The Ancient Wheel
Often the wheel is regarded as the oldest and most important invention of mankind, to the extent that we often compare it to the use of fire. In fact, humans have been taming fire for more than 1.5 million years, and have only been using the wheel for a mere 6,000 years.
The birthplace of the wheel
Wheeled vehicles would not have been possible before sharp, sturdy tools were available. It was difficult to work wood into a proper cylindrical shape with stone tools, let alone a wheel complex enough to have spokes. So the wheel could only have appeared after the Bronze Age.
The famous American anthropologist Robert Lowe has asserted that all the peoples who use the wheelbarrow, none of them learned it directly and indirectly from Babylon. The Indians of America knew to tow boats on rolling logs, also used spinning wheels, and the play of rolling iron rings, but the meaning of traveling on wheels never occurred to them.
Lu Wei's view of the origin of the wheel is also the view of most archaeologists. But new archaeological discoveries often subvert well-worn theories. Ruts under the megalithic tomb at Flintbek, Germany, were left between 4800-4700 BC. Jars with cart patterns found in Bronocice, Poland, have been dated to before 4725 B.C., but seven carbon-14 dates for the stratum favor a 4610-4440 B.C. conclusion. And the earliest evidence for the appearance of wheeled transportation in the Near East was found by American archaeologist Baldia at the Late Uruk site located in Syria. A model with wheels and wall paintings of "wagons" were unearthed there. These things were left by the first people 6,400-6,500 years ago.
So, it is likely that wheeled vehicles appeared in Europe and then spread to the Near East, or were reinvented by the East.
From Pottery Wheel to Wheel
Let's put aside the arguments of the archaeologists for a moment, and see what they ****ed up:
The predecessor of the wheel was the potter's wheel, which was used by the ancients to make pottery in batches [01 Making Pottery on a Pottery Wheel], which was the earliest of the crafts and containers of mankind. The simplest potter's wheel requires only a pair of disk-shaped wheels, with an axle fitted between the disks, and the axle placed upright vertically; the potter rotates the lower disk with his foot on one side, and places soft clay in the upper disk with his hand on the other side, molding and kneading it into shape.
The earliest wheels in Mesopotamia consisted of round plates securely nailed to an axle. By 3000 B.C., axles had been fitted to wheelbarrows, and the wheels were not directly attached to the body. Shortly thereafter, wheels fitted with spokes appeared. These primitive wheelbarrows, though awkward as hell, were much better than the human shoulders and pack animals (usually donkeys) that had always been used before.
Wheels were also used very early in the construction of chariots. Such chariots were first used to charge into enemy lines and force the enemy to break up; later they were used as fighting platforms on which charioteers could stand and throw javelins at the enemy to kill them.
Impact of the Wheel
Perhaps the greatest use of the wheel was to enable a man to move objects far in excess of his own weight.
Making pottery on the potter's wheel The most common use of the wheel was for transportation. Before the invention of the wheel, the ancients had to use sledges to move heavy objects. The simplest sled was an inclined plane, and the more complex ones would have a couple of roll bars under the weight - this is how the ancient Egyptians stacked huge stones into pyramids. Although the ancient Egyptians were more likely to have been inspired by the roll bar to invent the wheel, it wasn't the ancient Egyptians who first used the wheel.
The technological advances made possible by the use of the wheel were accompanied by corresponding far-reaching institutional changes. Population growth allowed certain villages to develop into cities ruled by new religious dignitaries and, later, military and administrative leaders. The emergence of cities was made possible by the growth of agricultural productivity. This growth in agricultural productivity allowed for a surplus of food to feed the newly created priestly class, soldiers and officials. This process of development was not sudden or unilateral. There has been a lot of debate lately about whether technological change determines institutional change or whether institutional change determines technological change. This is reminiscent of the debate about an early stage of human evolution: did the human brain come first, and then human culture, including language and tool-making, was created? It is now agreed that the former interacted with the latter, and that language and tool-making were both the cause and the effect of the development of the brain. It seems that the same is true of technological change and social change, first interacting with each other and finally leading to the urban revolution and the arrival of civilization. The Neolithic cultivators who supplied surplus goods to the dominant eminences, and thus were converted from tribal members to peasants, did not do so because they agreed to do so from one time to another, or were forced to do so; on the contrary, it was a gradual process of development in which cause and effect interacted with each other and were closely interrelated.
The emergence of the concept of the wheel
Any simple but far-reaching invention does not appear in people's minds out of nowhere; there must be some phenomenon that triggers the inspiration. Just as the ancients thought of canoes when they saw wood floating in the water, the invention of the wheel may have been inspired by some natural objects. The Huainanzi says that our ancestors "knew the wheel when they saw the flying canopy". "Flying puff" is a kind of grass, its stem is about feet high, the leaves are large, the root system into the soil shallow. A gale, it is easy to be uprooted, rotating with the wind. The ancients were probably inspired by this phenomenon and invented the wheel and axle. As with the legend that Lu Ban was inspired by the sawtooth grass and invented the saw, it is likely that this claim is also just a legend. Because the wheel has a prototype in nature.
Primitive peoples once universally worshipped the sun and moon in the sky. The ancients must have thought they possessed the most perfect form - as late as the time of Ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato also still considered the sphere to be the most perfect form. Perhaps it was natural for Neolithic ancestors to mimic the shapes of the sun and moon when making implements. When they stumbled upon a disc-shaped object made to keep its shape while rotating, they were interested in discovering its uses further.
The Wheel and the Natural Environment
The wheel is a relatively recent invention because of the natural environment in which the first people lived. Ten thousand years ago, much of the land was covered by glaciers. If anything could be called "transportation" at that time, it was the sled. In the jungles and deserts, the wheel had no utility - if it ever did, it was rendered obsolete by the dense forests that covered the trails and the quicksand that rolled over them. The Aztecs of Mesoamerica did not use wheeled vehicles, and interestingly enough, they made a large number of clay sculptures of animals with four wheels.
Then there were the Eskimos. They lived in the ice, not only no suitable roads, even the lack of wood. Wheels were obviously not possible in such an environment.
Elsewhere, the wheel did not first appear as a means of transportation. A car-shaped cup from a Hungarian tomb from 2900 BC and artifacts from other parts of the world show that wheeled vehicles were first used only in ceremonial and ritual settings.
Even with vehicles, it was futile to have them without proper animal power. The lack of horses to draw vehicles was also one of the factors that constrained the Aztecs from inventing the wheel. As far back as 15,000 BC, Stone Age hunters caged their horses. Humans had just recently domesticated the horse.
Wheels in China
According to the conclusions of the British historian of science Joseph Lee, the first car appeared in China about 4,500 to 3,500 years ago. And the Zuo Zhuan (左传) mentions that the car was invented by Xi Zhong (奚仲) in the early years of the Xia Dynasty, which, if the record is true, would have been 4,000 years ago. In the Yin Dynasty (more than 3,000 years ago) artifacts, archaeologists have also found carts used for martyrdom, and at that time, carts consisted of compartments, yamens and two wheels, and were already relatively sophisticated means of transportation.
Stone tools
Ancient Chinese legend has it that Xuanyuan Huangdi caused the vehicle by inserting wood in the center of a round wheel to make it run. But given the sheer number of inventions attributed to the Yellow Emperor, we can't easily take this claim seriously.
How the Wheel Worked in Ancient Times
Take Egyptian chariots, for example. These chariots had spoked wheels, which were fitted with strong hoops, and the wheels were fastened to the axles by means of wedges. The box, the yoke and the two pairs of harnesses attest to the same technology.
It is of little use to inquire into the process of human invention of the wheeled vehicle from the kind of fine workmanship seen in the Egyptian chariots or in the creators of the Roman chariots. But it is often the case that one can find roughly made objects that seem to be reproductions of the early stages of technology. The rudest country carts of antiquity had wheels of two round pieces of wood, almost a foot thick, made from the trunks of broken trees, while the round pieces, or wheels, did not revolve on an axle, but were fixed to it. The axle rests in a special wooden frame, or in two narrow planks, or is threaded through a ring-hole in the bottom of the car, and turns with its pair of wheels, as in a child's toy car. It is interesting to note that the builders of railroad cars have reverted to this construction when conditions have changed.
In some countries, such as Portugal, it is still possible to see classical cars with axles and wheels turning together. So it can be envisioned: a similar large car shows how the car with wheels was invented. At first axles, or rollers, were used, and it was with them that large stones or other huge heavy objects were rolled. We can imagine that a roller of this kind, made of a smooth tree trunk or log, was at first accomplished in this way: by thinning its middle part a little. It was then transformed into a shaft with a wide round roll at each end. The axle, we suppose, was under some sort of the humblest kind of beam and wood frame, and turned under it. Thus we have a wheeled cart of the simplest imaginable kind. It is entirely possible that, after something like the first notion about a cart appeared, the wheel began to be made separately and fixed on a movable axle, fitted with a hoop. Later, lightweight wheels and smooth wheel seats became available, so the wheel turned on an immovable axle. All this, of course, is nothing more than a figment of the imagination, but, at any rate, it makes the nature of the car perfectly clear to our minds.
The wheel in modern times
Gears are representative of the Industrial Revolution. Chaplin, in his movie Modern Times, implied with the help of workers stuck in giant gears that mankind has become a slave to the machine. One might think that the wheel would be pushed out of history in the information age and the coming age of biotechnology; this is not the case. As you read this, your hard disk is whining and your CD-ROM and floppy drives are probably working; and in the various labs sequencing genomes, centrifuge bearings are spinning to complete the separation of proteins.
Since we chose the wheel from the beginning of civilization, it is likely to be with humanity for all time.