Everybody yips about The Wheel as the greatest invention of all time. What a media whore! Think about it! What can you actually do with a wheel? Not much! Try it! Look around for something round, (pie plate, saucer, jar lid, even one of those ancient DVD discs — it doesn’t matter.) Now, try and find a use for it. Frankly, once you’ve done Frisbee, you’re pretty much finished. The fact is, despite the hype, a wheel, by itself, is absolutely useless. And whoever invented it must have been a dumbass. Imagine the caveman conversation.
“Hey, Marvin! What you got there?”
“I call it a wheel.”
“Cool! What does it do?”
“Watch this! I just give it a push, and look, it rolls all the way down the hill.”
“Cool! And — uh?”
“And nothing. I go down, carry it back up the hill and do it again.”
Serious silence.
“Dude! We’re like friends and everything, but that is totally stupid.”
“That’s all you know. The wheel is going to be a big thing, someday. It’s goin’ be as big as like fire, probably.”
“Man, you gotta stop lickin’ those shiny frogs.”
Here’s the deal. In order to do anything except roll away, wheels need other wheels. Plus, they need something to control the spin and some way to attach the spin to something else (i.e. transfer the energy.) In other words, they need an axle, and that concept it very complicated. It took prehistoric humans 10,000 years of circular hit and miss just to figure out they could use tree trunks as rollers to move heavy stuff like stones. And it was another millennium plus before Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II’s two-wheeled chariots kicked the crap out of the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 B.C. However, it was actually a Roman genius, Vitruvius (who most people have never heard of, BTW) who unleashed the tireless potential of the wheel axle, when he built and used the first vertical waterwheel around the time of Christ. Eighteen hundred years later, steam turned the wheels axles of the Industrial Revolution, and from there, it didn’t take very long (less than 200 years) for NASA’s Planetary Surface Exploration Device to be doing wheelies on Mars.
So even though the wheel gets all the credit, it’s really the tireless work of the axle that is one of the greatest human achievements of all history.
WD Fyfe 
A Frisbee is fun though…
Especially if you have a dog or and obedient child. cheers
Thanks!
Tomorrow I am going on vacation with my wheelbarrow.
Any Suggestions of places to go???
Kind regards,
A man with a wheelbarrow can go anywhere he likes but I’ve heard Amsterdam is pleasant this time of year. cheers
I grew to hate frisbees because I associated them with guys who were stoned out of their minds, had long greasy hair, and played their hideous music too loudly as they cavorted in their yards with – yes – their large dogs. This makes me sound so boring and uptight, but I don’t care — I HATE FRISBEES!
I got hit in the nose with one once, got a terrible bloody nose. So I’m not crazy about them either. 😉
Do you remember the Gilligan’s Island with the dream about cavemen and the Professor invents the wheel? He makes your point very well. He was in need of an axle.
This from the guy who could fix a hole in a boat. Too busy eyeballing Mary Ann? cheers
Where would the wheel be without an axle and where would the axle be without bearings. Fun post, thanks for sharing it.