Glimpse of Yesteryear
Jet planes use them, as do dentistry drills, cooling fans in computers, electric generators, trains and Geaugas early settlers. Youve ridden on…
Jet planes use them, as do dentistry drills, cooling fans in computers, electric generators, trains and Geaugas early settlers. Youve ridden on them in cars and in them in carousels. Wheels! They are what many anthropologists consider early mankinds second most significant invention controlled fire being the first.
When the early Geaugans came, most of them came riding on something that dated so far back (10,000 years according to some) that tracing their history takes a real detective or maybe a scientist with the instincts of a Sherlock Holmes. They use pictures on the walls of caves and ancient buildings and pots along with a good helping of logic to build the story of the development of the wheel.
It is still a mystery who invented the wheel or even where it was first used. Archaeologists guess that maybe it was around 8000 B.C. (plus or minus a millennium) somewhere in Asia. The oldest known example of a wheel was found in Mesopotamia. It is believed made by the Sumerians and to date back to 3500 B.C.
Pottery from about 3,000 years ago tells us two things one, that pottery wheels were used then, and two, that there were war chariots back then (pictures on the pottery show them).
Pictures of wagons were found on pottery dating from about the same time. But, these pots originated and were found in Eastern Europe… ha! Another clue! The wheel predates 3000 B.C., probably quite a bit seeing as how the idea traveled so far. Some say that the earliest wooden wheels likely came from between 6500 and 4500 B.C.
One thing were pretty sure of is that the potters wheel was invented somewhere around 4500 B.C. and wheeled vehicles came hard on the domestication of the horse, between 4500 and 3300 B.C., with spoked wheels being invented about 1,100 years later.
As to how wheels were invented, here we use a combination of logic and imagination and hope we have the story straight. It is believed that early men found that if they placed rollers (likely smooth logs) under heavy objects, they could move them more easily. Then, they began placing runners under a heavy load and discovered the load was easier to drag. This was the invention of the sledge. It is believed that early men soon (several hundred years?) began to combine the roller and the sledge. As the sledge moved forward over the first roller, a second roller was placed under the front end. It took on the load as it moved off the first roller. There is a model of such a sledge and rollers at the Smithsonian.
As the rollers that carry the sledge become grooved with use, those deep grooves actually allowed the sledge to move forward a greater distance before the next roller was needed. It is believed that early men noticed this and, eventually, they removed the wood between the grooves of the roller, forming what we would call an axle. Wooden pegs were fastened to the runners on each side. When the wheels turned, the axle turned in the space between the pegs, making the first cart. Over time, wheels and axels were made separately and holes for the axels were drilled though the frame of the cart.
But this primitive cart bore as much resemblance to the wheeled carts Geaugas settlers came in as the Wright brothers aeroplane bares to a stealth jet.
For information on the events at the Geauga County Historical Society’s Burton Century Village Museum, call 440-834-1492 or visit www.geaugahistorical.org.
