Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-it-took-so-long-to-inv/

by Tomte • 10 years ago

160 155 10 years ago

I often like to fantasize how would I fare if I found myself suddenly transported into medieval times or earlier (spoiler: poorly).

Articles like this make me appreciate even more how little difference there is between us and humans thousands of years ago. I wouldn't have figured out how to make a working wheel, and I've seen one. I have no idea where I picked up the idea that "ancient civilizations were dumb", but the more I read, the more I appreciate how little difference there was.

BTW, if you haven't, you should definitely check the "Primitive technology" channel on Youtube.

derekp7• 10 years ago

Two really good literature treatments of your fantasy are Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Jules Verne's Mysterious Island. They both have as major plot elements a character who has a lot of knowledge of fabrication techniques, and recreate their technology in a primitive situation (one involves time travel, the other is stranded on a primitive island).

On another note, I've heard that the first thing you need to fabricate (beyond basic hand tools) is a lathe. Once you have that, you can make a better lathe, which can make various other machine shop tools, etc. until you have a whole workshop created. Although this probably assumes that you still have access to modern (as in the last couple hundred years) materials to work with.

evincarofautumn• 10 years ago

I’ve heard of bootstrapping a machine shop from a lathe as well—apparently there’s a series about it, written by this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery

bobcostas55• 10 years ago

Another good take on the idea is Lest Darkness Fall, which features time travel to 6th century Rome.

jessaustin• 10 years ago

Based on the old wooden wagons I've seen, lathes played no part in their construction. The spokes on the wheels had been spokeshaved (gee, maybe that's the etymology of that tool's name?) rather than turned on a lathe. The wheels as a whole were pieced together by hand so they'd be round automatically (i.e. spokes and rim segments were all the same length, held together by an iron hoop that just took shape around them when cooled).

Sure this is just one example, but it is what comes to mind given TFA's subject matter. Without access to iron-working, I suppose a less durable rim material like e.g. hemp could be used, which would introduce some more complications involved in tightening. If solid rather than spoked wheels were acceptable, an out-of-round wheel on an axle can be marked with a piece of chalk-rock held in place while spinning the wheel, and then abrasive stones can be used to true the wheel to the chalk mark.

KineticLensman• 10 years ago

The "what would I try to invent?" question one is fascinating. If I found myself transported back to Roman times, I'd aim to make a lens. The Romans had glass so the raw material is there. With a lens you can fairly quickly go a telescope, which has immediate military application, so would perhaps be widely adopted. Astronomy might then follow, heading off the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held back modern thinking. You can also make a microscope, which fairly quickly leads to the discovery of microscopic organisms, and perhaps the germ theory of disease.

For bonus points I'd give them the decimal number system.

nine_k• 10 years ago

Telephone or at least telegraph are also easy, and may be even more valuable in a military setting.

pbhjpbhj5• 10 years ago

heading off the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held back modern thinking //

How do you think that held us back? Do you think heliocentrism, which is similarly wrong, has/is holding us back?

lkrubner5• 10 years ago

The problem is with the assumption behind "which fairly quickly leads to the discovery of microscopic organisms". In your scenario, who learns about microscopic organisms, and when?

As a point of comparison, who discovered the existence of North America? Was it Christopher Columbus in 1492? Or was it the Vikings in 900 AD? Or was it some mix of people who first melded together in Beringia, somewhere around 20,000 BC?

Has a fact been discovered if one person learns of it? Or is it only discovered if the news spreads to all of society? If the latter, then science is a social process, not an individual one.

The historian Fernand Braudel points out that an Italian engineer, wanting to show off his skills, built an automated saw mill in Italy, back during the 1200s. The logs were slotted automatically and run through the mill automatically. This engineer had created an important part of the Industrial Revolution, 500 years early!!! Did it matter? No. The project was merely a demonstration. The abundance of wood was never used. How could it be? There was no system of transportation for the abundance of wood, there was no finance to cover operating expenses, nor any finance to support a building boom that might use the wood, nor any modern labor market from which the mill owner could hire more workers to do the initial cutting of trees, nor was there the modern strictness regarding contracts, nor were commoners allowed to bring civil suits against the nobility (in case of default, supposing a nobleman contracted to have a manor built), nor was the judiciary independent, nor... In other words, the Industrial Revolution was a social process, involving the creation of dozens of important modern institutions, and the public's acceptance of the legitimacy of those institutions. No single engineer, however brilliant, could jump start the process.

ekianjo• 10 years ago

Greeks had no telescope yet some of them had already devised that the Earth was orbiting around the Sun and also calculated the diameter of the Earth with reasonable accuracy.

Houshalter12• 10 years ago

I love this game. I think I would send the idea of plant breeding. They had this idea to some extent, but I don't think there was big public, long term effort to breed new crops or get much higher yields. If you get modern crops faster, you have larger populations, which leads to industrialization sooner. This isn't just limited to food crops, it's possible ancients could have bred plants and animals for many useful purposes.

Slightly relevant, what information would you send to the past if you had a phone that could communicate backwards in time? But there's a catch, any idea you send is converted to the closest analogue in ancient times. So if you tell them about the scientific method, they will just think about religion. http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/

knz2• 10 years ago

Was glass and the tools needed to make a lens readily available to people then? Or would you nedd to time travel with substantial wealth?

noamyoungerm• 10 years ago

the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held back modern thinking

This says much more about how we dismiss ancient civilizations as inferior than it does about ancient civilizations themselves.

The fact is, the geocentric model was an excellent one, able to explain all observations at the time in a sensible and straightforward way. Admittedly, more data helped to develop the heliocentric model, but there were valid scientific criticisms against that model at the time. In particular, it took Kepler to provide truly sensible and strong arguments in favor of heliocentrism.

The geocentric model is so good that even today it is often the sensible model to use when thinking about some astronomical problems. I hate to hear it being dismissed as 'wrong' - because from a physical perspective the two are simply geometrical transformations of one another, they are both 'right'. It's simply that one of them is simpler than the other for most problems.

But most of all, I hate hearing people say it 'held back thinking', because I assure you that the people doing the thinking back then were just as capable of doing good, logical, rational thinking as we are today, and didn't need anyone to claim they were too stupid to think critically for themselves about the scientific understanding of the time.

njharman2• 10 years ago

Bicycles. Food preservation. Sanitation / boiling water.

Roman legions mounted in bikes could be everywhere. Their roads already were a force multiplier. Combined with being able to feed them and have them not die of disease simple wounds. We'd all be speaking Latin.

We all know, Rome is center of the universe. :)

WalterBright5• 10 years ago

Paper, followed by a printing press. Look what happened in the century after Gutenberg.

maxerickson3• 10 years ago

The trick might be to try to leverage the knowledge of the contemporary craftsmen. Not sure how you establish the credibility to do that, but you don't actually need to know how to fit a wheel to utilize the concept.

Razengan3• 10 years ago

I often like to fantasize how would I fare if I found myself suddenly transported into medieval times or earlier

I wonder the same. If I was suddenly teleported to the middle of a forest, without anything, not even my shoes and clothes, and no chance of any contact with civilization again, what SHOULD my first few tasks even be??

Imagine a modern human, ideal in health and strength and faculties, and immune to disease or aging, teleported butt-naked to a copy of the planet Earth where there never had been any humans — so no chance of radio, or rescue choppers seeing your smoke signals, or finding any technology that you didn't make yourself.

The only thing that person has is a version of Wikipedia in their brain, so they know how everything is built and how nature works.

How long will it take for them to resch current levels of technology, and be able to construct a device like the one you're reading this on? Would two people make a significant difference?

How would you fare in that situation?

rwmj2• 10 years ago

If it was one human, they'd die off before reaching any significant technological level. However someone who's been on a survival course should be able to survive for the length of their natural life (minus modern medicine), the first few days being the key.

Transporting a man and a woman doesn't help much either because there probably wouldn't be sufficient genetic variety to produce a viable species. I think I read you need thousands of humans to do that, and then there's enough spare capacity beyond mere survival to ensure that knowledge gets passed on.

There is a book about all this (a rather depressing book actually): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/knowledge-how-...

knz2• 10 years ago

I'm not sure I would have the goal of the "modern world" in mind if transported to a pristine planet! Millions of people want the technology but not the stress and pollution of the rat race. A small remote coastal settlement in a temperate climate with some technology to make life easier (fishing nets, agricultural tools) sounds ok!

Of course the daily grind there is probably food production and medical issues.

bsenftner• 10 years ago

Gaaa! I can't find the reference to a short story I've read about an over-developed future where the entertainment of the time is "athlete performers wearing body/environment capture suits" who are trained for "any scenario" and then randomly dropped into alien primitive populations where they have to survive, live without detection, and their "reality show goal" is to become a leader or otherwise pivotal to that primitive race, all the while not being discovered by "the Federation" type of modern police because such intervention with a primitive race is highly illegal. The public watches it all in a "body sim" like VR player. Is this triggering anybody's memory? Can't believe I'm blanking on the author...

david-given3• 10 years ago

Actually, Terry Pratchett's _The Long Mars_ discusses this, to an extent.

(In that setting, you can build a very simple machine --- powered by a potato, which actually makes sense in context --- which can take you to a parallel Earth. You can take what you can carry with you; but not iron, which stays behind. Turns out that setting up a society from scratch using only hand tools and brain power is kinda hard.)

michaelbuckbee• 10 years ago

You recommended "Primitive Technology" which I thought of as well while reading the article. It would be really neat if he did an episode on making a more complicated wheel and axle structure.

Also, I would highly recommend "The Cross Time Engineer" series as it's this same scenario but works through how he's able to apply his modern knowledge as leverage to work up from a boatman earning pennies to running the country.

1 - https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad...

ronald_raygun• 10 years ago

I would try to do math and finance earlier. I think calculus is usually underrated when people consider "most important inventions", and the idea of investing for fractional ownership in an enterprise turned out to be non-obvious but really really useful.

wycx• 10 years ago

Also cartesian coordinates. No one drew graphs until Descartes.

a3n2• 10 years ago

spoiler: poorly

And vice versa.

We spend most of our time either learning to be a cog in society's machine, or being that cog.

Most of today's cogs are useless in ancient times. "What is this 'full stack' you speak of, stranger?"

Most of the past's cogs are useless today. "So you're good with sticks on wet clay? Cool story bro."

Either stranger could adapt to the times, but they'd be very inefficient because they'd never be fully integrated to the larger machine, having to relearn every interaction that a native just takes for "the way things are."

danbruc2• 10 years ago

I heard the story differently. Wheels are only really useful if you have good enough streets to use them on and building streets is a huge upfront investment. It is also a chicken egg problem - wheels are only useful with streets and streets are only useful for wheels. Without streets you are better of carrying your stuff around than trying to push it around on wheels in natural terrain. That is also why the wheel first appeared in toys, because you can push them around on a flat table. So the wheel was probably well known before it saw widespread adoption for transportation which additionally to the lack of streets had to overcome the engineering problems mentioned in the article that come up when you scale the wheel from a toy to a wheel burrow.

dualogy• 10 years ago

Streets? Where we came from, we needed no.. streets ;)

I mean, didn't "streets" emerge really from commonly-travelled paths carved by feet and horse hooves and time, and really most non-paved paths are quite fine for most wheels? Perhaps they last longer on pavement, but other than that..

danbruc2• 10 years ago

I didn't want to imply pavement when I said streets. The question is what commonly traveled paths look like before the wheel. If they were just desire paths, then they were not suitable for carts because they are to narrow even if they were used with horses or other animals instead of just walking. Could they already have been wide enough for example because of several people walking next to each other? Certainly, but were they? I personally can not think any path I have ever used that was wide enough for carts but never intended or actually used by any sort of vehicle.

bhaak2• 10 years ago

Streets are also useful if you don't use them with wheels.

The Roman empire made good use for it with their armies (of course, also for trade) and Roman soldiers were mostly on foot and a few on horses.

Houshalter12• 10 years ago

The Romans absolutely used wheels. Those roads were so well travelled with wagons that there are still grooves cut into them where the wheels wore away the pavement. The roman armies would have used large numbers of wagons to carry all the food and supplies an army needs, which is the main reason they needed roads.

ap222132• 10 years ago

Streets happen naturally when there's enough population density and permanent structures. Of course, those things require agriculture first (or at least plentiful, permanent food sources like fish).

tpeo• 10 years ago

Streets and roads aren't useful only for wheels. Try taking a mile-long walk through a (seemingly) flat field and through a paved surface as an experiment.

The first one will be much bumpier and tiresome than the second for any given speed, and you'll be at a higher risk of injury due to careless step. And the benefit of having a flat surface is greater the more rugged is the terrain that must be crossed. This is why, though the Incas didn't use the wheel, they had roads nonetheless. And the Romans, too, built their own roads mainly for the speedier movement of their armies while on the march.

Hermel• 10 years ago

Also, the wheel is not very helpful without compact, step-free pathes.

pbhjpbhj5• 10 years ago

Water wheel, spinning wheel, pottery wheel, grinding wheel (eg for wheat flour), ... seems useful.

dredmorbius14• 10 years ago

The domain under discussion is transportation, not use of the wheel in industrial applications.

Spinning, water, and grinding wheels all postdate the wheel-and-axel in transportation. It is thought that the transport wheel may have evolved from the potter's wheel.

dredmorbius14• 10 years ago

This is being downvoted, but yes, that's a crucial element. For transportation, you hard, level, vegetation-free ground.

One of the sources I've been reading (probably Smil or Weissenbacher) looks at the regions in which wheeled vehicles might have originated.

They're generally suspected to have come out of the middle east (or present-day Ukraine / southern Russia), quite possibly being developed from potter's wheels.

Wheeled vehicles don't work in sandy ground because there's too much resistance. Pack animals (horses, camels, donkeys) are far more efficient. The wheel was lost in much of Arabia for a considerable period due to this, and even today, sand tracked and blown across highways is a problem for cars.

On grassy plains, you have the problems of both vegetation and mud / soft soil. On the American prairie, you can still find, a century and a half after their passage, the ruts left by wagon trains rolling across the soil.

Hilly or mountainous country, such as that of the Aztecs and Inca, isn't suitable for wheeled vehicles, especially if your roads have stairs (as Incan roads did). Again, human porters and animals can traverse these.

Even with suitable roads, overland travel was exceptionally slow and expensive in terms of animal power, drovers, and feed required. Ships and canals were vastly more efficient, and remained the best option until the advent of the railroad. Even that required high-quality Bessemer steel (1860s) to provide rails which could handle high loads and were resistant to splitting.

bane• 10 years ago

The wheel is one part of a two part invention:

1) The wheel

2) smooth hard-ish surfaces that are large enough to be worth going anywhere

Without either, the wheel on its own isn't worth much. It turns out roads are a much older, more useful invention without which the wheel doesn't make much sense.

pbhjpbhj5• 10 years ago

Rollers work well on all sorts of terrains.

Wheels are good, eg wheelbarrows, on hardened earth of a footpath.

maxerickson3• 10 years ago

Settlers beat trails across the American west. Granted, much of it is hard and flat, but it didn't take a lot of improvement to get that way.

There's also still lots of relatively major roads in undeveloped countries that are not smooth or hardish. http://www.flickriver.com/photos/globalizepeace/3832727846/

Houshalter12• 10 years ago

You can use wheels without roads. Wheels were used before roads were built. Wheeled chariots were even used on battlefields, which is far from optimal circumstances. And also wheelbarrows and similar things are very useful for doing work.

ghrou3epuri• 10 years ago

hence why the wheel never really evolved in nature, because legs are far more adaptable to terrain and probably easier to grow. (modern) wheels do work on rough terrain (e.g. mountain bikes) but they're highly sensitive to scale. It's possible the idea was thought of many many times but only became practical with the advent of roads.

jlampa• 10 years ago

If you think INVENTING the wheel took a long time, wait till you learn how long it took to put them on suitcases: http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/did-you-know-that-we-went... (spoiler alert: we got to the moon first!)

minikites• 10 years ago

I'm surprised this article didn't give some credit to the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is a main reason there are ramps you can use with your wheeled luggage instead of hauling it up the steps to a building entrance.

pbhjpbhj5• 10 years ago

That's more a mass production thing isn't it - we had trolleys of various forms you could load your bags on to.

Strong plastics, probably made such mass production cheap enough.

People rich enough to have wheeled luggage in the past would have just used servants, it's seemingly economics rather than technology that prevented such "inventions" as attaching wheels to things permanently instead of temporarily.

A modicum of googling suggests Templar Knights had wheeled trunks in the 12th Century though.

monk_e_boy• 10 years ago

we had trolleys of various forms you could load your bags on to

and a man or boy you paid to push the trolley. Much more civilised.

mythrwy• 10 years ago

Wheels were certainly in use well before 3500BC.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/62357/who-actually-invented-w...

(A casual Google check will reveal other examples as well)

Also parent article mentions metal tools being needed to bore holes for the shaft. Other methods could do this also... people worked intricately with wood long before metal was used (although metal would certainly speed up mass production.)

As far as roads, you don't really need roads for a wheel to be useful. You just need a flat semi hard surface. People crossed the US in horse drawn wagons without roads. Not sure where the "roads" argument comes from other than, sure, better roads means more wheeled vehicles.

aptwebapps• 10 years ago

The oldest artifact mentioned in the article at "5650 to 5385 years ago" is right around 3500 BC.

Houshalter12• 10 years ago

One of the most fascinating books I ever picked up from the library was Ancient Inventions (https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Inventions-Peter-James/dp/034...), which goes over the details of stuff like this.

The historical figure that strikes me as "most likely to be a time traveller" is Archimedes, who designed incredibly advanced machines that destroyed the Roman fleet and protected his home city. Sadly he was accidentally killed during the war. The Romans wanted to capture him and use him for their own purposes. It's possible that could have changed history quite a bit.

Heron of Alexandria is another candidate that gets a lot of space in that book. He invented the first steam engine way before his time. But also many other insanely elaborate mechanical devices. Including an entirely mechanical little theater, with mechanical puppets and music.

Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only. Sometimes I wonder if the greatest inventor of our time might be applying his work to video game engines.

jbpetersen2• 10 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if the greatest inventor of our time might be applying his work to video game engines.

John Carmack?

mamon• 10 years ago

I vaguely recall reading somewhere that some mathematical formula for Unified Field Theory (or similar physics concept) was originaly derived as a part of a game engine and patented.

jacquesm2• 10 years ago

The Chinese may have had primitive steam engines before Heron of Alexandria:

http://tellmewhyfacts.com/First-Steam-Engine-James-Watt

That doesn't diminish Heron of Alexandria's accomplishments in any way, I highly doubt it was anything else than either an original invention or an independent re-invention.

Super interesting historical figure, right up there with Archimedes and Leonardo da Vinci.

Retric3• 10 years ago

Tiangong Kaiwu only dates back to 1637, so do you mean it holds references to earlier steam engines? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_Kaiwu

xenadu022• 10 years ago

More proof that being the first to invent something is overrated. Execution matters as much as invention.

I think it also proves how much everyone (the most boot-strappiest included) rely on society and circumstance to provide a favorable environment.

Peter Thiel born 10 years earlier or later probably ends up as a nobody. Maybe successful, but certainly not a billionaire.

theoh• 10 years ago

Also, we really should not forget the post-classical but pre-renaissance technologists of the Arab world. e.g. http://www.muslimheritage.com/article/automata-review-exhibi...

The "hellenocentric" narrative can inadvertently contribute to bias against other very nearby civilizations that communicated with them and contributed to the technologies.

There's an interesting text on parabolas called "On burning mirrors" by Diocles which comes to us only through an Arabic translation:

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1065183.files/Too...

dleslie• 10 years ago

Entertainment is fertile soil for creative invention; it is often an environment which eschews rigid, pattern-based development in favor of creative expression.

I've spent a fair amount of time in video game development and in enterprise software; without a doubt, my experience reflects that creative developers are drawn to video games, whereas the few that found their way elsewhere have a sense of being exotic caged animals.

kartan• 10 years ago

Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only.

I read somewhere that one of the problems in antiquity to develop useful machines was the abundance of slave/captive labor. Why do you want to create a complicated inefficient first version of a machine when you have cheap humans being to do the task?

Houshalter12• 10 years ago

Yes that's probably why the industrial revolution didn't happen. There's a good comment below that explains other societal reasons why the industrial revolution didn't happen, like the lack of contract law and investors.

I also read a great theory once (but I can't find it again through google!) that the industrial revolution really required the invention of the cannon first. Building an efficient steam engine in roman times would have been incredibly expensive and dangerous, because of their primitive metal technology. The cannon created a tech race between nations to develop more/better/cheaper/lighter cannons. Which resulted in better metal working tech. Once you can make big pieces of metal that can withstand and direct the pressure created from explosions, steam engines aren't too far away.

But Heron's invention was still useful, and would have been the fastest moving thing ever built up to that time. Perhaps it could have been adapted to military applications, like flinging tons of rocks really fast at high speed?

api4• 10 years ago

After initially being skeptical and disliking him for libertarian leaning political reasons, I've come around to wondering if John Maynard Keynes might have been even more right than we have imagined.

Slave labor is kind of an extreme case of the paradox of thrift. Slaves have no disposable capital and they flood the labor market down to zero. Slavery is like a permanent deflationary spiral. There is just no reason to innovate or invest in anything except conquest and luxuries, which describes most ancient cultures well.

Had the Greeks or Romans abolished slavery and set a minimum wage we might be flying to Proxima Centauri in a fusion rocket starship by now.

notahacker• 10 years ago

The other issue with having most of your labour performed by slaves is that the slaves themselves generally don't have the motivation, or education, or chance of actually being taken seriously to propose even incremental process improvements.

agumonkey• 10 years ago

I'd add a dose of social myopia. Even without slaves, you'd have to make everybody imagine a world taming forces. I believe up until Newton, the value of technology and its pace was very different. So people wouldn't align and go that deep into physics and engineering. It's a bit of a stretch for steam power, but another instance is electricity, a phenomenon which was known at the time but would require way too much desire and stack to master.

ps: This is something that distort my perception of the world. Somehow similar to the comma.ai birth, the owner believed the others were caught into a limited view of the world. It's possible that a lot of stuff that we dismiss because we believed in others are "limiting" our existence. But the brownian motion seems unavoidable for now.

api4• 10 years ago

It makes perfect sense that they'd be novelties. Play is creative. It's really harmful to science that it's become so institutional and bureaucratic.

tomdell• 10 years ago

Unfortunately? Entertainment and art give many people a significant reason to live.

dredmorbius14• 10 years ago

Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China needs mention, though you might not want to buy the whole thing.

It was begun in 1954, and now runs 27 separate volumes, with several more still planned.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilization_in_...

bhaak2• 10 years ago

The article surprised me in that it didn't mentioned the potter's wheel even though the principles are mostly the same.

ap222132• 10 years ago

If I remember correctly, the pottery wheel came later.

Razengan3• 10 years ago

Is there any realistically conceivable alternate-history/universe where cable-suspended wheel-less trams (like [1][2][3] but closer to ground level) became the dominant method of transportation instead of huge roads and cars?

It's something I've been musing on to incorporate into some fiction, inspired by all the recent news and discussions about self-driving cars and the prospect of shared fleets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_transport

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_tramway

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondola_lift

jbpetersen2• 10 years ago

Try http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/

pitaj• 10 years ago

What would you use to move the cables? A piston with a friction grip that pushes the cable along bit by bit?

Without wheels or axles, there would be little to no electricity, or maybe it wouldn't have been invented at all.

vanderZwan2• 10 years ago

However, from that place, it seems to have spread so rapidly across Eurasia and the Middle East that experts cannot say for sure where it originated.

Well the very nature of the wheel itself probably helped with that - I wonder if that holds true for all transportation-related inventions?

dredmorbius14• 10 years ago

Lateen sails took a particularly long time to spread. They had been introduced to the Mediterranean region as early as the 2nd century BC (and had been developed much earlier in China and Arabia), but were not brought into widespread use in European sailing ships until the 1400s. This is hugely significant as a lateen-rigged ship can sail far closer to the wind than a square-rigged ship, giving it much better maneuverability, allowing it to navigate complex waters (e.g., harbour entrances) under less-than-ideal conditions, and increased the length of the sailing season -- November through May was "no-sail" season from Roman times (with numerous interesting impacts on historical events, messages, etc.).

The rig seems to be among the technologies lost during the middle ages.

The big hitch, as noted in James Burke's Connections, was how ships and sailing voyages were financed. A ship was a sufficiently sizeable investment, and financing sufficiently difficult to arrange, that conservative financiers opposed any radical explorations of such tomfoolery as them thar lateen-rigged newfangled boats.

As for other transportation innovations ... there mostly weren't any until quite modern times.

Once introduced, though, their advantages were immediately obvious, and they were adopted quickly throughout Europe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateen

Yes, you saw further advances in ships and navigation. Especially navigation -- position-taking and timekeeping were critical, and several innovations followed catastrophic losses of entire fleets run aground and shipwrecked into the 20th century -- see the Honda Point disaster in which seven US destroyers sailed at full speed into rocks just offshore the Santa Barbara coast in 1923.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Point_disaster

After the Lateen rig and excepting other ship designs, the major transport innovations were canals (major construction from the 1500s onward in Europe, though much earlier in China, and some earlier European/Mediterranean instances), the railroad (1825), steamship (1810s), safety bicycle (1870s), automobile (and truck and bus -- 1880s), and airplane (1900s). These all spread essentially instantly throughout the world wherever industrial capacity (and fuel) capable of producing such vehicles existed.

nradov• 10 years ago

And yet European naval architects continued using square rigging for most large vessels until the end of the age of sail even when they were fully aware of lateen rigging. So clearly there were advantages to square rigging beyond just conservative finance.

vanderZwan2• 10 years ago

Thank you very much for following up on that off-hand question!

hyperion2010• 10 years ago

It could also be related to the fact that in order for wheels to become widespread you need to have terrain that they can roll on. The only obstacle to the 'need something to roll on' hypothesis is wheelbarrows which in theory should have appeared long before.

a3n2• 10 years ago

Because middle managers in meetings were accusing innovators of reinventing the cube.

thomasthomas• 10 years ago

The invention of the wheel was so challenging that it probably happened only once, in one place

i disagree with this premise based on kevin kelly's simultaneous discovery phenomenon.

The fact that pretty well every invention and discovery you mention has occurred to two different people at possibly the same time. Possibly three. Possibly four. My favorite example of this is the light bulb, which in my part of the world a man named Joseph Swan gets the credit for inventing the light bulb and a terrible fraud called Thomas Edison came along and ripped him off. Well, if I live in Russia, I give the credit to Lodygin, and I'm equally cross with Edison. But actually if you drill down into history, in the 18th century there are 23 people in that decade alone who deserve independent credit for coming up with the idea of the incandescent light bulb. It was an idea ripe to be discovered. It was inevitable that it would be discovered in that decade. And that's true of almost everything. And then of course famously evolution itself, the idea of natural selection occurs to Wallace and Darwin at the same time, and Darwin has to rush into print to prevent himself being preempted. Even relativity--we tend to think of Einstein as unique in coming up with this idea that nobody else, that it took the world by surprise and nobody believed him. Well, that's true, but if you look at what Hendrik Lorentz was doing at the same time, he was well on the trail. He would have got there if Einstein had been run over by a tram. The double helix of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), incredibly important discovery--big race going on to find it. That, the technology had reached the point where we're going to find the genetic code around that time. So, there's a sort of complete dispensability of scientists and inventors that really surprises people when you think about it.

[0] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/02/matt_ridley_on_1.ht...

Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

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