Fun facts on the wheel
Camels 1; Camels supplanted the wheel as the standard mode of transportation in the Middle East and northern Africa between the second and the sixth centuries A.D.
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Despite abandoning the wheel for hauling purposes, Middle Eastern societies continued to use wheels for tasks such as irrigation, milling and pottery.
Richard Bulliet cites several possible reasons in his 1975 book, The Camel and the Wheel, including the decline of roads after the fall of the Roman Empire and the invention of the camel saddle between 500 and 100 B.C.
- “Breaking on the wheel” was a form of capital punishment in the Middle Ages. This type of execution was medieval even by medieval standards.
A person could be stretched across the face of a wheel and bludgeoned to death or have an iron-rimmed wheel pounded across the person’s bones with a hammer.
In another variation, Saint Catherine of Alexandria was wrapped around the rim of a spiked wheel and rolled across the ground in the early fourth century.
Legend has it that the wheel “divinely” broke—sparing St. Catherine’s life, until the Romans beheaded her. Since then, the breaking wheel has also been called the “Catherine Wheel.”
- The oldest, most common design for a perpetual motion device is the overbalanced wheel.
For centuries, tinkerers, philosophers, mathematicians and crackpots have tried to design perpetual motion devices that, once set in motion, would continue forever, producing more energy than they consume.
But no matter the design, they all violate the first and second laws of thermodynamics, which state, respectively, that energy cannot be created or destroyed and that some energy is always lost in converting heat to work.
- Roulette means “small wheel” in French. The origin of the gambling game roulette is a bit hazy.
Some sources say Blaise Pascal, a 17th-century French mathematician, invented it in his attempts to create a perpetual motion device.
But what’s more commonly accepted is that roulette is an 18th century French creation that combined several existing games.
- The term “fifth wheel” comes from a part that was often used in carriages. By definition, a fifth wheel is a wheel or a portion of a wheel with two parts rotating on each other that sits on the front axle of a carriage and adds extra support so it doesn’t tip.
But it’s superfluous, really—which is why calling someone a “fifth wheel” is a way of calling them unnecessary, basically a tag along.
- The first Ferris Wheel was built to rival the Eiffel Tower. Norman Anderson, author of Ferris Wheels: An Illustrated History, surmises that the first pleasure wheels, or early Ferris Wheels, were probably just wheels with buckets, used to raise water from a stream, that children would playfully grab hold of for a ride.
But it was the “revolving wheel, 250 feet in diameter and capable of carrying 2,160 persons per trip,” invented by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. and unveiled at Chicago’s World Columbian Fair in 1893, that really brought the Ferris Wheel to the carnival scene.
The fair celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, and organisers wanted a centrepiece like the 984-foot Eiffel Tower that was created for the Paris Exposition of 1889.
Ferris answered that call. He apparently told the press that he sketched every detail of his Ferris wheel over a dinner at a Chicago chophouse and no detail needed changing in its execution.
- One man actually succeeded in reinventing the wheel. John Keogh, a freelance patent lawyer in Australia, submitted a patent application for a “circular transportation facilitation device” as recently as May 2001, shortly after a new patent system was introduced in Australia.
He wanted to prove that the cheap, streamlined system, which allows inventors to draft a patent online without the help of a lawyer, was deeply flawed. Believe it or not, his “wheel” was issued a patent, thousands of years after the fact.