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Gears: Putting Civilization in Gear |
| Section: NATURAL SCIENCE / IMPACTS |
| Author: William J. Cromie |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/1986 |
| Size: 3,628 Words, 21,298 Characters |
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The invention of the wheel clearly was one of the most important events in the history of civilization. In both a literal and figurative sense, it got everyone and everything moving. It's a shame that we don't have anyone to honor for such a great achievement; no one knows who rolled the first wheel or where. The oldest surviving record of its use is a 5,500-year-old tablet showing two horses pulling a loaded wooden-wheeled cart in Mesopotamia.
Sometime afterwards--no one knows how long--the wheel became the basis for another technological breakthrough. An anonymous genius thought of sticking a series of pegs around the outside of a wheel, which would mesh with pegs on another wheel. By changing the size of the wheels and the number of pegs, force could be multiplied, speed incr...
. . .
...hat way.
Two or three thousand years ago, wise men may have compared pegged wheels to log rollers and predicated that gears would revolutionize mechanical movement and lifting. In 1986, Zaretsky compares the two by predicting that "rollers will be to gears what transistors are to vacuum tubes." One might say that history not only repeats itself, but also zigzags toward progress.
(806 of 21,298 characters)
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