TecC 13 - Turning Point: The Axis of Progress
The paradox of finding constancy amid motion, stability amid change
In the last episode, after having touched previously upon how humans domesticated plants and animals, we came to discuss that supreme epitome of speed: the horse. Let’s now look at another this-time-nonliving enabler of speed, and of much more, one that turned things around for us like no other.
A Circular Problem
This particular example of human innovation, central as it has been to so much technological and other progress that’s come later, poses some rather fascinating epistemological and philosophical conundrums for me. Above I use the word ‘circular’ cognizantly, I am referring to the wheel.
I will touch upon another circular artefact that also poses the same sort of puzzle in a later episode where it’s more appropriate, but let’s start with exploring this one here.
In TecC 09 - Kindling Change, I touched upon this difficulty:
… when we look back at certain innovations…, [we] have the benefit of hindsight… it’s hard for us in many cases to even imagine how life was before a certain new innovation – an artefact – came to be that became part of our life…
That’s the challenge I am referring to. How do we comprehend, and in my case in this series chronicling the development of human innovation and progress, how do I take us, even myself, back to a pristine mental or epistemic (or cognitive) state, to be able to then effectively and accurately trace and enunciate the progress made in such an area?
So let’s try and picture this. And as before, we have with us our friend Bryan (remember him?) even as we momentarily time-travel back to such a pre-wheel pristine state!
Literally The First Revolution
It’s early evening, the sun hasn’t yet set, and Bryan is sitting around by his dwelling, enjoying a juicy freshly-seared steak beside the fire, the fire whose control his Stone-Age ancestor Steve (and remember him?) first mastered. (I would also have said he’s rolling a cigar but we really gotta be disciplined in trying to simulate that pristine pre-rotary stage!) Of course next to Bryan is his trusty friend, his dog Bruno who was still a wolf in Steve’s Stone Age times!
The fire on which he’s seared that meat he and his tail-waggy friend are enjoying watching Netflix the sunset, was of course made from a few logs he picked up from the forested surroundings. There are still a few small pieces of log left over, one of which he’s of course throwing out for Bruno to fetch - wonder where we’ve seen that! But then Bryan notices something interesting.
One of the logs slips by the pile and slides down. Not the first time a log displayed such behavior, but let’s say the first time Bryan noticed it. Or furthermore, thought about it.
Being a perfectionist,1 he puts the log back to the top of the log pile and there you go, it slides back down again! His curiosity intrigued, he picks up the log and examines it, and notices the peculiar nature of its cross-section: it is, what he doesn’t yet have a word for, but luckily we do: round. Or circular. He takes another object that doesn’t have that shape and places it at the top of the pile, it doesn’t slide!
He doesn’t give much more thought to it – folk back then didn’t have Newton or Edison as role-models! But after a while he notices an ant on top of the circular log, balancing itself on the log while the log is sliding down the slope slowly. Bryan thinks: hmm, the other day we had to move those huge boulders of rock quite a distance, wouldn’t it be easier if we, yes I’ve got it, ‘rolled’ them big rocks over some big logs of this shape?!
Those of you who have read my previous articles know, well I hope, that such silly stories of mine have a purpose to them: this is perhaps how it all started, after Bryan carried out some experiments, he ran to his kin to demonstrate the phenomenon. And his friends were like “Bryan, you’re on a roll!” And lo and behold, that was the first wheel, it was revolutionary indeed! Literally!
Twists and Turns, Trial and Error
Whatever our speculations (or my flights of imagination), the fact of the matter is, we really do not know how it all began with the wheel. Scientists have conjectured that it all started with logs – picture the large boulders of the StoneHenge being transported miles and miles across the landscape in Great Britain on large cylindrical trunks of trees (surely these movers and shakers were the first rock stars who made it to the cover of the Rolling Stone?!) But there is no archeological or other evidence confirming this hypothesis of the first wheel-like artefacts. But that’s a likely start to get the thingamajig rolling!
Cylindrical and circular objects exist in nature. So there had to come a day when humans had to notice it, and another day when they had to envisage its potential, and yet another day by when they finally managed to actually realize it - ‘realize’ not in the cognitive sense but in the ‘real’ sense, in the sense of making it real! And researchers have surmised that those three ‘days’ spanned around 500 or more years! Which goes back to the point I was puzzling about above.
I’d love to know what you think, but I do still wonder how humans did not come upon this realization (this time, even just the cognitive) much earlier, and I’m amazed at how long it seems to have taken them to, once the idea sparked, implement it in a realistic way.
The Heart of the Matter
Importantly, there are other components that go into making the wheel viable. The chief one is the axle. It’s not enough for a large cylindrical log to be ready to roll down the slope. Unlike that acrobatic ant we imagined above, that itself won’t take us far! I think it was the observation that the center of the circular cross-section does not move, whence the movement of the circular (or cylindrical) object can be regulated, that was the real breakthrough, almost literally!
As we’ve explored, the earliest rolling objects were probably cylindrical, and only later we get to what we may call circular, for that might have required sharp cutting tools to chop the cylindrical log to, well, real wheels - flat discs, and I’ll come to the ‘making’ aspect in the next episode.2 But setting aside these other fabricatory challenges until we get to that one, theoretically at this point, I suspect the notion of sticking a thin stick between two wheels cutting across their centers gave early experimenters the first mechanistic experience of achieving constancy amid motion, stability amid change.
And this I propose was not just an artefactual but in the larger scheme of innovation, a significant intellectual milestone. (When we get to the Renaissance, I’ll discuss how Leonardo da Vinci developed and mastered the idea of translating motion, in his paintings, to depict emotions!)
The Moving Aesthetic of Roundness
Man-made implementations of rotation and revolution are to be seen everywhere around us, wheels and their other circular, cylindrical and spherical extensions are ubiquitous to modern life. Even back in its earliest days, in slight contradiction to the above narrative, it was perhaps the pottery wheel that found use before the vehicular one.
Let’s also pause for a moment to appreciate the aesthetic of it, along with what Nature herself had already bestowed upon us in this context. Circular motion across the axis, the centerpoint, confers a certain symmetry. In fact, it’s more elevated than the symmetry we find in duality, such as in mirrors or when we look at a human face, or as our aforementioned Renaissance Man from Vinci so meticulously and mathematically perceived and projected, the human body itself.
Circularity (and circular symmetry) occurs profusely in nature, with mathematically definable consistency (I intend to touch upon this with regard to flowers and icicles another time!) And we cannot live without it, it’s the very basis of our existence: our planet revolves around its energy-giver, our collective life-giver, in a more or less circular fashion.3 And beyond the two-dimensional limits of the circle, or wheel, we have the sphere, or the ball. (Going back to the epistemic question, did not early humans gather anything from observing berries rolling? Intellectually I mean!)
There are metaphorical and philosophical extensions of this concept. We talk about cycles in phenomena we observe, not just in the seasons I hinted at in the previous paragraph but in a great many others.4 The wheel has been a metaphor for many such phenomena, both natural and artefactual. Emperor Ashoka the Great had as his emblem a wheel, a depiction of Buddhist (and wider dharmic) notion of the dharmachakra, which in the metaphor of movement, symbolizes progress.5 The Brazilian motto ‘Ordem e Progresso’ and its depiction as the celestial globe on their flag seem to offer similar connotations. We can also similarly relate to the Olympic rings still in use in our own day forming a circular motif representing the unity of the inhabited continents from where come together athletes to participate in a cycle of recurring games.
But even back in the concrete world of artefacts (our main focus) here and now, we can see that we cannot imagine life without the wheel and its extensions: clocks, fans, roller skates, gears, ball bearings, the shiny disco ball and many many more.
So perhaps what needs next to be said is how it all came together, the tooling, the techniques, the technological breakthroughs. And, in the spirit of the technocentric series this is, that’s what we shall look at next!
Audio and images generated by AI
Some habits are as old as ever!
The other leap here is that a cylindrical object such as a tree log can stay stable, whereas a wheel needs balanced
Aristotle, a lover of perfect circles, insisted that all celestial bodies moved in ‘perfect, eternal circles’ symbolizing divine perfection and uniformity. It took Kepler about 2000 years later to debunk this notion in favor of elliptical motion
I’ll touch upon the connection between ‘cycle’ and ‘wheel’ in a couple of episodes, stick around!
And many other philosophical ideas wrapped around it by later commentators!
Glad to see Bryan's still upright and sniffing air.
Very interesting. From a human perspective, watching the moon, Sun, and planets move through the sky puts us at the location of the hub or axle. So I wonder if epistemologically this helped us inhabit the idea of the center and then create that to invent the wheel. I really liked the part of this episode that highlighted the importance of the axle... which might explain why it took 500 years because the wheel in and of itself is not as useful without something to center it. And I had never thought that the pottery wheel might have predated the transportation wheel. Good info!