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Wheel away the clichés
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Wheel away the clichés A fresh history of the world’s top invention puts Simon Ings in a spin Japanese – who ate little red meat, arrived. They made wheeled toys, had few large herds of cattle and though. Cattle-herding societies horses, and seldom used animals from Senegal to Kenya were not to pull vehicles – did not share taken in by wheels either, though with Westerners.” they were happy enough to In answer to some questions feature the chariots of visitors that seem far more difficult, Bulliet in their rock paintings. provides extraordinarily precise Bulliet has a lot of fun teasing answers. He proposes an exact generations of anthropologists, birth for the wheel: the wheel-set archaeologists and historians for design, whereby wheels are fixed whom the wheel has been a to rotating axles, was invented for use on mine cars in copper mines “Even a technology as ubiquitous as the wheel in the Carpathian mountains, turns out to be a hostage perhaps as early as 4000 BC. to historical contingency” Other questions remain intractable. Why did wheeled vehicles not catch on in presymbol of self-evident utility: Columbian America? The peoples how could those foreign types not of North and South America did get it? His answer is radical: the not use wheels for transportation wheel is actually not that great an before Christopher Columbus idea. It only really came into its
IN 1870, a year after the first rickshaws appeared in Japan, three inventors separately applied for exclusive rights. Already, there were too many workshops serving the burgeoning market. We will never know which of them, if any, invented this internationally popular, stackable, hand-drawn passenger cart. Just three years after its invention, the rickshaw had totally displaced the palanquin (a covered litter carried on the shoulders of two bearers) as the preferred mode of passenger transport in Japan. In the course of his story of the wheel, Richard Bulliet, a historian of technology, asks some very good questions. He marshals a simple argument to explain why the rickshaw never caught on in the West until recently, with the arrival of streamlined bicycle rickshaws in well-touristed cities. What made the rickshaw so different from a wagon or an ox-cart and, in the eyes of many Westerners, so cruel, was the idea of it being pulled by a man instead of a farm animal. Pushing wheelchairs and baby carriages posed no problem, but pulling turned a man into a beast. “This quirk of perception,” Bulliet says, “reflects a history of humananimal relations that the Westerners were appalled by the sight of a human pulling a rickshaw 42 | NewScientist | 23 January 2016
Grenville Collins/Mary Evans
The Wheel: Inventions and reinventions by Richard W. Bulliet, Columbia University Press, $27.95/£19.95
own once John McAdam, a Scot born in 1756, introduced a superior way to build roads. It’s worth remembering that McAdam insisted the best way to manufacture the small, sharpedged stones he needed was to have workers, including women and children, sit beside the road and break up larger rocks. So much for progress. The wheel revolution is, to Bulliet’s mind, a recent and largely human-powered one. Bicycles, shopping carts, baby strollers, dollies, gurneys and roll-aboard luggage: none of these was conceived before 1800. At the dawn of Europe’s Renaissance, in the 14th century, four-wheeled vehicles were not in common use anywhere in the world. Bulliet ends his history with the oddly conventional observation that “invention is seldom a simple matter of who thought of something first”. He could have challenged the modern shibboleth (born in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and given mature expression in George Dyson’s Darwin Among the Machines) that technology evolves. Add energy to an unbounded system, and complexity is pretty much inevitable. There is nothing inevitable about technology, though; human agency cannot be ignored. Even a technology as ubiquitous as the wheel turns out to be a scrappy hostage to historical contingency. I may be misrepresenting the author’s argument here. It is hard to tell, because Bulliet approaches the philosophy of technology quite gingerly. He can afford to release the soft pedal. This is a fascinating book, but we need more, Professor Bulliet! n
Wheel away the clichés A fresh history of the world’s top invention puts Simon Ings in a spin Japanese – who ate little red meat, arrived. They made wheeled toys, had few large herds of cattle and though. Cattle-herding societies horses, and seldom used animals from Senegal to Kenya were not to pull vehicles – did not share taken in by wheels either, though with Westerners.” they were happy enough to In answer to some questions feature the chariots of visitors that seem far more difficult, Bulliet in their rock paintings. provides extraordinarily precise Bulliet has a lot of fun teasing answers. He proposes an exact generations of anthropologists, birth for the wheel: the wheel-set archaeologists and historians for design, whereby wheels are fixed whom the wheel has been a to rotating axles, was invented for use on mine cars in copper mines “Even a technology as ubiquitous as the wheel in the Carpathian mountains, turns out to be a hostage perhaps as early as 4000 BC. to historical contingency” Other questions remain intractable. Why did wheeled vehicles not catch on in presymbol of self-evident utility: Columbian America? The peoples how could those foreign types not of North and South America did get it? His answer is radical: the not use wheels for transportation wheel is actually not that great an before Christopher Columbus idea. It only really came into its
IN 1870, a year after the first rickshaws appeared in Japan, three inventors separately applied for exclusive rights. Already, there were too many workshops serving the burgeoning market. We will never know which of them, if any, invented this internationally popular, stackable, hand-drawn passenger cart. Just three years after its invention, the rickshaw had totally displaced the palanquin (a covered litter carried on the shoulders of two bearers) as the preferred mode of passenger transport in Japan. In the course of his story of the wheel, Richard Bulliet, a historian of technology, asks some very good questions. He marshals a simple argument to explain why the rickshaw never caught on in the West until recently, with the arrival of streamlined bicycle rickshaws in well-touristed cities. What made the rickshaw so different from a wagon or an ox-cart and, in the eyes of many Westerners, so cruel, was the idea of it being pulled by a man instead of a farm animal. Pushing wheelchairs and baby carriages posed no problem, but pulling turned a man into a beast. “This quirk of perception,” Bulliet says, “reflects a history of humananimal relations that the Westerners were appalled by the sight of a human pulling a rickshaw 42 | NewScientist | 23 January 2016
Grenville Collins/Mary Evans
The Wheel: Inventions and reinventions by Richard W. Bulliet, Columbia University Press, $27.95/£19.95
own once John McAdam, a Scot born in 1756, introduced a superior way to build roads. It’s worth remembering that McAdam insisted the best way to manufacture the small, sharpedged stones he needed was to have workers, including women and children, sit beside the road and break up larger rocks. So much for progress. The wheel revolution is, to Bulliet’s mind, a recent and largely human-powered one. Bicycles, shopping carts, baby strollers, dollies, gurneys and roll-aboard luggage: none of these was conceived before 1800. At the dawn of Europe’s Renaissance, in the 14th century, four-wheeled vehicles were not in common use anywhere in the world. Bulliet ends his history with the oddly conventional observation that “invention is seldom a simple matter of who thought of something first”. He could have challenged the modern shibboleth (born in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and given mature expression in George Dyson’s Darwin Among the Machines) that technology evolves. Add energy to an unbounded system, and complexity is pretty much inevitable. There is nothing inevitable about technology, though; human agency cannot be ignored. Even a technology as ubiquitous as the wheel turns out to be a scrappy hostage to historical contingency. I may be misrepresenting the author’s argument here. It is hard to tell, because Bulliet approaches the philosophy of technology quite gingerly. He can afford to release the soft pedal. This is a fascinating book, but we need more, Professor Bulliet! n