49 Fun Facts About The Wheel

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

Six: none of them creates energy, so any that eases the force you need makes you push over a longer distance instead.

Why did department stores first turn away Bernard Sadow's wheeled suitcase?

It seemed unmanly: Sadow recalled a 'macho feeling' at the time, when men were expected to carry luggage for their wives.

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

Chakra: the seven chakras familiar from yoga are only one tradition's version; older texts counted four, five, six or even more.

Found in a Slovenian marsh in 2002, the Ljubljana Marshes Wheel is older than which of these?

The Great Pyramid: the wheel was locked onto its axle, so rather than spinning around the axle, wheel and axle turned together.

Which saint's legendary torture wheel shattered at her touch, giving a spinning firework its name?

Saint Catherine of Alexandria, legend says, was bound to a spiked wheel that broke when she touched it, so her persecutors beheaded her instead.

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

A four-wheeled wagon with a shaft: the shaft forks into a V, probably a yoke, which suggests the wagon was pulled by a pair of animals.

Pictographs of wheeled vehicles from about 3500 BCE come from which Sumerian city, where legend says Gilgamesh ruled?

Uruk's pictographs are about as old as drawings of wheeled vehicles from Europe, so experts cannot say for sure where the wheel began.

What were the earliest wheels on carts and wagons?

Solid wooden disks with an axle hole came first; slices across a trunk made weak wheels, so better ones were shaped from planks held together by cross-bars.

Which Old Testament prophet described a vision of 'a wheel in the middle of a wheel'?

Ezekiel saw wheels with rims 'full of eyes' that went wherever four living creatures went, because the creatures' spirit was in the wheels.

The wagon-wheel effect is an illusion that makes a fast-spinning wheel on film appear to do what?

Spin backwards: film catches separate frames, yet people also see the effect in continuous daylight, and scientists have argued over why.

The high-wheeled bicycle called the penny-farthing got its nickname from what?

Two British coins: a big penny beside a small farthing, like its wheels; the pedals turned the front wheel directly, so a bigger wheel meant more speed.

Before European contact, the few wheels found in the Americas are usually identified as what?

Children's toys is the usual reading of the small wheeled animal figures from Mexico, yet no cart, barrow or potter's wheel was put to use there before the 16th century.

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

No large domesticated draft animals: bison were never domesticated and the native horses had died out, so nothing was available to pull a cart.

Which mantra is commonly written on Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheels?

Om mani padme hum: each turn is believed to count as reading it aloud once for every copy on the scroll inside, so more copies mean more merit.

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.

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

Panama's arms also show the sun setting as the moon rises, marking the evening hour of its separation from Colombia on 3 November 1903.

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

The Romani flag was endorsed at the first World Romani Congress near London, and International Romani Day on 8 April now honours that meeting.

India's flag features a wheel linked to which ancient emperor?

Ashoka: Radhakrishnan told India's Constituent Assembly the wheel denotes motion, because there is death in stagnation and life in movement.

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

The Noble Eightfold Path: the Buddha taught that path in his first sermon, which is said to have set the wheel of dharma turning.

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

Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy was written in prison as he awaited execution, and in it Fortune says she turns her wheel to bring the high down and raise the low.

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

Tyche had an old temple at Argos where the legendary hero Palamedes is said to have dedicated the dice he invented to the goddess of chance.

Which ancient engineer, famous for a steam-spun sphere, listed the wheel and axle among machines for lifting?

Hero of Alexandria's aeolipile spun because steam escaping from its bent nozzles pushed the ball round.

In Greek myth, who was bound to a wheel as punishment for lusting after Hera, wife of Zeus?

Ixion: Zeus shaped a cloud in Hera's likeness to trick him, and Ixion lay with the fake before being chained to the wheel.

Which inventor, seeking the lightest possible wheel for a flying machine, did away with wooden spokes altogether?

George Cayley never patented his idea, and in 1826 the first patent for a wire wheel went to Theodore Jones of London instead.

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

Under tension: because the spokes only pull, thin metal wires could replace heavy wooden spokes, giving bicycles far lighter wheels.

Why were iron tyres fitted hot?

It shrank tight: the cooling iron pulled the spokes firmly into their joints, making the whole wheel stronger and more rigid.

Which word names both the hub of a wooden wheel and the main body of a church?

The nave: wheelwrights usually made a wheel's nave from elm, a wood valued because its interlocked grain makes it very hard to split.

Before iron tyres, early chariot wheels were bound with which material?

Rawhide came first; later, iron strakes nailed on in sections let wheelwrights shoe a wheel without a blacksmith's help.

Which people are generally credited with bringing the horse-drawn chariot into Egypt?

The Hyksos, though some scholars dispute it; Egypt's first recorded chariot battles came in the wars that drove the Hyksos out.

Napoleon took the chariot statue from which Berlin landmark?

Brandenburg Gate: its quadriga was hauled to Paris as war booty and returned to Berlin only after Napoleon's defeat in 1814.

In Tacitus's account, which British queen rallied her troops from a chariot before battle with Rome?

Boudica: Tacitus says Romans had seized her late husband's kingdom and flogged her, and her rebels went on to burn London.

An ancient Chinese history credits which strategist with the 'wooden ox', a wheelbarrow for hauling army supplies?

Zhuge Liang: even with wooden oxen hauling his grain, one campaign against Wei ran out of food and he had to pull his army back.

What did Rumpelstiltskin finally demand for spinning straw into gold?

Her firstborn child: when he came to collect, she could keep the baby only by guessing the little man's name within three days.

Why does a water wheel fed from above outperform one pushed from below?

The water's weight turns it: gravity pulls down the filled buckets, which is why a fairly small stream could drive a big overshot wheel.

What did many early cars use for steering before the steering wheel caught on?

A tiller, like a boat's: racer Alfred Vacheron fitted a steering wheel to his car in the 1890s, and within about a decade tillers were on the way out.

Belfast vet John Boyd Dunlop made his first air-filled tyres for his young son's what?

Tricycle: Belfast's rough streets made riding it hard for the boy, so Dunlop built a tyre filled with air to absorb the shocks.

Dunlop's tyre patent was declared invalid because which fellow Scot had patented an air-filled tyre decades earlier?

Robert William Thomson showed his 'Aerial Wheels' on London carriages, yet it was Dunlop who went on to mass-produce air-filled tyres.

Which company entered the first car to race on air-filled tyres, in 1895?

Michelin: its car did make it back to Paris after the race, but too late to be counted as an official finisher.

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

The World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago: the wheel went up in winter, and workers piped in steam to thaw the frozen ground for its foundation.

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

The Eiffel Tower: Chicago's fair challenged American engineers to top it, and the planners wanted something original and daring, not just bigger.

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

Bridge builder: fair officials first scoffed at his giant steel wheel as a madman's idea, but he kept pressing and won permission to build it.

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

St. Louis: when the fair ended, nobody took the wheel away, so it stood there neglected until wreckers finally blew it up with dynamite.

Which 250-metre wheel became the world's tallest Ferris wheel when it opened in 2021?

Ain Dubai: just five months after opening it shut for 'periodic enhancements', and it stayed closed for more than two years before reopening.

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

There was no money to tear it down; a 1944 fire burned out its cabins, and when it reopened in 1947 it had only 15 of its original 30.

Nature's closest thing to a wheel is a spinning flagellum, best known from which microbes?

Bacteria: one likely reason big animals never grew wheels is that a part spinning freely on an axle couldn't share the body's blood supply.

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 word 'tire', for a wheel's outer rim, is probably a shortened form of which word?

Attire: the rim's oldest spelling was tyre, which gave way to tire, until Britain revived tyre while America kept tire.

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

Ceremonial purposes: the wheel was well known in West Africa, yet most goods still travelled overland on porters' heads.

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.