How was the wheel invented?

[ronjanec]

Pre-historic man and his fellow cavemen were very religious people, and they originally worshipped the sun before any other earlier "gods": I believe they eventually made an image of their "god" the sun and placed "him" high up on a primitive altar to worship: The image they created only resembled a circular disc because they of course did not know that their "god" actually existed in the form of a sphere(the circular sun appearance is an optical illusion of course);

During one of the worship services, one of the believers stumbled into the altar, and the sun "god" was knocked off the altar(!), and "he" then started rolling off away from the alter for quite awhile before finally stopping somewhere.

From here on it gets really fuzzy, but I am pretty sure they started to experiment around with the sun "god" image(upright position, rolling in a straight line), and they then made another sun "god" image, then a crude axle, and eventually put this all together with a cart on top of the wheels and axles with eventually something to pull this with in front(I believe this was how the wheel may have been invented, or at least a variation of some kind on this, with still something to do with a very primitive sun "god" image)

Maybe someone drew a "circle" on a cave wall and then made a circular object independent from this image that then turned into the wheel? Maybe. But why would they? What would be the significance of just a circle on a cave wall? Maybe someone made a circular image of a very scary eclipse, and that turned into the first wheel somehow? Possibly.

Someone saw another circle existing somewhere on earth and then copied this into a wheel design? Not possible. A perfect "circle" is not a naturally occurring existence on earth, and I really doubt it is a naturally occurring existence existing anywhere in the rest of the universe(again, "the circle" that only appears to us to exist, was all originally based on an optical illusion of the appearance of the sun and moon to us)

[Dave_Oblad]

Hi Ron,

Interesting. I think the first wheel was a Square. It was very bumpy to ride on with a cart, so the Science guys decided to remove a Bump by making it a Triangle. This was logical (1 less bump per rotation) but didn't really help much. Then, centuries later, some guy got the notion of going the other direction and add more bumps. Completely non-logical, but it worked. And Science was born.. if it makes no sense, it must be right. So now days we have a wheel with millions of tiny bumps, and it rolls very smoothly.

I like your part about driving a Stake through the uncooperative Deity, as this seems to be a norm for Religion.

Anyway..

In the real world, Trees are basically Round. Some guy decided to make a table from a slice and it rolled away, with the inventor chasing it down a hill. He discovered how easy it was to Roll it back home and the first wheel was invented. When he added a support for his table to elevate it off the ground for you feet to go under.. the first Uni-Cycle got invented. Then roads became a problem:

BC by Johnny Hart

Best wishes,
Dave :^)

[BadgerJelly]

Pottery

[vivian maxine]

Someone saw a snake swallowing its own tail? Great imaginations you all have. Now for perpetual motion.

[ronjanec]

Hi Ron,

Interesting. I think the first wheel was a Square. It was very bumpy to ride on with a cart, so the Science guys decided to remove a Bump by making it a Triangle. This was logical (1 less bump per rotation) but didn't really help much. Then, centuries later, some guy got the notion of going the other direction and add more bumps. Completely non-logical, but it worked. And Science was born.. if it makes no sense, it must be right. So now days we have a wheel with millions of tiny bumps, and it rolls very smoothly.

I like your part about driving a Stake through the uncooperative Deity, as this seems to be a norm for Religion.

Anyway..

In the real world, Trees are basically Round. Some guy decided to make a table from a slice and it rolled away, with the inventor chasing it down a hill. He discovered how easy it was to Roll it back home and the first wheel was invented. When he added a support for his table to elevate it off the ground for you feet to go under.. the first Uni-Cycle got invented. Then roads became a problem:

BC_Wheel..jpg

Best wishes,
Dave :^)

Yeah, their "Diety" did a really lousy job of answering everyone's prayers and got what "he" deserved. :)

[ronjanec]

Pottery

BJ,

http://ceramics.org/learn-about-ceramic ... f-ceramics It sounds like as early as 24,000 BC, man could have made an image of the sun "god" at least in the shape of a wheel/circular disc.

[ronjanec]

Pottery

Duplicate post.

[BadgerJelly]

Pottery

[TheVat]

LOL

[BadgerJelly]

Couldn't help myself! XD haha

[Dave_Oblad]

Hi all,

I still think the original wheel was a table. It was elevated to put ones Knees under it, so that one could sit upright.. chiropractic methods still being a long way off. Walk upright and Sit upright was the official Motto. Still holds to this very day in fact.

The center spoke served a 2nd purpose too. Without pottery, that came much later, they had no plates and the table became a mess. Just give this early table a spin and it automatically cleared itself.

These guys were not as stupid as they looked.

Ok, on a more serious note, I believe the first wheel was used on what we call a wheelbarrow.. long before two-wheeled carts that employed animal power for motion. The latter needed roads of some sort before they could be truly useful. Wheelbarrows helped a lot in moving dirt around on uneven ground, as they still do today. Before that, one had to drag dirt around, which was of course, a real drag.

Best wishes,
Dave :^)

[Forest_Dump]

Some nteresting ideas here and, truth be told, off the top of my head, I am not sure what the best answer might be given the available evidence. But I can certainly rule out a few and narrow down some choices. Use of a wheel in any kind of transportation also requires some kind of path the roll the wheel along. That in turn also requires the ability to harness a considerable amount of effort to clear the path of obstacles like rocks and trees that would block the rolling of the wheel. Even more labour would be needed to clear the path of log rollers, of course. You would also need to consider evidence for either the domestication of draft animals like either horse or oxen and that would come with evidence from the bones of the animals that they had pulled heavy loads (yes it is out there in classical studies on the subject). Alternately, if you wish to hypothesize the labour was supplied by people, either as slaves or willingly, you just need to look at the evidence of large numbers of people livig together, being fed, led, etc. But of course, in the new world, there is evidence of the use of the wheel on toys even though it was never used on roads because they didn't exist as such.

But there is earlier evidence of the use of the wheel for other things. Wheel-thrown pottery is definitely one example. Kudos to BadgerJelly there. Wheels were also essential as spinning wheels in weaving with evidence of conplex weaving preserved either as spinning wheels or as complex cord impressions in pottery. Even older is evidence of flywheels used to drill with bow drills. Fairly simple rocks with holes and drilling through various kinds of rocks for amulets, beads (including shell beads, etc.), using chert and flint drills are eve older, perhaps back into the Pleistocene.

[ronjanec]

Some nteresting ideas here and, truth be told, off the top of my head, I am not sure what the best answer might be given the available evidence. But I can certainly rule out a few and narrow down some choices. Use of a wheel in any kind of transportation also requires some kind of path the roll the wheel along. That in turn also requires the ability to harness a considerable amount of effort to clear the path of obstacles like rocks and trees that would block the rolling of the wheel. Even more labour would be needed to clear the path of log rollers, of course. You would also need to consider evidence for either the domestication of draft animals like either horse or oxen and that would come with evidence from the bones of the animals that they had pulled heavy loads (yes it is out there in classical studies on the subject). Alternately, if you wish to hypothesize the labour was supplied by people, either as slaves or willingly, you just need to look at the evidence of large numbers of people livig together, being fed, led, etc. But of course, in the new world, there is evidence of the use of the wheel on toys even though it was never used on roads because they didn't exist as such.

But there is earlier evidence of the use of the wheel for other things. Wheel-thrown pottery is definitely one example. Kudos to BadgerJelly there. Wheels were also essential as spinning wheels in weaving with evidence of conplex weaving preserved either as spinning wheels or as complex cord impressions in pottery. Even older is evidence of flywheels used to drill with bow drills. Fairly simple rocks with holes and drilling through various kinds of rocks for amulets, beads (including shell beads, etc.), using chert and flint drills are eve older, perhaps back into the Pleistocene.

I imagine that this is a mystery that no one ever know for certain right Forest? Even if we eventually did find something from 10,000 years ago(Atlantis?), we still won't know for certain if it was the first.

[pythicnome]

Its a tough one, but I'd say that before proper wheels humans had learned to make use of rollers. These would be several straigh trees of the same length, laid on the ground in parallel. They would have used these to move large heavy stones. This is provable.
They also used similar sets of rollers to make rafts, but in the case they would be tied together.
Both of the above are also a sub-set of acquiring lumber itself, Once a tree was felled it could be observed that it was moveable by rolling downhill.
Someone has pointed out that the really difficult idea in the wheel was the thing that secured it to the cart. Because once you had a load moving across rollers, you had a kind of cart, but instead of constantly rotating the rollers, all you had to do was to find a way to attach the roller to the load. Once that was understood, you had a cart - a load on top of a fixed set of rollers. From there it was just a matter of thinning the diameter of the middle of the roller - turning it into an axle.

So the sequence was felled tree rolling to tree used as a roller, to connecting the rollers to the load, to converting the roller to two solid wheels and an axle.

[Q'uq'umatz]

The idea may have come from throwing rocks and noting that they would move along the surface for some time.

[cladking]

The wheel is pretty complex for modern people and if you don't believe it just ask a few aviation engineers if a plane can take off from a conveyor moving in the opposite direction.

It was "simple" enough for ancient people that the wheel just turned up each time it was needed and then abandoned when it wasn't. Ancient people appear to have been masters of machines with a single moving part.

The earliest known wheel was on a child's toy from Sumeria ~3800 BC. I'd guess they actually date back nearly 40,000 years.

The wheel is a deceptively complex three part machine that isolates things so they can move or transfer forces. It is not entirely intuitive for most people but anybody can "see" how it works.

[BadgerJelly]

In the UK we learnt the truth about this via an advertisement:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e3WLhaIu5r4

[Q'uq'umatz]

In the UK we learnt the truth about this via an advertisement:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e3WLhaIu5r4

It's good to see true and factual science so well presented.

[TheVat]

I seem to recall archaeologists theorizing that the wheel evolved from moving heavy objects by rollling them on logs. A log is essentially a very fat wheel with minimal steering capacity. Pretty sure it wasn't in a beverage commercial. Heh.

[Q'uq'umatz]

I seem to recall archaeologists theorizing that the wheel evolved from moving heavy objects by rollling them on logs. A log is essentially a very fat wheel with minimal steering capacity. Pretty sure it wasn't in a beverage commercial. Heh.

Yeah some have stated they might have been inspired by a potters wheel.

The wiki says:

The first evidence of wheeled vehicles appears in the second half of the 4th millennium BCE, near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia (Sumerian civilization), the Northern (Maykop culture) and South Caucasus (Early Kurgan culture), and Eastern Europe (Cucuteni-Trypillian culture), so the question of which culture originally invented the wheeled vehicle is still unresolved. Notable that the Egyptians aren't mentioned.

The earliest well-dated depiction of a wheeled vehicle (here a wagon — four wheels, two axles) is on the Bronocice pot, a c. 3500 – 3350 BCE clay pot excavated in a Funnelbeaker culture settlement in southern Poland.

[Fuqin]

Serendipity I reckon, there probably was a few tent polls or perhaps spears lienig around and someones draged something accross them and noticed the difference in resistance, that or thayve gone ass over on what might be concidered the first skate board, 100% speculation, a how might

[BadgerJelly]

As an “invention” it was an important step in industry (pottery.) For transport is wasn’t so much the “wheel” that was important, but the “axle” (or am I fooled by my commonsense?)

[Q'uq'umatz]

It was more about what the wheel allowed to be created and to set on the axle. A wheel by itself might be an amusement but a vehicle (or wheel barrow) that moved along the surface instead of being dragged was the star.

[ronjanec]

It was more about what the wheel allowed to be created and to set on the axle. A wheel by itself might be an amusement but a vehicle (or wheel barrow) that moved along the surface instead of being dragged was the star.

Good point.

[Brent696]

I would think the concept of the wheel was first realized by children playing, round stones, etc...

Utilization would probably wait until men started wood work whereas to build a sled or cart. I can imagine weaving baskets first, then structuring wooden supports to carry large baskets, then perhaps the rolling of logs as suggested above though this seems to only be feasible for short distance and heavy weights.

Perhaps the true invention, or more appropriately discovery, would be the axle, without which the wheel is moot.

"The invention of the wheel" perse, would seem to be synonymous with the expansion into building machines, as a cart is in reality simply a simple machine. So stone working, basketry, wood working, carts with wheels might seem a natural progression, how this lines up with archaeologist's dating history I would leave to those more knowledgable of that progression.

But the wheel itself, the simplicity of understanding the concept of weight being positioned over a circular structure, I would move all the way back to the stone age, perhaps even as creativity might have led to someone putting a hole through the center of a round stone, even possibly jewelry, so my overall vote would go to Dave and Johnny Hart as referencing the antics of BC