The Elegance of Simple Features: Wheels
Modern vehicles come with a borderline-insane number of advanced safety features that can do everything from alerting you when you’re getting sleepy to automatically applying the brakes to mitigate the damage of (or avoid) an accident. However, I believe that there’s an underappreciated elegance to cars’ simplest features; the ones that make vehicles functional.
Today, we will marvel at the wonder that is the wheel.
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Understanding the wheel
Cast your mind back to 3,500 B.C.E. — when the wheel was invented, according to Live Science’s Natalie Wolchover. We take the wheel for granted, but it’s a fixture of modern society. According to Wolchover, the invention is actually “so ingenious that it took until 3500 B.C. for someone to invent them. By that time — it was the Bronze Age — humans were already casting metal alloys, constructing canals and sailboats, and even designing complex musical instruments such as harps.”
The invention of the wheel as a means of conveyance for vehicles required even more effort. David Anthony, professor of anthropology at Hartwick College, stated that the “stroke of brilliance” was finding a way to make the wheel work efficiently with an axle.
Wolchover says of Anthony’s work, “the ends of the axle had to be nearly perfectly smooth and round, as did the holes in the center of the wheels; otherwise, there would be too much friction between these components for the wheels to turn. Furthermore, the axles had to fit snugly inside the wheels’ holes, but not too snugly — they had to be free to rotate.”
In short, the amount of work that went into the most basic elements of our vehicles is insane.
Imagining a world without wheels
While creating a rolling apparatus may have seemed revolutionary several thousand years ago, we tend to take it for granted. If you think about it, most lives would be completely different had the wheel not been invented.
- Horses would have been forced to drag us across vast expanses of wilderness on a set of skis, which would surely be more difficult.
- There would have been no to mill wheat in the olden times, which means Frosted Mini-Wheats wouldn’t exist.
- Mario Kart wouldn’t be a thing.
- It would take us a lot longer to get everywhere, as we would have to rely on literal horsepower.
- Mad Max wouldn’t be a thing.
- One-day shipping would be completely unfeasible unless your local Pony Express station employed Secretariat.
The unpleasant possibilities are endless. So be thankful that the wheel exists, despite its simplicity. There’s a reason that we feel comfortable calling our cars “wheels.”
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