It seems so ordinary and simple, but it took early humans a long time to figure out the wheel from what I’ve heard and I can’t understand why.
In: Engineering
Necessity breeds innovation.
No need for wheels? No wheels invented.
Don’t forget the potter’s wheel, but I don’t know when it came about versus the cart wheel (?).
Even today, people are more likely to go backpacking, snowshoeing, cross country skiing, dogsledding, canoeing, or use a pack animal, than they are to traverse rough, unmaintained terrain pushing or pulling some kind of non-motorized cart.
Up until recently, things like logging, and moving really heavy objects were also generally done without wheels.
Wheels only offer major advantages under limited circumstances, so many people didn’t have a pressing need to create them, or work on making better versions.
Also, the things that make wheels really good, like steel frames, rims, axles, ball-bearings and pressurized rubber tires all require advanced manufacturing techniques that have only been around for the last 200 years or so.
you could teleport a truck into the Stone Age and still be the idiot of the town. There were no roads.
The problem wasn’t the wheel. The wheel was invented once there were decent trails. Probably it has been invented multiple times but it failed to pick up because of the niche use.
Same for horseman. Natural horses were pony size. So they used 2 pony to tow a little chariot. Hence the war chariot. Only once horses were breed into big animals (that can carry a rid r at speed) humans got the opportunity to have cavalry.
Most inventions are a consequence of other developments.
It wasn’t the wheel that was hard, it was the axle. Unless you’ve got some boss tools, it’s still hard.
Necessity is the mother of invention. I’m guessing that as soon as there was a need then it likely got invented rather quickly. Your time frame probably includes the long period of time where there was no need to transport more than you could carry.
Using wheeled transport for carrying cargo or rapid travel didn’t even become efficient until the mid 1800’s. It was often faster to walk.
We figured out that wheels could be useful quite early on, but couldn’t make a matching wheel and axle for a long time after that.
There’s a documentary on Netflix about humanity’s greatest inventions that talks about this.
Because we didn’t have a use for the wheel, more specifically the wheel-axle, until other cultural developments like roads became more widespread.
Another fun fact about the wheel/axle: like most technology, it was invented once and spread throughout the world. It’s not a obvious thing that each culture comes up with, nor inevitable.
Wheels are only useful if you’ve got a fairly large area of unobstructed, kinda flat land, as well as something you want to move that would benefit greatly from being on wheels. So put yourself 40,000 years ago. There’s no roads, humans haven’t spent time clearing land for farming or cattle. Since you’ve never been able to move anything that you couldn’t carry yourself, you don’t own anything that you can’t carry.
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