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Thursday, February 28, 2008

Who invented the wheel and when?


Who invented the wheel and when?

No one knows who invented the wheel. It is an invention that arrived gradually, step by step, over a long period of time, the result of the work of many men, many cultures and many experiments. It was, therefore not a spark of genius in the mind of a single inventor but the result of centuries of work by a number of inventors that led to the greater mobility of man.

It is fascinating to study the development of man’s technological progress in terms of the wheel. It is believed that man became a tool user some 1, 000,000 years ago and that thousands of thousands of years went by until be made a wheel. But consider the progress that has been made in the relatively short space of time, 6000 years. Since the wheel was invented. It is a phenomenal rate of speed – 6000 years against almost 1, 000,000 and shows how truly important the wheel was and still is, to the growth of man’s technology.

The first primitive wheels were found in the remains of Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian cultures and were possibly invented simultaneously in those areas. However, we do no that it was never invented in the New World. The invading Spanish in the 16th century, bent on colonizing the continents of the Western Hemisphere, found the early American cultures quite advanced, but not one had a true wheel.

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