Re: OT: Wheels (Was: Clockwise without clocks)
| From: | Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, April 13, 2005, 13:09 |
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On Wed, 13 Apr 2005 12:07, Tim May wrote:
> Roger Mills wrote at 2005-03-31 15:09:26 (-0500)
>
> > H.S. Teoh et al. wrote:
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > You mean the pre-colonial Amerindian cultures don't know the
> > > wheel? That's interesting.
> >
> > Apparently not. Bear in mind, until the horse was brought in by the
> > Spaniards, there were no adequate beasts of burden. (Dogs and
> > people can't pull much; llamas are difficult, plus an Andean
> > mountainside isn't someplace you'd want to be in a wheeled
> > vehicle....). Mexican/Mayan cultures, maybe-- IIRC ceramic wheeled
> > toys (or miniature models?) have been found.
>
> Yeah, you can see some of them here[1][2]. I've been unable to
> determine with any confidence the distribution of these finds in time
> and space - Cihuatán is a late classic Maya site in El Salvador.
>
>
> Wesley Parish wrote at 2005-04-01 20:54:37 (+1200)
>
> > It seems to have been related to the development of smelting.
> > Stone Age peoples like the pre-colonial Americans never got that
> > far.
>
> That seems an odd conclusion to draw. Do you have any particular
> causal relationship in mind? AFAIK the correlation holds, but the
> wheel's only been independently discovered perhaps three times in
> human history.
Woodworking tools to work the wood to the tolerances needed for an axle, and
to connect the wheel to the axle. It's the same with building planked ships.
If the wood can't be worked to fit closely enough, then you are not going to
be able to build much larger than canoe size - although the Austronesians
_did_ make the world's largest and most seaworthy canoes.
>
> I'm inclined to think that the abscence of adequate draught animals
> was the main factor. (This introduction to a paper on wheeled
> vehicles in Bronze Age China [3] suggests four conditions for
> development of the wheel - draught animals, timber supply, woodworking
> skill and amenable terrain. I suppose smelting, and metal tools,
> would have some bearing on woodworking.)
That's a given. Stone tools are great - don't get me wrong there! - but they
are not suitable for the tolerances needed to fit something tightly together.
And it also has a bearing on the timber supply - stone tools can only supply
in low quantity. Metal tools can cut a greater quantity with the same amount
of effort. And that is also connected to smelting - smelting takes one heck
of a lot of wood.
Also, nails - one of the greatest inventions in all of history. Without
nails, you're restricted to laboriously drilling holes in wood and then
binding with rope (the Austronesian method of building ocean-going canoes.).
With nails, all you need to do is belt it into the wood and it will hold the
wood together. It allows for an extra magnitude of scale.
And then, Piggott's prerequisite of "heat bending" - that is
metallurgy-dependent. You can't bend wood over anything other than a worked
piece of metal - holding it over a naked flame will set it alight or
smoldering, and stone doesn't hold enough heat or transmit it quickly enough
to affect the fibres in any other way than light charring. A metal rod or
bowl does the job.
>
> Still, it's interesting. You'd think any society with sedentary
> farmers would benefit from a wheelbarrow, but I guess it's just not
> that obvious.
Wesley Parish
--
Clinersterton beademung, with all of love - RIP James Blish
-----
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