On a cold Sunday….lots of time for my mind to go in different directions looking for answers.

Could this be another of those probing questions I pose from time to time?

Once again my mind has tossed me a question that made my brain itch….and as usual I had to go about answering before my hair hurt.

The invention is common knowledge but is the inventor? Was it the caveman or the Sumerians or some extraterrestrial visitor that gifted humanity with this much used invention? I am sure there may be other ‘inventors’ that are considered.

Hundreds of thousands of years before the invention of the wheel, some unlucky hominin stepped on a loose rock or unstable log and—just before they cracked their skull—discovered that a round object reduces friction with the ground.

The inevitability of this moment of clarity explains the ancient ubiquity of rollers, which are simply logs put underneath heavy objects. The Egyptians and the Mesopotamians used them to build their pyramids and roll their heavy equipment, and the Polynesians to move the stone moai statues on Easter Island. But rollers aren’t terribly efficient, because they have to be replaced as they roll forward, and even if they’re pinned underneath, friction makes them horribly difficult to move. The solution—and the stroke of brilliance—was the axle. Yet despite the roller’s antiquity, it doesn’t appear that anyone, anywhere, discovered the wheel and axle until an ingenious potter approximately 6,000 years ago.

The oldest axle ever discovered is not on a wagon or cart, but instead on a potter’s wheel in Mesopotamia. These may seem like simple machines, but they’re the first evidence that anyone anywhere recognized the center of a spinning disk is stationary and used it to their mechanical advantage. It’s a completely ingenious observation and so novel that it’s unclear where the idea came from—perhaps from a bead spinning on string?—as it has no obvious corollary in nature. The pole is called an axle, and many scholars consider it the greatest mechanical insight in the history of humankind.

Yet there exists another great intellectual leap between the potter’s wheel and a set of wheels on a rolling object. The full wheel set appears to have first been invented by a mother or father potter, because the world’s oldest axles are made of clay, are about two inches long, and sit beneath rolling animal figurines.

The first wheeled vehicle, in other words, was a toy.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/who-invented-the-wheel-and-how-did-they-do-it

Best knowledge gives us the answer of the age old question….who invented the wheel?

Sorry still cannot put a name with the invention….it could have been Gronk or some guy named Bob….we may never know his/her name.

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”