60 Fun Facts About The Wheel

The wheel and axle is one of how many classical simple machines?

On its own a wheel is not a machine at all; it becomes one only when fixed to an axle turning in a bearing.

The wheel almost certainly evolved from the prehistoric use of what to shift heavy loads?

Rolling round tree trunks under stone slabs goes back so far it has never been dated.

The English word 'wheel' shares a Proto-Indo-European root with which Sanskrit word for 'circle'?

Greek kúklos, the source of 'cycle', comes from the same root, meaning 'to revolve'.

The oldest wooden wheel ever found was dug out of a marsh in 2002 in which country?

It sat about 20 km south of Ljubljana in a prehistoric pile-dwelling settlement now on the UNESCO list.

Roughly how old is the Ljubljana Marshes Wheel, according to radiocarbon dating?

That makes it older than the pyramids at Giza and roughly contemporary with the first Mesopotamian wagons.

The Ljubljana Marshes Wheel is made of which wood?

Its 124 cm axle was oak, wedged so tightly that wheel and axle turned together like a modern railway wheelset.

The Bronocice pot, incised with one of the earliest known pictures of a wheeled vehicle, was found where?

It dates to around 3400 BCE and now lives in the Archaeological Museum of Kraków.

What kind of vehicle is scratched five times onto the Bronocice pot?

Aurochs bones found with the pot had horns worn as if roped to a yoke, so the wagons were probably ox-drawn.

Pictographs of wheeled wagons from about 3500 BCE come from the Eanna district of which Sumerian city?

Some scholars think the wheel spread from the Near East to Europe; others note that all the oldest actual wheels are European.

What were the earliest wheels?

Slicing a disk straight across a trunk gave a weak wheel; better ones were built from lengthwise boards.

The earliest known wooden spoked wheels, from about 2000 BCE, belong to which Russian steppe culture?

Their chariot burials at Krivoye Lake are the oldest chariots known anywhere.

What did Celtic chariot-makers add around their wooden wheels in the 1st millennium BCE?

Earlier wheels had been bound with wet animal hide that shrank tight as it dried.

Britain's earliest complete Bronze Age wheel was uncovered in 2016 at which East Anglian site?

A horse's spine lay nearby, hinting that the wheel came from a horse-drawn cart in a village built on stilts.

In the Americas before European contact, wheels have only been found on which kind of object?

Some Mexican wheeled toys date to about 1500 BCE, yet no working cart, barrow or potter's wheel was ever built.

What is often given as the main reason wheeled transport never took off in the pre-Columbian Americas?

The bison was never tamed and native horses had died out about 12,000 years ago.

Which was the only large animal domesticated in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus?

It is a pack animal, and its use barely spread beyond the Andes before the Europeans arrived.

Wheel tracks from about 2200 BCE at Pingliangtai are the earliest evidence of wheeled vehicles in which country?

The vehicles were introduced from the west; the country's oldest spoked-wheel hubs come from Qinghai.

Wheeled vehicles were forbidden in which mountainous Buddhist land where the wheel was sacred?

There the wheel stood for cycles of rebirth rather than for getting the shopping home.

A winged wheel appears on the coat of arms of which Central American country?

The same symbol of progress is used by the Ohio State Highway Patrol and the State Railway of Thailand.

Besides India, which nomadic people put a wheel on their flag as a nod to their Indian origins?

The green-and-blue Romani flag with its red wheel was adopted in 1971.

How many spokes does the wheel at the centre of India's flag have?

India's first vice-president said it stood for the wheel of the law of dharma, truth and the dynamism of peaceful change.

In Buddhist tradition, an eight-spoked dharma wheel represents what?

The hub, rim and spokes are also read as the three trainings: ethics, wisdom and concentration.

The medieval image of the Wheel of Fortune was popularised by which early-6th-century book?

Fortuna, often blindfolded, cranks a millwheel with kings clinging to it; Tacitus had already complained the metaphor was a cliché.

What was the Greek equivalent of Fortuna, the Roman goddess who spins the wheel of fate?

Cicero mocked a colleague who danced naked at a feast 'without fear of the Wheel of Fortune'.

Which ancient engineer in Roman Egypt listed the wheel and axle among the simple machines for lifting?

He probably had the windlass in mind: a crank turning a barrel to wind up a well rope.

In the worked example, putting a dragged 100 kg load onto four wooden wheels cuts the work needed to what fraction?

The friction moves from the ground to the small axle bearing, so the sliding surfaces travel only a fraction of the distance.

Who invented the tension wire-spoked wheel in 1808, long before it appeared on bicycles?

The aviation pioneer never patented it; James Starley later put wire wheels on bicycles.

Unlike wooden spokes, wire spokes carry loads in which way?

Each spoke on an unloaded bike wheel is pre-tightened to about 100 pounds of force, and the rim hangs from the top spokes.

What did the word 'spoke' originally refer to?

Logs were riven into four or six sections and carved down; the spokeshave was invented for the job.

In a traditional wooden wheel, what are the curved rim segments called?

A wheel could have as few as two half-circle felloes of bent wood, or many, with at least two spokes each.

What is the traditional wheelwright's name for the hub of a wooden wheel?

The wheelwright works outward from the nave, fitting spokes and then rim segments before the iron tyre goes on.

Before iron tyres, early chariot wheels were bound with which material, applied wet so it shrank tight?

Later 'straking' nailed iron plates onto the rim; the one-piece hot-shrunk tyre came later still.

Which people brought the horse-drawn chariot into Egypt around 1650 BCE?

The best-preserved Egyptian chariots are the four found in Tutankhamun's tomb.

In ancient Rome, how many horses drew a biga?

A triga had three and a quadriga four; the quadriga is the team on top of the Brandenburg Gate.

Which British queen addressed her troops from a chariot during her uprising against Rome in 61 CE?

Tacitus records that her charioteers were swallowed up in the infantry fight and lost anyway.

A Han dynasty text credits the wheelbarrow, nicknamed the 'wooden ox', to which strategist?

He is said to have used it in 231 AD to haul supplies against Cao Wei; a Song scholar traced later barrows straight back to it.

Where was the wheel positioned on a traditional Chinese wheelbarrow, unlike the European design?

Putting the load over the wheel let one person move far heavier cargo, and some even carried sails.

The oldest potter's wheel ever found, from the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, is from which country?

It dates to the middle of the 5th millennium BC, several hundred years before the wheels of Sumerian Ur.

The 'fast' potter's wheel of the 3rd millennium BC stores energy from a kick using which principle?

Iron Age potters sat at a platform a metre off the floor linked by a long axle to a heavy wheel at their feet.

The earliest clear illustration of a spinning wheel, from 1237, was drawn in which city?

Some scholars argue India had spinning wheels by 500–1000 AD, but the first unambiguous Indian reference is from 1350.

Per John Smeaton's 18th-century tests, roughly what share of a stream's energy does an undershot water wheel capture?

Overshot wheels, fed from above, do far better, which is why mills with a decent head of water preferred them.

What did the first automobiles use for steering before the steering wheel caught on?

Alfred Vacheron fitted a wheel to his Panhard for the 1894 Paris–Rouen race; within a decade the tiller was gone.

John Boyd Dunlop, who made the first practical pneumatic tyre in 1888, worked in which profession?

He built it for his son's tricycle; cyclist Willie Hume then won race after race on the new tyres.

Dunlop's tyre patent was invalidated because which forgotten Scot had patented an air-filled tyre in 1845?

Dunlop still gets the credit for realising rubber could take the wear while staying springy.

Which company fitted the world's first pneumatic car tyres to a car called L'Eclair for an 1895 race?

The same firm later bought a bankrupt Citroën and used it to launch the radial tyre.

In what year did the French firm that made the first pneumatic car tyres develop the radial tyre?

American makers stuck with bias-ply until a 1968 Consumer Reports article shamed Ford into switching.

The original Ferris Wheel was built as the landmark of which 1893 event?

George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. gave his name to every big wheel since.

The 1893 Ferris Wheel was built to rival which structure from a previous world's fair?

At 264 ft it was the tallest thing at the fair, though far short of Eiffel's 1,063 ft.

What was George Ferris's profession before he built his wheel?

His Pittsburgh firm tested and inspected metals for railroads and bridge builders.

After the 1904 World's Fair, the original Ferris Wheel was dynamited in 1906 in which city?

Its 89,000-pound axle was then the largest hollow forging ever made.

Which 250-metre wheel, opened in 2021, is the tallest Ferris wheel in the world?

It stands on Bluewaters Island in the United Arab Emirates.

Why did Vienna's Wiener Riesenrad survive a 1916 demolition permit?

When Paris's Grande Roue came down in 1920, the Riesenrad became the world's tallest surviving wheel.

Apart from the corkscrew flagella of bacteria, how many organisms are known to move using true wheels?

Pangolins, dung beetles and tumbleweeds roll, but no animal has evolved a freely rotating axle.

Australian Aboriginal peoples traditionally rolled circular discs along the ground for what purpose?

It is one of the few traditional uses of a rolling disc anywhere in Australia.

The oldest surviving potter's wheel, from around 3100 BCE, was found at which ancient city?

Potter's wheels are thought to have been in use across the Middle East during the 4th millennium BCE.

A 5000 BCE Linear Pottery culture barn at Olszanica had a 2.2 m wide door, thought to be for what?

The 40-metre barn with three doors is one of the tantalising hints of wheeled transport before any actual wheels survive.

The word 'tire' may come from 'tie', referring to what part of a wooden cart wheel?

Before rubber, the earliest tires were simply metal bands fitted around wooden wheels to prevent wear.

What name is given to a rim-rider design with no centre hub, where the axle follows the rim closely?

Also called a rim-rider or centerless wheel, its 'hub' is in effect almost as large as the wheel itself.

From the 18th century, Dahomey and other West African states used wheeled vehicles mostly for what?

In sub-Saharan Africa the wheel was barely used for transport well into the 19th century, Ethiopia and Somalia excepted.

Miniature clay wheels from before 4000 BCE, the oldest hint of wheeled movement, were found north of which sea?

From the mid-4th millennium BCE, evidence such as toy cars and ruts appears across Europe, with the oldest find in northern Germany around 3400 BCE.