadget is an enslaveive dinosaur. And
Speaker 1: yet for their cars they just run around, they use
Speaker 1: their own foot powers. It's a bit odd. I think
Speaker 1: I am picturing their cars now. If I'm picturing correctly,
Speaker 1: their wheels are too wide. There'd be way too much friction.
Speaker 1: Surely there's been a MythBusters one. Alright, well, let's take
Speaker 1: our first break, and when we come back, we're gonna
Speaker 1: try and trace down the origin or origins of the wheel. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, Okay. Now, As we said early on, the
Speaker 1: fact is nobody knows for sure when the wheel was
Speaker 1: first invented. We do have some evidence about the times
Speaker 1: in history when it was first appearing in wide use.
Speaker 1: We have some archaeological evidence, some you know, visual pictographic records, um.
Speaker 1: But still the question is not fully settled. Who first
Speaker 1: invented the wheel and when and where. The only thing
Speaker 1: we can really be sure of is that Gary Larson
Speaker 1: is is probably wrong. It was probably not a Stone
Speaker 1: Age technolo oology. More likely this is something that is
Speaker 1: emerging uh as as humans are are leaving the Stone
Speaker 1: Age for the Bronze Age. Right. Yeah, pretty much all
Speaker 1: the experts, I think tend to put it somewhere within
Speaker 1: the boundaries of the fourth millennium BC, so like three
Speaker 1: thousand BC to four thousand BC. And we'll be discussing
Speaker 1: a couple of books that offer different theories about this now.
Speaker 1: While we will be talking about the wheel as an invention,
Speaker 1: I think one thing we want to emphasize is that
Speaker 1: we shouldn't necessarily assume that any place and time in
Speaker 1: history where we find a lack of wheel technology, whether
Speaker 1: that's you know, the whole world earlier on or cultures
Speaker 1: that didn't use a lot of wheel transport even more recently,
Speaker 1: that we should attribute that to the lack of the
Speaker 1: ability to come up with the idea of a wheel.
Speaker 1: Because to the contrary, I think there are lots of
Speaker 1: good reasons to believe that many cultures throughout history perfectly
Speaker 1: understood the concept of a wheel, like we already touched
Speaker 1: on the tibett An example, and and we'll be coming
Speaker 1: back around to the the South and meso American example exactly.
Speaker 1: So they, yeah, they understood the idea of a wheel
Speaker 1: just fine. They simply didn't have much use for it
Speaker 1: in transport and could meet their transport needs better in
Speaker 1: their environment with humans and animals than with wheeled vehicles.
Speaker 1: Uh so, And just as a quick analogy, this isn't
Speaker 1: a perfect analogy, but just let's play a little imagination game.
Speaker 1: Imagine yourself suddenly dropped into a Neolithic context because the
Speaker 1: world without highways and all that stuff. How useful now
Speaker 1: is your extremely advanced twenty first century car if you
Speaker 1: want to move stuff around, And that's a car with
Speaker 1: rubber tires and suspension and all this stuff that the
Speaker 1: earliest four wheeled vehicles didn't have, right, you would have
Speaker 1: to even assuming you had a four wheel drive vehicle,
Speaker 1: a nice you know, like just the the most urbust rural,
Speaker 1: mudd in truck you could possibly um, you know, acquire fire,
Speaker 1: and you took that with you back in time. You
Speaker 1: hook that up to the flux capacitor. You know, the
Speaker 1: only certain environments would really uh really work for you
Speaker 1: and then only until you ran out of gasoline. Yeah. True, Well, okay,
Speaker 1: let's ignore the gasoline and say your cars being pulled
Speaker 1: by horses or pushed by humans, or even you need
Speaker 1: to need garbage to put in there, like the flux
Speaker 1: capacity exactly. Yeah, You're you're going to run into problems
Speaker 1: very quickly, especially if you want to go in different
Speaker 1: kinds of places with it. You. Let's say you get
Speaker 1: to some uneven terrain or some mountains, or some mud
Speaker 1: or some swamp. I mean, they're just suddenly you are
Speaker 1: met with the reality that Earth is not made for cars,
Speaker 1: and you can extend that principle to say that really
Speaker 1: Earth is not made for wheels. Environments that are friendly
Speaker 1: to wheels are generally environments we've made with wheels in mind.
Speaker 1: This is sadly where I feel like the Mad Max movies,
Speaker 1: especially a thunder Road, have really they've really done as
Speaker 1: a disservice imagining a future in which these vehicles just
Speaker 1: see to roam everywhere. But I guess a desert environment
Speaker 1: has depicted in those films like that would maybe be
Speaker 1: an example of the kind of environment where yes, post
Speaker 1: apocalyptic vehicles could run wild and a you know, essentially
Speaker 1: a a civilization that's sliding back towards neolithic times. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they've got modern technology on their wheeled vehicles. Remember,
Speaker 1: they got like dune buggy tires and stuff. And they've
Speaker 1: got old, decaying roads to drivers. Not not exactly perfect,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I I know what you're saying, but I'm
Speaker 1: just saying, imagine yourself traveling across the wilderness with cargo, uh,
Speaker 1: in a in a place without paved roads? Would you
Speaker 1: rather have a cart with wheels or a team of
Speaker 1: pack mules. Now, humans carrying loads and animals carrying loads
Speaker 1: have inherent advantages that wheeled vehicles just don't have. They
Speaker 1: can go around obstacles, they can you know, take their
Speaker 1: time with uneven footing and all that. They're just tons
Speaker 1: of context where a wheeled vehicle, even a pretty advanced one,
Speaker 1: is not super useful. Now. On the other hand, while
Speaker 1: we don't have to assume him that lack of inspiration
Speaker 1: was the main impediment to the adoption of wheel technology
Speaker 1: at points throughout history, obviously the idea did have to
Speaker 1: occur to people, and so it is fun to think, like,
Speaker 1: what were those moments like where ancient inventors were struck
Speaker 1: with this idea. I just have to mention, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know how good of an idea this is.
Speaker 1: But I at least found one very interesting and weird
Speaker 1: looking paper on this subject, which was um by Gerhard
Speaker 1: Schultz in Contributions to Zoology in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: called Scarab the beatles at the interface of wheel invention
Speaker 1: in nature and culture. Of course, I mean the dung beetle.
Speaker 1: But exactly yes. That when I at the time, I
Speaker 1: almost interrupted to say, like I'm going to talk about poop.
Speaker 1: I'm so excited, but I didn't. Okay, So here's how
Speaker 1: it comes in. Schultz writes in his abstract quote, the
Speaker 1: combination of rotation and the use of low friction resistance
Speaker 1: of circular and smooth surfaces to transport a heavy load
Speaker 1: as is seen in scarab beetles rolling dung pills is
Speaker 1: the close this degree of similarity to a wheel found
Speaker 1: in nature. I think he's obviously he's excluding the like
Speaker 1: the bacterial flagellum, right right, I mean this would be
Speaker 1: an animal. This would be an example in nature that
Speaker 1: that ancient people would have seen Yeah, see you with
Speaker 1: the naked eye. Yeah, populations of dung rolling scarabs may
Speaker 1: have benefited from the early domestication of large mammals in
Speaker 1: the Middle East. I suggest that an increased opportunity to
Speaker 1: observe pill rolling scare beetles has inspired humans to invent
Speaker 1: the wheel. Now, who knows if that's actually true, if
Speaker 1: he's right at all about what he's saying about scara beetles,
Speaker 1: but it's not hard to conclude that observing one form
Speaker 1: or another of rolling behavior in nature could possibly have
Speaker 1: helped inspire the idea of rolling wheels and technology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like I mean, he could be right. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a fine hypothesis, but I would tend to
Speaker 1: lean more towards is probably a number of things right right.
Speaker 1: It's seeing the scare of beetle, It's noticing the shape
Speaker 1: of the sun in the moon. It's uh, it's just
Speaker 1: kicking stones around and pebbles around and eventually uh, toying
Speaker 1: with some of the more constructed forums here. Now, we
Speaker 1: do have some evidence that the wheel was not invented
Speaker 1: just once, but was independently invented at different times and
Speaker 1: places throughout history. Yeah, I was reading about this in
Speaker 1: um in a book by anthropologist Brian M. Fagan along
Speaker 1: with the number of Collaborators titled The Seventy Grade Inventions
Speaker 1: of the Ancient World. He talks a good bit in
Speaker 1: there about the wheel and he points out that, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was probably invented at least twice, first somewhere between
Speaker 1: Mesopotamia and the the in the Danube around the fourth
Speaker 1: millennium BC, and then also somewhere in Mesoamerica between two
Speaker 1: hundred BC and two hundred C. Right, And those are
Speaker 1: just cases where we know that they were invented separately
Speaker 1: because there would have been no contact in between there
Speaker 1: to share the wheel technology. Right. Uh. And when we
Speaker 1: were looking at the Old World wheeled vehicle evidence, we're
Speaker 1: basically looking at three different types of evidence. We're looking
Speaker 1: at depictions of vehicles or things, depictions that were pretty
Speaker 1: sure vehicles, because obviously you get in you get into
Speaker 1: problems with that. We've talked about that before, like is
Speaker 1: this an image of a mythological horse monster or just
Speaker 1: a horse in motion that sort of thing. Is this
Speaker 1: actually a mythical unicorn that we're looking at, or is
Speaker 1: this a profile drawing of an oryx with the two
Speaker 1: horns lined up exactly. The second bit of type of evidence,
Speaker 1: we have clay models, usually clay of wagons or their wheels,
Speaker 1: and of course when we're getting into models, uh, sometimes
Speaker 1: it's a question of is this is this a toy?
Speaker 1: Was this a real is just or is this a
Speaker 1: small version of a real thing. And then the third
Speaker 1: bit of evidence is actual vehicle remains, and it's it's
Speaker 1: actually I was really surprised at some of the reasons
Speaker 1: why we find some of these vehicle remains. We'll get
Speaker 1: into it. And of course in all of this we're
Speaker 1: not talking about like one particular model of wheel use.
Speaker 1: There's there's not one wheel technology, but multiple wheel technologies. Yeah, exactly. Now,
Speaker 1: a book that I was reading to prepare for this
Speaker 1: episode is called The Wheel Inventions and Reinventions by Richard W. Bullet,
Speaker 1: Columbia University Press, and this book is really interesting. A
Speaker 1: Bullet identifies three classes of wheels, actually three basic streams
Speaker 1: of technology that that go in different directions and start
Speaker 1: at different times. First of all, you've got the wheel set,
Speaker 1: and what makes this is that the wheels are fixed
Speaker 1: to the end of an axle and they turned together
Speaker 1: when the axle turns, so this would be a wheel set.
Speaker 1: It looks like a you know, like a barbell, and
Speaker 1: the wheels don't rotate independently. The other version would be
Speaker 1: you've got an axle and wheels do rotate independently, so
Speaker 1: they can spin at different speeds and all that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. And then finally you have this this thing
Speaker 1: that doesn't show up until the modern world, which is
Speaker 1: casters like you have on an office chair or a
Speaker 1: shopping card, and this rotates on an axle. But also
Speaker 1: so pivots in a socket above the wheel. These are
Speaker 1: very useful if you want kind of omnidirectional rolling. Yes,
Speaker 1: types one and two bullet rights were He agrees that
Speaker 1: they were invented sometime between three thousand and four thousand
Speaker 1: b C. The caster came into use only about three
Speaker 1: hundred years ago. Uh and bullet has a has a hypothesis.
Speaker 1: He makes an argument that I'll get into the details
Speaker 1: of in a minute that the first wheels to see
Speaker 1: major you swore wheel sets like like you would see
Speaker 1: on a train, you know, with the fixed wheels on
Speaker 1: the ends of an axle, and they were used in
Speaker 1: the copper mines of the Carpathian Mountains of eastern Europe
Speaker 1: around four thousand BC. And we'll get back and explore
Speaker 1: that in a minute. But one of the things that
Speaker 1: we should acknowledge is that each of these different types
Speaker 1: of wheels will ignore the castors for a bit because
Speaker 1: they're much more recent. Each of the other two types
Speaker 1: have different advantages and disadvantages, Like wheel sets are easier
Speaker 1: and cheaper to build. You can just you know, basically
Speaker 1: have like a square plank and then put round wheels
Speaker 1: on each side with square holes to stay put. And
Speaker 1: they're also less likely to have a wheel like come
Speaker 1: off and have the cart turnover. But wheel sets have
Speaker 1: a big problem, which is just imagine trying to move
Speaker 1: a heavy cart with wheels on a fixed axle. Now
Speaker 1: try to imagine turning it. Oh yes, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: a pain in the butt. Like you, this is gonna
Speaker 1: be a real problem. So independently rotating wheels are much
Speaker 1: much better at turning, basically better at doing anything other
Speaker 1: than going in a straight line. But of course there
Speaker 1: you know, they have their own drawbacks. The wheels can
Speaker 1: come off, there's more problems with like friction and wear
Speaker 1: and tear on the axles. And all that. Of course,
Speaker 1: cars used independently rotating wheels. Trains early on tended to
Speaker 1: use wheel sets. Because they were on tracks, it's easier
Speaker 1: to ensure that they would only be steered through a
Speaker 1: turn very gradually. Because there was no manual steering, all
Speaker 1: the turns could be dictated by the placement of the tracks.
Speaker 1: Another thing that Bullet points out this pretty interesting is
Speaker 1: that he says, basically throughout history, if you look all
Speaker 1: around the world in places in times where wheels were used,
Speaker 1: the two wheeled cart was much more common than the
Speaker 1: four wheeled card. And the main reason for this is
Speaker 1: that the two wheeled cart is easier to steer and
Speaker 1: has less friction. Yeah, Like, basically a two wheeled cart
Speaker 1: is kind of like a hybrid of of human and
Speaker 1: wheel or animal and or animal and wheel, whatever is
Speaker 1: is pulling or pushing the contraption. But when you have
Speaker 1: the four wheeled cart, yeah, it's it's it's almost like
Speaker 1: all machine. And then of course you may have something
Speaker 1: you're gonna have something pulling it as well. But that's
Speaker 1: essentially when in this whole episode is we're talking about
Speaker 1: the emergence of wheel technology. We're talking about the emergence
Speaker 1: of cart technology. But the cart is the real invention.
Speaker 1: Here way various designs that use a pair of wheels
Speaker 1: or four wheels or more more as a means of
Speaker 1: transporting goods, people, et cetera. Now we've touched on this already.
Speaker 1: But of course wheels are great if you have a
Speaker 1: smooth surface, like a smooth hard surface, like just like
Speaker 1: a flat rock face or something. Right, if you're in
Speaker 1: the desert of the Mad Max movies, you know, the
Speaker 1: near the gifts, you're doing pretty well, but just throw
Speaker 1: in just a little mud in the situations gets gets worse,
Speaker 1: thus limiting the use of wheels and making the road
Speaker 1: unnecessary invention. Yeah, and just last episode we were talking
Speaker 1: about roads. Of course, we'll have a few more things
Speaker 1: to say about roads today. Now, when we look back
Speaker 1: to the first actual wagons, we're looking at evidence around
Speaker 1: b C. We're looking at the stuff in Kish and
Speaker 1: or you're looking at a narrow, two seaters, fixed axle
Speaker 1: drawn by some sort of a beast. And most most
Speaker 1: experts favor Mesopotamia as the birthplace of all the cart. Well,
Speaker 1: it disagrees with this, but this I think has been
Speaker 1: the consensus for a while this is this is the
Speaker 1: general consensus, but again this is not something that we
Speaker 1: can be certain of. But the thing is, though the
Speaker 1: earliest evidence doesn't actually prove this out. Um there there's
Speaker 1: evidence of Neolithic wheels in what's now Poland from UH
Speaker 1: fifty to thirty one hundred b c. Ceramic vase vases
Speaker 1: that depict four wheeled vehicles attached to a V shaped yoke.
Speaker 1: And then we have clay models of four wheeled vehicles
Speaker 1: from Hungary same period. Would wheel remains from Switzerland and
Speaker 1: Slovenia from around the same time as well. We also
Speaker 1: have some five hundred burials of the Novo Titovka culture,
Speaker 1: which would have been somewhere between d and three thousand
Speaker 1: b c. Uh And and here we have actual wagon remains,
Speaker 1: really considerable vehicle remains from surrounding cultures as well. And accordingly,
Speaker 1: according to anthropologist Brian Fagan his book I said it earlier,
Speaker 1: along with the invention of the wheel, you also have
Speaker 1: the language of the wheel in es since you have
Speaker 1: the software of the wheel traveling with the hardware of
Speaker 1: the wheel. And this is actually an interesting way that
Speaker 1: people sometimes used to try to figure out what was
Speaker 1: going on in ancient cultures when we don't have archaeological remains,
Speaker 1: is looking at traces of what people had words for
Speaker 1: at different places and times, right, and so there's this whole, uh,
Speaker 1: there's this whole practice of sort of of of tracking
Speaker 1: the language for wheel looking at how for instanceance Sumerian
Speaker 1: it's something like gurger, and in Hebrew it's something like
Speaker 1: gal call, and in Georgian it's something like gorgo um.
Speaker 1: What wagon technology would have reached India by the third
Speaker 1: millennium BC and China by one thousand BC, though by
Speaker 1: that point chariot technology had actually outstripped it, reaching China
Speaker 1: around twelve BC. So you know, you can just sort
Speaker 1: of imagine the chart in your mind, a map of
Speaker 1: Eurasia and the Middle East and all these various, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, lines of communication as wheel technology and various
Speaker 1: versions of wheel technology spread with trade and warfare. Now,
Speaker 1: you might wonder, despite what you said earlier about about
Speaker 1: two wheeled carts being more popular, why then do we
Speaker 1: see more ancient four wheel carts in some of these uh,
Speaker 1: these remains. Well, I wonder if that might have to
Speaker 1: do with just the circumstances through which they're preserved exactly that.
Speaker 1: Fagin suggests that it may be due to the fact
Speaker 1: that the four wheeled cart was a status vehicle for burial.
Speaker 1: It's like being buried in your lexus. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: mean also, I mean, how do you want to ride
Speaker 1: to your grave? You know, perhaps wrapped up or even
Speaker 1: put into some sort of a box. Do you want
Speaker 1: to be in a two person cart or you're just
Speaker 1: gonna fall out? No, you want to You want to
Speaker 1: be you know, up there laying nice and proper in
Speaker 1: a four wheeled cart. It it makes a certain amount
Speaker 1: of sense. Um, ancient mummy in a shop card. Yeah,
Speaker 1: here's something else that Fagan adds. Quote but the ownership
Speaker 1: and use of the vehicles is far from understood. There
Speaker 1: is ethnographic evidence. This suggests that when vehicles have been
Speaker 1: introduced to non vehicle societies, they may have become communal
Speaker 1: property and require constant decision making concerning their use. Um.
Speaker 1: So this is interesting because it does make us. It
Speaker 1: forces us to rethink, like how a cart or a
Speaker 1: wheeled um, a bit of technology would have even fit
Speaker 1: into an ancient culture. Um. You know, certainly we we
Speaker 1: we end up looking back in time. We want to
Speaker 1: apply that Flintstone model right where we're just thinking about
Speaker 1: modern cars in the way that uh, we use modern
Speaker 1: cars now. And then also, i mean you can throw
Speaker 1: into the way we're using modern cars now is already changing.
Speaker 1: We're getting into this whole rideshare culture that is drastically different.
Speaker 1: Uh So Fagan also, you know, he spends a fair
Speaker 1: amount of time with this. He also writes that it's
Speaker 1: possible that the use of funeral cards in the late
Speaker 1: fourth and early third century BC were so widespread that quote,
Speaker 1: their religious purpose outweighed any functional constraints to maintain them. Alternatively,
Speaker 1: they may have had such short use lives that their
Speaker 1: ritual wastage in burial may not have appeared so costly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's an interesting way of thinking about it as well.
Speaker 1: It's like they didn't even have to work all that good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean all you have to do it, All it
Speaker 1: has to do is just take you from say that
Speaker 1: you know, the temple grounds to the grave pit. Uh
Speaker 1: and it as long as it doesn't fall apart, or
Speaker 1: if we go off the side of a cliff between
Speaker 1: those two points, you're good. Like, how good does the
Speaker 1: construction on a coffin really have to be exactly now
Speaker 1: this is this really blew me away? Uh, some of
Speaker 1: you might be wondering, Well, you've talked about two wheeled carts,
Speaker 1: we've talked about four wheeled cards, but what about the
Speaker 1: one wheeled card? What about the mighty wheelbarrow? Yeah? And
Speaker 1: now one thing that might strike us as odd is
Speaker 1: that in a Western context, I think we almost always
Speaker 1: think about the wheelbarrow as a tool of getting work done.
Speaker 1: You know, you put mulch in it or something and
Speaker 1: roll it away. And the wheelbarrow is a wonderful, simple
Speaker 1: little invention. It combines the wheel with the lever, Right,
Speaker 1: you get leverage by lifting up against the wheel, and
Speaker 1: you don't have to carry all of the load and
Speaker 1: roll it off to wherever you need it. But it's
Speaker 1: not always just forgetting work done, that's right. It's easy
Speaker 1: to begrudge the wheelbarrow really and think of it as
Speaker 1: just this this crude but necessary step in like moving
Speaker 1: mult or something around. Right. Um, But but when you
Speaker 1: look at what was done with the one wheeled cart
Speaker 1: in in China, for instance, it feels like the term
Speaker 1: wheelbarrow is inappropriate because because we're we're really limiting the
Speaker 1: things that they did. The Chinese are actually the inventors
Speaker 1: of the wheelbarrow, according to Fagan Uh and they attribute
Speaker 1: its invention to one Zoo Lang, a third century CEE
Speaker 1: general inventor, and of course wizard Um. It was known
Speaker 1: as the wooden ox with blighting horse, and then were
Speaker 1: several different varieties that they mastered, including both push and
Speaker 1: pull wear wheelbarrows, passenger wheelbarrows, systems that had better traction.
Speaker 1: And check this out. A wheelbarrow with saals. Yes, sales
Speaker 1: a sixteenth century invention at least, it may have gone
Speaker 1: back further than that. And it had five to six
Speaker 1: foot or one and a half to one point eight
Speaker 1: meter sails to deploy when to rain and winds permitted.
Speaker 1: So this is a land sailboat. Yeah, essentially. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I would never have thought of the wheelbarrow like reaching
Speaker 1: such heights of technological advancement. Again, it's it feels unfair
Speaker 1: to even call that a wheelbarrow. Now, I think you'd
Speaker 1: have to. I would assume you'd have to have a
Speaker 1: human steering it, right, Yeah, I would assume they'd have
Speaker 1: to be a human in the midst there. Now, otherwise
Speaker 1: you're in for a wild ride. Well, with the wind involved,
Speaker 1: it seems like it could get a kind of wild
Speaker 1: for sure. All right, we're gonna take a quick break,
Speaker 1: but we'll be right back. And we're back now. We
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, you know that the emergence of of wheels
Speaker 1: in the New World in UM in South and meso
Speaker 1: America for example, and UM. A lot of our main
Speaker 1: evidence here revolves around models from El Salvador in Mexico
Speaker 1: from two hundred BC to two and on through the
Speaker 1: Spanish conquest as well. And what these are the evidence
Speaker 1: we're looking at here are small scale wheeled animal toys.
Speaker 1: So they don't look like carts, they're not toy wagons.
Speaker 1: There are things like dogs and deer and even alligators
Speaker 1: with just simple wheels. Yeah. So an example would be
Speaker 1: there's like a clay wheel dog from I think about
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred years ago that was made in what's now
Speaker 1: southern Mexico and the old met culture. So it's it's
Speaker 1: a clear sign that the concept of the wheel existed.
Speaker 1: It was just it was for toys. It was not
Speaker 1: something that was utilizing It's not like there were people
Speaker 1: saying or some kid is like, father, why don't you
Speaker 1: make this into a vehicle of war and then the
Speaker 1: father's laughing and saying, oh no, no, no, that's kids stuff.
Speaker 1: We would never But of course the question remains, like
Speaker 1: why why didn't they take this technology that they clearly
Speaker 1: had his understanding that they had and scale it up. Now,
Speaker 1: one common explanation that's been given for this, I think
Speaker 1: this was also given by the historian Jared Diamond and
Speaker 1: like guns, germs and steal that author, his idea was
Speaker 1: that the indigenous American culture is never really developed wheeled
Speaker 1: transport at any kind of scale because they didn't have
Speaker 1: large draft animals to move the wheeled vehicles around. Uh.
Speaker 1: That book I mentioned by Richard Bullet. Bullet doesn't think
Speaker 1: that's a very good argument because he points out that
Speaker 1: the human was very often the creature that moved we
Speaker 1: old Vihoh yeah, I mean, let's just think back to
Speaker 1: the wheelbarrow example. We were just given that the human
Speaker 1: can be the power behind various forms of the cart
Speaker 1: and and certainly give and the brutality of human history.
Speaker 1: The human may be doing so willingly or under durest. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this brings us to this interesting question. We we
Speaker 1: know that there are examples of places in places and
Speaker 1: times in human history where people had invented the wheel,
Speaker 1: they had the concept, like they knew how to make it,
Speaker 1: they just didn't really use it. Like historians are very
Speaker 1: often wanting to answer the question of why so many
Speaker 1: civilizations around the world never adopted widespread use of the wheel,
Speaker 1: and Bullet sort of argues that the reason is it's
Speaker 1: not that they didn't have the idea, it's not that
Speaker 1: they like didn't know how to use it, they were
Speaker 1: just not impressed with the usefulness of wheeled vehicles for
Speaker 1: transport when human and animal transport generally worked just fine.
Speaker 1: And Bullet points out that almost all cargoes that people
Speaker 1: are trying to move can actually just be separated into
Speaker 1: loads of manageable size that can then be carried by
Speaker 1: humans or pack animals, or can be dragged along on
Speaker 1: a sledge, and instead, he argues that we should flip
Speaker 1: the question around their way, what made wheeled transport especially
Speaker 1: useful at the times and places when it was widely adopted,
Speaker 1: not why didn't everybody else widely adopted? And so this
Speaker 1: is bullets theory, he says, quote the wheel was invented
Speaker 1: for use in copper mines in the Carpathian Mountains of
Speaker 1: Eastern Europe, and the four wheeled mine cars in that
Speaker 1: region were pushed by miners and equipped with wheel sets,
Speaker 1: that is, wheel assemblies in which the wheels are fixed
Speaker 1: to the ends of the axle, with the entire assembly
Speaker 1: rotating together. In other words, he's saying that the wheeled vehicle,
Speaker 1: the first widespread use of the wheeled vehicle was as
Speaker 1: a local solution to a particular transportation problem, rather than
Speaker 1: this huge revolutionary breakthrough which would be of immediate and
Speaker 1: obvious importance everywhere. So this is flipping on its head
Speaker 1: the idea that, like, you know, how people answer these surveys,
Speaker 1: they say, oh, yeah, the wheel, that's the greatest invention
Speaker 1: of all time. He's actually saying, no, no, no, the
Speaker 1: wheel is not immediately and obviously useful in lots of contexts.
Speaker 1: It was immediately useful in a very particular context. Another
Speaker 1: way of thinking about it is the first widespread use
Speaker 1: of the wheel arose not as an example of engineering genius,
Speaker 1: but as an example of the particular mechanical usefulness of
Speaker 1: wheels in a very specific work environment. Okay, so how
Speaker 1: does he make this case, Well, Bullet argues that the
Speaker 1: most accurate calibrated carbon dating of archaeological evidence shows that
Speaker 1: the wheel was being used in some places in Europe
Speaker 1: at least as early as the archaeological evidence for wheels
Speaker 1: in Mesopotamia. And we discussed a little bit about this earlier.
Speaker 1: Uh He says that the earliest known archaeological evidence of
Speaker 1: a wheeled object is also a toy. Like we've been saying,
Speaker 1: it was a this this zebra striped bull with horns
Speaker 1: mounted on wheels from from a an ancient culture that
Speaker 1: existed in western Ukraine in the Carpathian Mountains, and the
Speaker 1: object is dated to some time between thirty nine fifty
Speaker 1: and thirty six fifty BC. Now, again, as we've been discussing,
Speaker 1: the existence of a toy with wheels does not necessarily
Speaker 1: mean that the culture that produced it used large wheeled vehicles.
Speaker 1: Some people's obviously understood the concept of wheels for toys,
Speaker 1: but didn't have much use for them as transport. But
Speaker 1: of course it could be a bit of evidence if
Speaker 1: coupled with some other evidence. So Bullet asks the question,
Speaker 1: was there anything unique about the transportation needs of this
Speaker 1: mountainous region around four thousand b C. And he says, yes,
Speaker 1: it was the emergence of tunneled copper mining in the
Speaker 1: Carpathian Mountains. So he's saying that there's this period in
Speaker 1: history known as the Copper Age. It predates the Bronze Age.
Speaker 1: Before we're making a lot of bronze stuff. There was
Speaker 1: this Copper Age, which he said began around fifty b C.
Speaker 1: In Serbia. And this was a metal working age that
Speaker 1: where copper or was was separated into pure metal and
Speaker 1: used to fashion copper tools and trinkets and objects. But well,
Speaker 1: it says by the late Copper Age, most of the
Speaker 1: low hanging fruit had been picked, like their surface copper
Speaker 1: deposits around the world, but those had already been depleted
Speaker 1: because copper became valuable, and so people found all of
Speaker 1: the exposed copper and mind it and is the demand
Speaker 1: for copper remained or increased while surface copper supply decreased.
Speaker 1: There was this incentive to dig tunnels into the rocks
Speaker 1: to find deeper and deeper veins of copper to exploit. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so he says copper ore is valuable, but it's
Speaker 1: really dense, and he writes that it weighs about a
Speaker 1: hundred and forty pounds per cubic foot. That's really heavy,
Speaker 1: and most of the ore is waste, Like, most of
Speaker 1: that weight that you're going to be moving around doesn't
Speaker 1: actually turn into the metal that you can use. Stuff
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to chip away and refine later, yeah,
Speaker 1: or get or burn off. Yeah. So a cubic foot
Speaker 1: of ore yields only about one to three pounds of
Speaker 1: the refined metal, and it's a hundred and forty pounds
Speaker 1: of stuff you've got to take out of the mine.
Speaker 1: So he says, inside these mine tunnels, you would have
Speaker 1: to be constantly carrying baskets of this extremely heavy ore
Speaker 1: back outside, so they could be melted down in fires
Speaker 1: to separate the copper from the waiste product. And so
Speaker 1: then he's like, okay, think about the properties of these
Speaker 1: mine tunnels. They could be small, and sometimes the entrance
Speaker 1: into them would have to be a vertical shaft before
Speaker 1: you get to the tunnel part, which meant you probably
Speaker 1: couldn't bring pack animals like oxen into the mines to
Speaker 1: carry your ore baskets back out to the entrance for you.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, the inside of the mine shaft
Speaker 1: would have a relatively smooth rock surface that traveled in
Speaker 1: a straight line as the floor. So Bullet argues that
Speaker 1: this is what made late coper age minds the perfect
Speaker 1: environment for the first four wheeled vehicles in regular use
Speaker 1: for transport. The loads were very heavy, pack animals were
Speaker 1: not practical, and smooth stone surfaces on the floor of
Speaker 1: the tell we're friendly to wheeled baskets or mine carts
Speaker 1: rather than being you know, covered in mud and obstacles
Speaker 1: and uneven terrain that that made wheels impractical. And a
Speaker 1: lot of other environments. This is fascinating because it reminds
Speaker 1: me of of more modern examples of tunnel environments where
Speaker 1: wheels become a necessity. So I mean certainly large scale mining,
Speaker 1: but I'm also thinking of smuggling tunnels, and even I
Speaker 1: want to say, it's been a while since I read
Speaker 1: The Great Escape, but I believe they had to they
Speaker 1: use some sort of wheels in that, didn't they. Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I've never read it. I may have
Speaker 1: that wrong. I have to check by that back end man.
Speaker 1: Maybe have to remove that section if I got that wrong.
Speaker 1: But but but certainly, yeah, if you're in a cramped
Speaker 1: little tunnel, and you need to move even yourself along
Speaker 1: much less cargo. Uh, there's no room for animals, there's
Speaker 1: limited rules, room for slinging anything over your back. The
Speaker 1: cart begins to make perfect sense, and we see analogies
Speaker 1: to this in later technology that we have much better
Speaker 1: records of, like the my environment was crucial to the
Speaker 1: development of railroads. Like rail based travel later on developed
Speaker 1: when people were trying to get or out of minds,
Speaker 1: in fact, minds figuring to all kinds of stuff. Just coincidentally,
Speaker 1: you know, the steam engine was also one of the
Speaker 1: first big uses that it was developed for was not
Speaker 1: for moving stuff around, but was for pumping water. Yeah,
Speaker 1: minds would flood and you had to pump them out,
Speaker 1: and that's what the steam engine was for a little
Speaker 1: preview of perhaps the future episode on steam technology. It's
Speaker 1: a fast there's a fascinating history there as well. Absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd love to come back to that. So anyway, I
Speaker 1: just want to say in summary, we don't know that
Speaker 1: bullets hypothesis here about the origins the wheel set is correct,
Speaker 1: but I do think it's really interesting and if you'd
Speaker 1: like to read his full argument where he presents a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of evidence. You can check out his book.
Speaker 1: But if bullets argument is correct, the invention of the
Speaker 1: wheel is truly a case of necessity being the mother
Speaker 1: of invention, and that it's not that there was something
Speaker 1: special about the inventor, but the is something special about
Speaker 1: the problem the inventor faced and the environment in which
Speaker 1: that problem arose, not necessarily like unique genius or creativity,
Speaker 1: but unique necessity. All right, So we're gonna leave it
Speaker 1: there for this episode, but please join us for the
Speaker 1: next episode of Invention because we're going to discuss even
Speaker 1: more about wheels and this and the next episode is
Speaker 1: going to be the one where we get into the
Speaker 1: legacy of wheels. In the meantime, if you want to
Speaker 1: check out more episodes of Invention, head on over to
Speaker 1: invention pod dot com. That's where you'll find all those episodes.
Speaker 1: You'll find links out to some social media accounts that
Speaker 1: were active off on. You also find a link for
Speaker 1: our store where you can actually you can get a
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Speaker 1: the power to do so. Huge thanks as always to
Speaker 1: our excellent audio producer, Tari Harrison. If you would like
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us with feedback about this episode,
Speaker 1: it or any other, to suggest a topic for the
Speaker 1: future or justice say hello. You can email us at
Speaker 1: contact at invention pod dot com, m