Viswanathan K's Thoughts

  Next up in the small inventions that make a huge difference, Roma Agrawal talks of the wheel in Nuts and Bolts . This may take you aback – what is there to write a chapter about the wheel? Don’t we even have the saying “Don’t reinvent the wheel”, which suggests that the wheel was perfected ages back?   Historical records suggest that the wheel was not invented for transportation. No, the wheel was invented for pottery! Why pottery? To create vessels to store food and water. What? As humans began to settle into agriculture and thus larger colonies, people found themselves further and further away from the fields or rivers, hence the need to store and carry food and water increased.   It was only after humans had domesticated animals and thus had something to pull a vehicle with that the “vessel-maker” wheel was transformed into a “destination-maker” wheel, writes Agrawal. But the early wheel had many drawbacks – cut from logs, they were heavy; they were uneven i...

In one of his books, Nassim Nicolas Taleb wondered why it took so long to invent the suitcase with wheels? After all, he said, both the suitcase and the wheel had existed for long, so what took so long to put them together? He didn’t have the answer, which is why Anton Howes’ article caught my eye. Even better, the scope of his article was the generic question: why did so many such obviously simple yet useful inventions not come up much, much earlier? It’s not like they needed some other technology to be available first, or the use or need wasn’t evident.   But first, suitcase on wheels apart, a few other examples: “My favourite example is John Kay’s flying shuttle, one of the most famous inventions of the British Industrial Revolution. It radically increased the productivity of weaving in the 1730s, but involved simply attaching a little extra wood and string . It involved no new materials, was applied to the weaving of wool — England’s age-old industry — and required no sp...