Review: The Wheel
Category: Inventions
Author: Anonymous Ancient Mesopotamian
Rating: 27%
The wheel is a well-established invention, created by an anonymous inventor in the fourth millennium BC. It is a round, disk-like structure, which has allowed a great amount of progress in a huge number of areas, especially transport. Without the wheel, the world as we know it would be an unrecognizable, dysfunctional mess.
While this is true, I must admit: I’m not a big fan.
The fact is that the wheel is only as good as whatever it transports. It is a leech on the success of other inventions, such as the wheelbarrow; does anyone talk about the invention of the wheelbarrow? No, we classically allude to the invention of the wheel. It’s disproportionate.
I’m not saying the wheel isn’t valuable; it’s just that it has no intrinsic value. It’s like inventing a ball, or a cube; we can’t get by without them, and we can’t create greater structures. Their invention, however, is not necessary. No one invented the ball, yet here we are with snooker and the lottery and hungry hungry hippos. These things just happen.
The achievement of the wheel is also debatable. It has served only to speed up things which we could have done already- transport and freight. This increase in speed has lead to a huge number of deaths over 5.5 thousand years; our speed continues to increase today, because the wheel gave us a taste for it.
Without the wheel, there wouldn’t be biker gangs, there wouldn’t be drink-driving, and the number of people confined to wheelchairs would dwindle to nothing. Even the holocaust would have been prevented, because moving more than 6 million Jews without trains would have been an absolute nightmare (Not that the holocaust wasn’t a nightmare; I just mean that this time, the nightmare would be Hitler’s).
The wheel is overrated and frankly quite dangerous. Why people go on about it is beyond me; I’m only glad that idiot Mesopotamian isn’t making royalties. The wheel sucks- if your society hasn’t invented it yet, I wouldn’t recommend it.
