What is the most useful invention of humans? Sure, most people will answer this question with “The Wheel!” Indeed, today almost any machine runs with some kind of wheel. But do we know whom to thank for this gift? Let’s take a little journey back through time.
Rewind to our greatest invention.
Of course there was a time before the wheel, around 5000 BC. People used slides and logs of timber to transport goods. During the Bronze Age (ca. 3500 BC), wheels of clay and of wood were being attached to carts. Records of those first wheels are found in different cultures of the same age. For a long time, it was believed that the Sumerians from Mesopotamia were the inventors of the wheel. But new findings prove that other cultures from Western and Eastern Europe of the same age built something similar. The main difference of those earliest constructions were in the suspension – some were rotating with the axis, some were rotating around it.
Over the ages, this technology spread all over the world. The wheels became lighter and more stable. The development of trade, technology and (even) warfare, is due to the wheel. The wheel has made it possible for us to wonder at all the modern engineering marvels.
Still it is unlikely to identify a group of people – not to mention a single person – as the inventors of the wheel. To imagine what fortune one would amass today from such an invention…
– Tatjana Daenzer
Read more:
— https://www.ke-next.de/panorama/die-groessten-erfindungen-das-rad-116.html
— http://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-technology/revolutionary-invention-wheel-001713