Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamp and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick, and this is gonna be part two
Speaker 1: of our first foray into the exploration of the Wheel,
Speaker 1: the ultimate technology, the one everybody goes to when they're
Speaker 1: asked to think of an invention. Uh, the thing that
Speaker 1: they tell you, let's not reinvent, when in fact, people
Speaker 1: reinvented all the time, and thank god, they do, the
Speaker 1: very technology that Anthony Zerbe was so down on in
Speaker 1: The Omega Man talking about did he hate the wheel?
Speaker 1: I thought they rode on cars and stuff. Well, the
Speaker 1: wheel was for them. Like, Okay, if you haven't seen
Speaker 1: The Omega Man, based on Mathieson's excellent I am legend
Speaker 1: it is a kind of a sad reworking of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a corny Charleton Heston. Uh lead this redundant
Speaker 1: the sentence you just said. Nineteen seventies um post apocaly
Speaker 1: oiptic film in which Charlton Heston is seemingly the last
Speaker 1: human and then you have these pale vampires that are
Speaker 1: ruling the night and scientists exactly, He's a scientist that's
Speaker 1: like Christ like scientists battling the vampires, and the vampires
Speaker 1: like see the wheel as a symbol of everything that
Speaker 1: humanity got wrong. At some point, that's kind of a
Speaker 1: shaky premise. They tell him he stinks of oil and
Speaker 1: electric circuitry. He did look a little oily in that,
Speaker 1: I have to say, but any rate, but but it
Speaker 1: was corn oil. So yes, we're continuing our discussion of
Speaker 1: of wheel technology. Uh, we're not quite as down on
Speaker 1: wheel technology as the as the future of vampires are.
Speaker 1: So let's jump back into our discussion. So how does
Speaker 1: the wheel and the wheeled cart change things? How do
Speaker 1: these technologies change the world. Well, one thing I would
Speaker 1: say is that the legacy and impact of wheeled transportation
Speaker 1: and has been much more profound and say, the last
Speaker 1: four or five centuries than it was for the you know,
Speaker 1: most of the time wheeled vehicles have existed, their impact
Speaker 1: was less profound. Basically, you know, they made it easier
Speaker 1: to move some stuff around in places where you could
Speaker 1: use them, right, and the ultimately that that's one of
Speaker 1: the main advancements here, is that it was for the
Speaker 1: transportation of goods and and people to a certain extent
Speaker 1: as well. You can also make, of course the argument
Speaker 1: for the use of chariots in a military s areo
Speaker 1: or the move using moving around say large scale siege equipment, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Though though after the age of chariots, wheels basically sort
Speaker 1: of fell out of use in a military context and
Speaker 1: were replaced largely by heavy cavalry. Yeah, by by sheer horsemanship. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: another important the impact of the wheel is just the
Speaker 1: stimulation of carpentry and road technologies like the the because
Speaker 1: that's something to keep in mind too. To have like
Speaker 1: a really functional, useful car, you've got to have a
Speaker 1: certain level of carpentry employ for that thing to even exist.
Speaker 1: And then you're gonna need to up your game with
Speaker 1: with roads so that you can get it all the
Speaker 1: places you need to get it, so that it can
Speaker 1: actually transport goods and people or you know, equipment from
Speaker 1: one place to the other. Yeah, Bullet wrights about this
Speaker 1: a lot about the So he's got a section of
Speaker 1: his book where he talks about um the fact that
Speaker 1: the wheel shaped to the modern world, and that these
Speaker 1: influences were highly contingent not just on the wheel existing,
Speaker 1: but on the different types of wheels we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Like he explores how fixed wheel sets like the early
Speaker 1: steam engine locomotive wheels, and then axles with independently rotating
Speaker 1: wheels like we saw on the more versatile carriages and
Speaker 1: modern cars had very different impacts on the world. And
Speaker 1: he mentions road design, and so think about how we
Speaker 1: were talking about roads in the last episode. When the
Speaker 1: first carriage roads UH came about, they were usually based
Speaker 1: on old roads that have been used for centuries by
Speaker 1: foot and you know, animal transport, whereas the first railroads
Speaker 1: had to be of a completely different design. They had
Speaker 1: to be built a new into the landscape for obvious reasons. Example,
Speaker 1: early trains with fixed wheelsets couldn't handle sharp turns or
Speaker 1: steep grades down a hill, and this meant that the
Speaker 1: landscape had to be altered to accommodate them to allow
Speaker 1: a train to pass through UH. And they also required
Speaker 1: the intervention of government authorities to help manage things like
Speaker 1: right of way and scheduling of use. And this was
Speaker 1: not originally the case for carriage roads, which you know
Speaker 1: eventually became automobile roads. But funny enough, a lot of
Speaker 1: aspects of the design of railroads were then later recreated
Speaker 1: when interstate highway systems and their worldwide equivalents like the
Speaker 1: Auto bonn were born. Yeah, just the idea that, oh,
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna be able to road from point
Speaker 1: A to point b Uh. There's a hill in the way,
Speaker 1: we're not going to go around it, We're not gonna
Speaker 1: go over it. We're going to go right through it.
Speaker 1: And that means that building a tunnel, we're going to
Speaker 1: do it, or we're just gonna cut a massive, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, slice out of that hill. And we see
Speaker 1: this all over with certainly with their trains but also
Speaker 1: with our interstates. Yeah, but also avoiding stops, avoiding sharp
Speaker 1: turns of what you know, doing doing all that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff you would see in railroad design. But now
Speaker 1: it's to get lots of cars through all at once.
Speaker 1: Another story Bullet tells about road design that I thought
Speaker 1: was interesting was about the Scottish guy named John McAdam,
Speaker 1: who was born in seventeen fifty six, who came up
Speaker 1: with a new design for carriage roads. So you had
Speaker 1: a traditional way of building roads, which was essentially based
Speaker 1: on the Roman road design. You'd have like flat paving
Speaker 1: stones on top of a layer of cement that went
Speaker 1: on top of a layer of smaller, looser stones. This
Speaker 1: is great for foot traffic. You're you know you want
Speaker 1: to march a bunch of legionaries through, that's fine. But
Speaker 1: heavy carriages and carts with iron rimmed wheels would crush
Speaker 1: these roads. They would break the flat paving stones and
Speaker 1: ruin them. And at one point even the Roman emperor
Speaker 1: Theodosia uh set weight limits on wheeled carts. This was
Speaker 1: in four thirty eight CE to prevent damage to the
Speaker 1: road systems. But by the sixteenth century, when carriages were
Speaker 1: becoming really popular in Europe, it was clear that an
Speaker 1: inverted design worked better. So you'd have larger stones or
Speaker 1: blocks on the bottom, and then you'd cover it with
Speaker 1: smaller stones like you could use streambed gravel that could
Speaker 1: better survive the assault of wheeled carriages. But and even
Speaker 1: better design, supposedly was this guy John McAdams, and this
Speaker 1: was roads paved with small stones, not tiny pebbles, but
Speaker 1: small stones that had to be of a certain small
Speaker 1: size and sharp edged rather than round. And when it
Speaker 1: comes down to the size bullet rights that uh quote,
Speaker 1: building supervisors sometimes put them in their mouth to check.
Speaker 1: But the sharp edges of the stones actually mattered because
Speaker 1: that meant that when traffic went over them, it would
Speaker 1: pound the stones into each other and sort of compas
Speaker 1: act them, rather than pushing them out to the sides
Speaker 1: of the road as often happened with smoother stones and
Speaker 1: bullet rights. That McAdam became known for insisting that the
Speaker 1: best way to make sure stones were the correct size
Speaker 1: and shape was to have a bunch of workers sit
Speaker 1: alongside the road and use hammers to break rocks, and
Speaker 1: this led to the common image of the chain gang
Speaker 1: of prisoners breaking rocks on the side of the road. Huh,
Speaker 1: I had no idea. But of course, as we discussed
Speaker 1: in our our Road episode, it's not. The changes are
Speaker 1: not just to the way you get from point A
Speaker 1: to point B. There. They actually change the cities and
Speaker 1: towns that you're traveling to. Oh, they completely change it,
Speaker 1: and they change urban culture. I mean, have you ever
Speaker 1: seen like old city centers from very old cities across
Speaker 1: the Middle East and North Africa where there will be
Speaker 1: the city centers there are amazing. They're they're gorgeous and
Speaker 1: they are not made with wheeled vehicles in mind. And
Speaker 1: it's great because so they've got like staircases in the
Speaker 1: middle of the city roads, and they they can be
Speaker 1: very narrow, sometimes bullet rights that even some city like
Speaker 1: city roads in city centers have ladders in them, and
Speaker 1: this is fine, you can deal with this on foot,
Speaker 1: but they're just not made for cars. And so the
Speaker 1: carriage revolution of the sixteenth century lead to city designs
Speaker 1: with straighter roads, wider roads that were better paved, and
Speaker 1: with sort of regimes to keep obstacles out of the
Speaker 1: middle of the road. And this had a really profound
Speaker 1: effect on culture. Like do you ever think about the
Speaker 1: irony of what it means to be street wise or
Speaker 1: life on the streets? Like I think what we use
Speaker 1: that to mean is being out in public, mingling with
Speaker 1: people and strangers, right, but that doesn't literally apply because
Speaker 1: like if you're you're not mingling with people in the
Speaker 1: street unless I guess there's a festival going on or
Speaker 1: something like cars are going by. You need to get
Speaker 1: out of the way. Maybe that's the one of the
Speaker 1: appeals of street festivals and probably like these various fun
Speaker 1: runs as well as like where you're retaking the street
Speaker 1: for what they originally were used for for for us
Speaker 1: to move around, uh, devoid of these uh you know,
Speaker 1: murderous uh machine housings that we use all the time.
Speaker 1: I mean, traditionally, streets in most cities are a place
Speaker 1: for people to walk and sometimes for people on horseback
Speaker 1: to travel, but also there are a place for public
Speaker 1: commerce there, for the public square to take place in.
Speaker 1: So you'd have people in the streets mingling, talking, having
Speaker 1: public events, buying and selling things. And this changed somewhat
Speaker 1: with the carriage, and then it changed a huge amount
Speaker 1: with the motorized car. The motorized car with the car,
Speaker 1: you know, and I think you can see an inverse
Speaker 1: relationship between the amount of wheeled vehicle traffic on a
Speaker 1: road and the amount of public commerce, economic and social
Speaker 1: that takes place there. Bullet rights that without wheeled vehicles,
Speaker 1: quote a street or lane can bring neighbors together instead
Speaker 1: of keeping them apart. That's kind of sad, you know.
Speaker 1: I I get kind of sad because when I see
Speaker 1: like kids in a neighborhood playing in the street, my
Speaker 1: instinct is they should get out of the street. That's dangerous,
Speaker 1: when what I really should be thinking is like we
Speaker 1: shouldn't be driving here. Yeah, I mean, it's a sad
Speaker 1: defect of of of certainly American history where you see,
Speaker 1: for instance, railroads and other certainly railroads but also major
Speaker 1: streets used as a divide between racial populations. Yeah and
Speaker 1: or yeah, like bullet rights about that, our railroads and
Speaker 1: highways very often did become like dividing lines for along
Speaker 1: class lines, along racial segregation, all kinds of cruel segregation
Speaker 1: that took place in the creation of modern cities. So
Speaker 1: while I don't really love what like cars have done
Speaker 1: to our cities, on the other hand, there are some
Speaker 1: really interesting ways that uh well, I don't know if
Speaker 1: you'd say this is for the better or for the worst.
Speaker 1: It's certainly just in at least a neutral way. Our
Speaker 1: way of thinking about the world has been largely changed
Speaker 1: by wheeled vehicles, and one of those is the arrival
Speaker 1: of standard Dice time. Yeah, Like, without wheeled vehicles, we
Speaker 1: probably would not have standardized time because before before trains,
Speaker 1: different villages and towns would you know, the clock at
Speaker 1: the main clock in the village might read a different time.
Speaker 1: People would keep a different general local time. It would
Speaker 1: probably be close to the same as other villages nearby,
Speaker 1: but wouldn't necessarily be exactly the same. And on railroads,
Speaker 1: arrivals and departures have to be timed very carefully, and
Speaker 1: in some cases mistakes and scheduling could even lead to
Speaker 1: like collisions of trains, so everybody had to be on
Speaker 1: the same time, even at distant points along the tracks.
Speaker 1: The railroads have been crucial in the development of the
Speaker 1: idea of standardized time across distance, and sometimes wonder without
Speaker 1: without standardized time, where things better or worse? Like I'm
Speaker 1: sure people spent just a lot more time waiting around
Speaker 1: for things to happen, or waiting around for to meet
Speaker 1: somebody or something. Well, this is this is actually something
Speaker 1: I think we could come back to in a future
Speaker 1: episode where we deal with the standardized time and time
Speaker 1: keeping and discussing, you know, as we always do. What
Speaker 1: was it like before this innovation? What was it like
Speaker 1: in a in a world without rigorous timekeeping? And I think,
Speaker 1: you know, there's an argument that you may that you
Speaker 1: still you still can go to places where you experience
Speaker 1: something more like our our traditional uh you know, unaltered
Speaker 1: experience of time. Yeah, I mean sometimes as simple as
Speaker 1: going on a vacation or going they're also you know,
Speaker 1: there's an argument to made maybe certain cultures put less
Speaker 1: of an emphasis on rigorous timekeeping, and other cultures put
Speaker 1: too much emphasis on rigorous timekeeping. Yeah, like maybe rigorous
Speaker 1: timekeeping might be uh, it might help the efficiency of
Speaker 1: your economy or something, but it might not be as
Speaker 1: psychologically healthy. Yeah, I mean, how ultimately it is an exercise?
Speaker 1: And how had the rate at which time is leaking
Speaker 1: out of your hands? Right? And how useful is that
Speaker 1: across the board? Now that we're talking so much about time.
Speaker 1: I also can't help but notice that I think of
Speaker 1: time as a wheel because the clock face is circular
Speaker 1: and the hands go around. It recurs again and again
Speaker 1: every day, the same way a wheel spends. A wheel
Speaker 1: is sort of like an indispensable physical metaphor of of
Speaker 1: tons of things that happen every single day. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: just an irresistible model upon which to interpret the human condition.
Speaker 1: And again, like the unseen movements of cosmos and divinity
Speaker 1: and nature. Um, you know, the wheel is a symbol
Speaker 1: of cycle of eternal return, arguably a means of understanding
Speaker 1: the very way that you know that that early people
Speaker 1: understood the very shape of their lives, that the pan
Speaker 1: Indian cyclical nature of time in which everything comes back
Speaker 1: around to the same place have you carried on? In
Speaker 1: Buddhism and Jainism, UH, particular note is the wheel of
Speaker 1: sam Sara, which charts the movement of the soul through
Speaker 1: various incarnations and phases of life, and it's part of
Speaker 1: the you know, the ongoing effort to break free from
Speaker 1: the wheel and uh to achieve liberation. We also see
Speaker 1: this in the largely medieval idea of the wheel of fortune,
Speaker 1: the road of fortuna uh, you know, carrying, and this
Speaker 1: carries over to the into the occult as well, that
Speaker 1: the forces of fate are bringing us high and bringing
Speaker 1: us low again. And then there is a circular nature
Speaker 1: to how this works that seems to lead even to
Speaker 1: like the idea of a cycle of myth that functions
Speaker 1: as a wheel. And then there of course a whole
Speaker 1: host of other symbols used in various cultures around the world.
Speaker 1: There may not be a wheel per se or a
Speaker 1: circle per se, but there is some sort of uh
Speaker 1: you know, like a spiral design to it. There's some
Speaker 1: sort of implied motion. And then, of course we already
Speaker 1: talked about the breaking wheel a little bit. The just
Speaker 1: to drive home the idea that no matter what the
Speaker 1: the invention is. No matter what new spin we take
Speaker 1: on the technology, somebody is going to figure out a
Speaker 1: way to use it as an instrument of torture and death. Uh,
Speaker 1: that's just that just comes with the territory. Now, let's
Speaker 1: not end on that sour. Now we should think about
Speaker 1: So we've talked about four wheeled carts and some of
Speaker 1: the challenges they face. We've talked about trains cars, We've
Speaker 1: talked about two wheeled carts. We've talked about the one
Speaker 1: wheeled wheelbarrow. But if you really want to get down
Speaker 1: to like the true form of the one wheeled vehicle,
Speaker 1: I think we should take one final look at something
Speaker 1: called the mono wheel. I would love to ride in
Speaker 1: a mono wheel. I don't know if I would actually
Speaker 1: because it seems like it could easily end in in
Speaker 1: a tangled metal death. But a mono wheel, if you've
Speaker 1: never seen one, is a sort of experimental or novelty
Speaker 1: type of vehicle. It's not actually all that useful compared
Speaker 1: to other types of vehicle, but it is a single
Speaker 1: wheeled vehicle, sort of like a unicycle. But when you're
Speaker 1: on a unicycle, you sit up above the wheel in
Speaker 1: a monowheel. The driver generally sits inside the wheel. So
Speaker 1: think about like you're sitting inside a hula hoop frame,
Speaker 1: and then on the outside of the hula hoop frame
Speaker 1: there is a wheel and you can power it somehow
Speaker 1: with I don't know, pedals or with a motor, and
Speaker 1: obviously because there's only one, well, this is going to
Speaker 1: be very difficult to steer, doesn't It sounds like fun?
Speaker 1: Though it sounds like fun. I've I've seen, I've run
Speaker 1: across a number of cool images of these, uh these vehicles.
Speaker 1: I've never actually seen footage of one in motion or
Speaker 1: I assume one falling over which, if you it looks
Speaker 1: like something that would be be easy to wreck. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess one way around that is like
Speaker 1: you can make the center of it more of like
Speaker 1: a a spherical cage and then just have a single
Speaker 1: wheel that rolls on the outside. I think I've seen
Speaker 1: some designs like that. I'm surprised. I can't think of
Speaker 1: any science fiction treatments of this offhand. I'm sure they're
Speaker 1: out there, like some sort of a futuristic vehicle that
Speaker 1: is essentially a mono wheel because it lends itself well
Speaker 1: to that kind of vision I feel. I know I've
Speaker 1: seen it in some sci fi movie and I can't
Speaker 1: remember what it is. I think maybe one of the
Speaker 1: men in Black movies has one, because it feels very Tron.
Speaker 1: But I'm pretty sure they're not in Tron. I could
Speaker 1: be wrong. Somebody's working on the next Tron sequel. We're
Speaker 1: placed the light cycles with light mono wheels. Yes, and
Speaker 1: if you're not working on the Nextron sequel, please work
Speaker 1: on the Nextron sequel. I would love to see another one. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right
Speaker 1: back with more on wheels, and we're back now. It's
Speaker 1: also worth noting and all of this that early notions
Speaker 1: of celestial mechanics, you know, the movement of of of
Speaker 1: planets and the spheres uh. You know, some of the
Speaker 1: models that were employed saying in Greek antiquity, uh certainly
Speaker 1: benefited from an understanding of the wheel, the wheel as
Speaker 1: uh you know, as a metaphor as well, along with
Speaker 1: the geometric metric circles and spheres like. Knowledge of these
Speaker 1: things helped the minds of the day try and figure
Speaker 1: out what was going on in the observable universe. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The one thing that's interesting is that the orbits of
Speaker 1: the planets began to resemble true wheels. More we had
Speaker 1: an accurate understanding of like the heliocentric model of the
Speaker 1: Solar System. Because when you had the geocentric model of
Speaker 1: the Solar System, the planets didn't just go in a
Speaker 1: straight circle around the Earth. They had to regress and stuff.
Speaker 1: So you'd see him to go across the sky and
Speaker 1: then go backwards. Yeah. And as you move towards the
Speaker 1: heliocentric model, Uh, then you begin to to to see
Speaker 1: these things that are, due to your point, more like wheels.
Speaker 1: It's almost as if we while we were becoming better
Speaker 1: at using physical wheels within civilization, uh, more of our
Speaker 1: metaphorical models or physical models of the universe came to
Speaker 1: incorporate wheels. You know, the orbit of the planets, while
Speaker 1: slightly elliptical, you know, they're not perfect circles, they're pretty
Speaker 1: close to circular. Uh say that then the models that
Speaker 1: weren't perfectly accurate, but like the orbit of electrons around
Speaker 1: the atomic nucleus and all that, Yeah, exactly, And uh,
Speaker 1: you know another area we see wheels utilized to really
Speaker 1: I think spectacular effect are in various wheel based creatures, beings,
Speaker 1: and artifacts from religion. We may have touched on one
Speaker 1: or two other examples already, but but I don't think
Speaker 1: we even mentioned the Old Testament examples of say, uh,
Speaker 1: you know the the vision from Ezekiel. Oh, yeah, where
Speaker 1: he saw the wheels and the fiery wheel, the thing
Speaker 1: that got like Eric von Danikin all excited all the
Speaker 1: ancient aliens. People say, look this story and Ezekiel he
Speaker 1: talks about wheels in the sky. It's got to be
Speaker 1: flying saucers, right, Yeah, And the Sherebims lifted up their
Speaker 1: wings and mounted up from the earth in my sight,
Speaker 1: and when they went out, the wheels also were beside them. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to be clear, we're not advocating the ancient
Speaker 1: aliens theory here, no, But I know because I have
Speaker 1: one thing I don't think you have to. Because as
Speaker 1: we've pointed out, like the wheel was already established as
Speaker 1: this this thing in the human mind, and and and
Speaker 1: it's one of the one of these forms you might
Speaker 1: turn to when conceptualizing, you know, visions from heaven or
Speaker 1: the will of the gods, et cetera. Yeah, it's one
Speaker 1: of the is platonic forms. Almost you would expect to
Speaker 1: see it turn up in visions. In fact, you could
Speaker 1: expect to see maybe wheels show up as alien transport
Speaker 1: in hallucinations for the same reason in the twentieth century exactly.
Speaker 1: And well they end, well they did. Now. Another creature
Speaker 1: that I just mentioned mostly in passing here is the
Speaker 1: demon bure described in Johan Vyers fifteen sixty three Grimore
Speaker 1: pseudo Monarchya Demonum sounds like a good read. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're into if you're into summoning various demons, it's
Speaker 1: certainly a good text to pick up um. But there
Speaker 1: there have been various illustrated versions of these over the years,
Speaker 1: and you know, there are some phenomenal woodcuts that went
Speaker 1: along with these. But the demon bure Is is described
Speaker 1: as the great President of Hell. Now, like all these
Speaker 1: different demons have different roles and positions in Hell, and
Speaker 1: this one's most notable because it looks kind of like
Speaker 1: a uh an evil lion's head with what five different
Speaker 1: goat legs kind of rotating or it's like rotation is
Speaker 1: implied anyway, with the different goat legs poking out of him.
Speaker 1: He looks you know, what he looks like is an
Speaker 1: overbalanced wheel, which I'll talk about in the second. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some people might remember this guy because I believe he
Speaker 1: was also on a Black Sabbath album cover. I don't
Speaker 1: remember that, or maybe it was an Aussie uh solo
Speaker 1: album cover, but any rate, uh. It certainly has shown
Speaker 1: up in um in metal likeonography a few times. Right.
Speaker 1: And then of course there's the there's the idea of
Speaker 1: the juggernaut. Uh so this is you know, in modern English,
Speaker 1: this word often refers to like a large, impossible to
Speaker 1: stop force that's on motion, or a complex machine, you know,
Speaker 1: like this company is a juggernaut, or this uh or
Speaker 1: I don't know, this football team is a juggernaut. You know,
Speaker 1: it just can't be stopped. Meanwhile, in uh in British usage,
Speaker 1: you'll find that it is often used to describe to say,
Speaker 1: just a large truck. But all I would expect it
Speaker 1: to be someone who explores juggers. What actual it doesn't
Speaker 1: have any connection to the to those word routes because
Speaker 1: it it derives from seventeenth century British observations of the
Speaker 1: wheeled altar cart processions at the Jaganatha Temple in India.
Speaker 1: See that's so that's where we get a juggernat jagganava
Speaker 1: um and and this is basically just a situation where
Speaker 1: we could have carts, really ordinate carts with big wheels,
Speaker 1: and they would carry statues of like the Hindu deity Jaganatha,
Speaker 1: along with a couple of other key figures and h
Speaker 1: they observed this, and they were even like these, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, erroneous accounts. So from for instance, the fourth
Speaker 1: fourteenth century text The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which
Speaker 1: said that Hindus would cast themselves before these great wheels
Speaker 1: as a sacrifice. But that's not true, and that's not true.
Speaker 1: It's just just a parade, a procession of of sacred
Speaker 1: altars upon wheeled vehicles. Now this is interesting because it
Speaker 1: kind of connects to the idea of the wheeled funerary carts.
Speaker 1: So we're discussing in the last episode where there were
Speaker 1: apparently cultures that didn't there's no evidence that they used
Speaker 1: wheels all that much, just for normal everyday work, but
Speaker 1: there might have been wheeled carts to like take a
Speaker 1: body to its final resting place. It seems a similar
Speaker 1: kind of ceremonial or religious significance for the use of
Speaker 1: the wheel. I wonder if there's something I haven't seen
Speaker 1: this mention in any of the texts that we've been
Speaker 1: looking at. But I wonder if we're missing something very
Speaker 1: basic about the sacred nature of a wheeled cart, just
Speaker 1: by virtue of it being everywhere and having been everywhere
Speaker 1: in human history for so long. But like, if you're
Speaker 1: building a wheeled cart and to say you're the first
Speaker 1: to do it, imagine yourself being the first to create this.
Speaker 1: What have you done? You've created an artificial scenario in
Speaker 1: which a horizontal space is no longer set in in
Speaker 1: time and space. It can be moved. Um. Which you
Speaker 1: know this sounds like an outrageous overstatement of the obvious,
Speaker 1: But but if you think about it for a second,
Speaker 1: you really think, and you you try and put it
Speaker 1: in a context where this is Uh, this is not
Speaker 1: just an everyday occurrence, but an anomaly like something that
Speaker 1: us an amazing invention, like think of the you know,
Speaker 1: the metaphorical power of that, the religious power of that,
Speaker 1: the idea that like that which cannot walk, be it
Speaker 1: um statue of a deity or the body of the dead. Uh,
Speaker 1: that the entity cannot move, but we can move the
Speaker 1: ground upon which it is it is reduced. That's really interesting,
Speaker 1: And there's another way to think about it, which is that,
Speaker 1: because we talked about it in the last episode, there
Speaker 1: is no wheeled locomotion in nature, except you might talk
Speaker 1: about like the bacterial flagellam working kind of like a propeller,
Speaker 1: But there is no animal with wheels, so you would
Speaker 1: never see this in nature. The closest thing you might
Speaker 1: see is like a dung beetle rolling a circular pill
Speaker 1: of dung around, but that's not a wheel with an axle.
Speaker 1: So the wheel and axle moving a fixed substrate is literally,
Speaker 1: in some ways like un natural or other worldly as
Speaker 1: a form of locomotion that might I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: I'm reaching here, but you the place where you see
Speaker 1: the disks wheeling around the sky, the sun and the moon,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's easy to see how you could
Speaker 1: think of wheeled locomotion as this other worldly thing. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean certainly in terms of just like a horsh
Speaker 1: horizontal space that is is an emotion. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: you can look to rafts certainly that would have have
Speaker 1: predated the cart, but still the wheels allow a raft
Speaker 1: to move across the ground with you know, rather smoothly,
Speaker 1: depending on you know, exactly what sort of wheel set
Speaker 1: up you're using. That is really interesting to think about.
Speaker 1: I think we should keep that in mind. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: All Right, we're back. Let's get rolling now. One thing
Speaker 1: I was reading about that seems kind of interesting to
Speaker 1: me is that also if we want to sort of
Speaker 1: like get into the realm of the unnatural to look
Speaker 1: at other world lead types of wheels. Perhaps the most
Speaker 1: famous design for a supposed perpetual motion machine is known
Speaker 1: as box Sara's wheel, or the over balanced wheel. Now,
Speaker 1: I know we're focusing primarily on wheels for transportation, but
Speaker 1: I think this is too interesting not to mention. We
Speaker 1: could easily do a whole episode, and I think we
Speaker 1: should in the future about failed attempts to build perpetual
Speaker 1: motion machines, because the the idea of the perpetual motion
Speaker 1: machine is sort of a perfect test case where the
Speaker 1: earnest ambition or dishonest cunning of inventors and self proclaimed
Speaker 1: inventors sort of crashes head first against the laws of physics.
Speaker 1: So who was Boxer? So there was this guy Boxer
Speaker 1: a too, also known as Boxer the Learned, and he
Speaker 1: was a twelfth century Indian mathematician and astronomer. He was
Speaker 1: a pioneer of the use of the decimal number system,
Speaker 1: and he was the chief astronomer of a of an
Speaker 1: observatory ugine. And the wheel model named after him is
Speaker 1: also some times described as the overbalanced wheel. As I said,
Speaker 1: the basic idea of an overbalanced wheel is that it's
Speaker 1: a wheel that is covered with shifting weights. And these
Speaker 1: could be glass tubes of liquid, or that could be
Speaker 1: slots with weighted disks that can slide back and forth,
Speaker 1: or that could be like metal balls on hinges. You've
Speaker 1: probably seen some form of this or another at some point,
Speaker 1: but the key is it's anything that allows a significant
Speaker 1: amount of mass to transfer from one side to the other.
Speaker 1: Of this, of these things that are all around the
Speaker 1: wheel and on the overbalanced wheel, these weights are angled
Speaker 1: to shift so that one side of the wheel is
Speaker 1: always heavier than the other side, or so that parts
Speaker 1: of the wheel on one side of the axle are
Speaker 1: always providing greater torque, which should in theory keep the
Speaker 1: wheel spinning forever, right, But Robert, I know we've looked
Speaker 1: at a few perpetual motion machines in the past. Never
Speaker 1: really seems to work out, does it. Yeah, it does.
Speaker 1: It doesn't quite work because, unfortunately, we now know that
Speaker 1: you can't make a machine like this. They're supposed to
Speaker 1: stay in motion forever without any input of energy from
Speaker 1: the outside. But we know this is impossible due to
Speaker 1: the law of conservation of energy, which says that energy
Speaker 1: is never created or destroyed, It just gets transferred from
Speaker 1: one form to another. So the wheel can't make its
Speaker 1: own energy. And then the other thing is that that
Speaker 1: you've got the second law of thermodynamics, which means that
Speaker 1: within a closed system, usable energy or order, such as
Speaker 1: the angular momentum of wheel, gets transformed into unusable energy
Speaker 1: or disorder, which is heat. And no machine, no wheel, no,
Speaker 1: nothing is perfectly efficient. There's always going to be some
Speaker 1: amount of usable energy, like angular momentum that a spinning
Speaker 1: wheel just loses over time. In this case, the spinning
Speaker 1: wheel is gonna lose its angular momentum to friction on
Speaker 1: the axle. You know that turning around the axle is
Speaker 1: rubbing and it's heating up and it's changing that momentum
Speaker 1: into heat until finally the wheel just becomes balanced. No
Speaker 1: matter how hard you try to keep it to design
Speaker 1: it so that it stays unbalanced forever, eventually it will
Speaker 1: balance out at its lowest point and just stop turning.
Speaker 1: And there's a reason patent offices generally don't grant patents
Speaker 1: for perpetual motion machines, even if it looks really convincing.
Speaker 1: You know, no matter what, there's a flaw in the design,
Speaker 1: something is not actually working as intended. I should have
Speaker 1: looked this up before I came in, but I just wondered, now,
Speaker 1: I wonder if there are like recreational engineering nerds out
Speaker 1: there who are constantly just trolling patent offices trying to
Speaker 1: get perpetual motion machines issued patents. Maybe and maybe they're
Speaker 1: even listening to this podcast, and they can write in
Speaker 1: and let us know. Yeah, if you have experience, let
Speaker 1: us know. Speaking of patents, I also came across an
Speaker 1: interesting story about wheel patents in a Smithsonian dot com
Speaker 1: article by Megan Gambino, where she mentions this story that
Speaker 1: around the year two thousand one, the country of Australia
Speaker 1: they tried to put in place this new system for
Speaker 1: patent applications. They're like, okay, well we'll make it all Streamline,
Speaker 1: will make it easy on the user. Right, So they
Speaker 1: allow inventors to draft their own patents without the advice
Speaker 1: of legal counsel. And so a patent lawyer named John
Speaker 1: Keo wanted to argue that the new system for patent
Speaker 1: applications was flawed, and he did so by applying for
Speaker 1: and being granted a patent for quote, a circular transportation
Speaker 1: facilitation device. Uh. He apparently was issued a patent for
Speaker 1: his invention the wheel. Oh. I bet he probably didn't
Speaker 1: go get too far with that one though, in terms
Speaker 1: of just like you know, trolling everybody and uh and
Speaker 1: causing chaos and you know, going out and insisting that
Speaker 1: everyone bade him royalties on his wheel. No, I assumed
Speaker 1: this probably just showed that something was wrong with the system. Well,
Speaker 1: let's let's let's talk a little bit about tires. What
Speaker 1: do you say, Robert, I am so ready to get tired?
Speaker 1: All right? Well, you know, Scott Benjamin, the Great Scott
Speaker 1: Benjamin helps us with research for this show. Scott, of course,
Speaker 1: previously co host of the long running Car Stuff which
Speaker 1: was I think finally just parked in the garage, what
Speaker 1: a year or so ago. It's on hiatus for the
Speaker 1: foreseeable future. But Scott's doing great stuff right now. Yeah, he's.
Speaker 1: Scott's busy with all sorts of grizzly happenings. But he
Speaker 1: also has all this wonderful knowledge about automobiles automobile history.
Speaker 1: So of course he brought some interesting tires to our attention. Uh.
Speaker 1: One of them that I was particularly amazed with is
Speaker 1: is the idea of the role the rollergon tire. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these were really interesting. Yeah. So what you have with
Speaker 1: the rollergn tire is imagine a steam roller and instead
Speaker 1: of like just a big like the rollers, imagine instead
Speaker 1: of it being this this hard crushing uh material, you know,
Speaker 1: this big steel wheel, imagine instead that it is this soft,
Speaker 1: inflatable substance like a you know, like a partially deflated kickball.
Speaker 1: That that's That's about what the the the rollagon tire
Speaker 1: consisted of. The classic image of the roller gun tire
Speaker 1: is an image of its inventor, William Hamilton Albe being
Speaker 1: joyfully run over by his own invention and like giving
Speaker 1: a smile and a thumbs up while it's on top
Speaker 1: of him. Right now. It's primary feature It was not
Speaker 1: that it could run over it's an own inventor without
Speaker 1: killing him, but rather that yet with these low pressure rollers,
Speaker 1: you could roll across soft or uneven terrain. And so
Speaker 1: the origin story to this is pretty pretty cool. It
Speaker 1: was ninety five and Albie was teaching in a small
Speaker 1: Eskimo village in the Bearing Strait and he saw some
Speaker 1: of the locals. They're using bags of swollen seal skin
Speaker 1: like like essentially seal skin balloons, uh, And they were
Speaker 1: using these to hoist a boat out of the water,
Speaker 1: a boat that was filled with about four tons of
Speaker 1: meat and roll it up a hill, right yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So essentially these were like wide tires. There were sort
Speaker 1: of like low pressure balloons made out of tough material. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen fifty one Albi ended up a dad
Speaker 1: acting this concept using nylon rubber bags on rollers. A
Speaker 1: good Year actually manufactured them based on his plans, and
Speaker 1: the Rollergne was born. And it does sound like a
Speaker 1: creature from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Does the U.
Speaker 1: S Army actually use these in Korea? It was it
Speaker 1: was a successful concept, and it's still used today in
Speaker 1: some forms, but they were ultimately too expensive to make
Speaker 1: and certainly to to mass produce or to even mass market.
Speaker 1: You a very specialized tire, the roll agane. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think it's a really interesting variation on the concept
Speaker 1: of a wheel or a tire, because normally you want
Speaker 1: kind of narrow, high pressure tires to reduce friction and
Speaker 1: improve efficiency of steering and movement. Like you might notice
Speaker 1: in your car that if your tires are running at
Speaker 1: low pressure, it's a little bit harder to steer the car. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, this is another kind of thing you would
Speaker 1: take out on the highway. No, no, no, no, But wider,
Speaker 1: lower pressure rollers taken to the extreme here can be
Speaker 1: more forgiving. The terrain is undependable, right, they can just
Speaker 1: sort of roll over whatever. They're not gonna get jostled
Speaker 1: around too much, and so a machine like this could
Speaker 1: never be built for speed or for efficiency, but it's
Speaker 1: great for rugged environments. Now, another design that Scott brought
Speaker 1: to our attention the twheel. Yeah, this is great. So
Speaker 1: what is tweel is kind of what it sounds like, right,
Speaker 1: if you take a tire and a wheel and you
Speaker 1: remove most of the tire, so it's just the tea left. Well,
Speaker 1: you have a twheel modern airless radial tires. They're you
Speaker 1: use for generally things like golf carts, but also construction vehicles, lawnmowers. Um. Basically,
Speaker 1: it's all rubber spoke virtually little no a little to
Speaker 1: no tire or another way to think of it would
Speaker 1: be it kind of feels like a toy cars wheel
Speaker 1: and tire scaled up to it's like usable form um.
Speaker 1: Another interesting take on the tire. This has been described
Speaker 1: as the tire of the future, the spherical maglev tires. Uh.
Speaker 1: And these were these were produced by a good Year
Speaker 1: I believe as well. Uh. The idea is that you
Speaker 1: have a tire and you transform it essentially into a
Speaker 1: sphere and then you kind of use kind of a
Speaker 1: kind of something that's like a computer mouse ball, uh
Speaker 1: insert socket. That's how you would line these up on
Speaker 1: the bottom of a vehicle, you know, four and just
Speaker 1: like you would have four tires, and it would enable
Speaker 1: crazy mobility because you could you could you could really
Speaker 1: just maneuver this thing like an ikea shopping cart. You
Speaker 1: can only the castors on your office chair exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you could do like all sorts of amazing parallel
Speaker 1: parking and the sky's the limit. But of course you'd
Speaker 1: also need a computer to help drive these things, because
Speaker 1: like an ikea shopping cart, you could the things you
Speaker 1: could just careen out of control, um and then you
Speaker 1: have to you know, flee the store. But but you
Speaker 1: and you'd certainly need a computer to help driving if
Speaker 1: you were doing anything other than just traditional driving, if
Speaker 1: you had it in you know, anything besides just sort
Speaker 1: of typical automobile mode. But the other crazy the thing
Speaker 1: about it is not only the spherical nature of the wheels,
Speaker 1: but the car would essentially float above these tires via
Speaker 1: magnetic levitation, thus the maglev we talked about. So it's
Speaker 1: just another example that yes, we continually reinvent the wheel,
Speaker 1: we continually reinvent tires. I want to see this episode
Speaker 1: lead to a revolution in everyday language. I think people
Speaker 1: should stop using the phrase let's not reinvent the wheel,
Speaker 1: not only because a lot of times when people say it,
Speaker 1: they're actually just like trying not to get you to
Speaker 1: do something that is important, but also because it doesn't
Speaker 1: make sense as a phrase. The wheel is constantly reinvented.
Speaker 1: The wheel and the infrastructure that supports it had to
Speaker 1: be reinvented or we wouldn't have the vehicles we have today.
Speaker 1: It's ridiculous, Robert, this has been really interesting, but obviously
Speaker 1: we've touched on so many things we're gonna have to
Speaker 1: come back to in the future. I think tires. Tires
Speaker 1: are are more fascinating than you might imagine. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is one of these inventions that really, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: not just one invention, it's multiple inventions, legacy of inventions,
Speaker 1: and then spiraling off from from it are all these
Speaker 1: different diversion technologies and necessary um, you know, supporting technologies.
Speaker 1: So I I I'm pretty sure we're not done with
Speaker 1: the wheel yet. Uh and and neither is is human civilization.
Speaker 1: We are still reinventing the wheel, um constantly. I predict
Speaker 1: that by all human civilizations will have transitioned to motorized
Speaker 1: pogo stick. Well, what wouldn't that be nice? It's hard
Speaker 1: to wage war on a poco stick one of sims.
Speaker 1: All right, Hey, if you want to check out more
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