Inventing the Wheel

Nothing to do with Reinventing the Wheel.

In any story that takes place in One Million BC, you're going to see someone invent the wheel. Common fodder for It Will Never Catch On. Often the wheel is some shape other than round.

Examples of Inventing the Wheel include:

Advertising

• Used in a beer commercial once where they're going to be late to a party, then someone shows them their new invention, the wheel. Subverted in that the wheel makes things more difficult because they just use it as a tray to carry to beer on. To quote the cavemen: "Wheel Suck!"
• Similarly, in a Volvic mineral water commercial, it looks like a Neanderthal just invented the wheel, but it turns out he invented something else.
• There are a few Promotional Consideration spots for some patent company which shows B.C. caveman "accidentally" inventing the wheel, a unicycle, wheelbarrow...

Comics

• In Jack Kirby's 2001: A Space Odyssey comic, one of the earlier issues credits the wheel to the intervention of the monolith. Only Kirby could draw a two-page Splash Panel about the invention of the wheel and make it epic.
• Depicted in Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe. The inventor of the wheel shows it to his friend, expectantly saying "Well?" His friend says "A tray with a hole? Maybe you should see the spiritual adviser..."

Film

• You know who my father was? A wheel! The FIRST wheel! And you know what he transformed into? NOTHING! But he did so with HONOR!

Literature

• The prehistoric-earth sequence in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has both an inventing-the-wheel joke and an inventing-fire joke.
  • In the television adaptation, the wheel that the Golgafrinchans invent is multicoloured and octagonal.
  • There's also a brief remark about a race with dozens of arms, who invented aerosol deodorant before the wheel.
• Averted in Eric:

"There are quite a lot of uses to which you can put a stone disc with a hole in the middle, and the Tezumen had explored all but one of them."

• A Murderous Maths book featured an inventing-a-triangular-wheel joke.
• David Macaulay's The Way Things Work, strangely enough, does not tell the story of how the wheel was invented. However, various wheel-based machines are described, many of them powered by woolly mammoths.
• In Sergey Lukyanenko's short story Evening Conference with the Mr. Special Deputy, the alien ambassador reminisces on how his grandfather discovered the wheel on their planet, before revealing the horrible truth about humanity. Apparently, we are the slowest species to advance technologically, and most other races advance at warp speed, to the point where the ambassador offers to give us their ships, which have already become obsolete since they arrived a few weeks before.
• In The Pyrates, the Mayincatec residents of the Lost City of Cohacgzln are waiting for a Great White God to arrive and teach them how to make wheels. Their massive step-pyramids are explained as piles of discarded wheel prototypes.
• In the short story "Wiping Out" by Robert J Sawyer, the narrator points out, "Out of the hundred billion human beings who have existed since the dawn of time, precisely two came up with the idea of the wheel. All the rest of us simply copied it from them." In one of Sawyer's WWW books, Webmind references the same fact while reflecting on the expression "no need to reinvent the wheel". He reckons that humanity might have been better off if we had reinvented the wheel a few times.

Machinima

• The World of Motion ride that used to be at Epcot had a scene with three attempts at creating the wheel, one of which was the right one.

Music

• One verse of Allan Sherman's song "Good Advice" claims that the singer advised the inventor of the wheel just what he had on his hands:

Ooka Magook was a Neanderthal man,

A very poorly educated soul

He had a great big square thing made of solid stone,

And in the middle of it was a hole

One day he had to go from his cave in Natchez

To his uncle's cave in Mobile

I said, "Round off those corners

And buy a set of tires,

And Ooky baby, that's a wheel!"

Newspaper Comics

• In the original The Moomins comics, the family get sent back in time and set to work as slaves in a quarry. Moominpappa invents the wheel and tells the other slaves it'll help them carry rocks... but since he doesn't explain how, they try to carry the wheel and the rocks at the same time.

Slave: Rocks as heavy as before. New fat slave stupid.

• Thor invented the wheel in an early BC. Unfortunately, he couldn't work out what it was for. Eventually the girls saw him looking dejected, and decided to cycle over and see what was wrong...

Puppet Shows

• In one episode of Fraggle Rock, the Fraggles plan to use a flat, round object as a cover for a bucket of water. Wembley explains that the object is an invention of his: "I call it the wheel. It doesn't work, though -- it just keeps rolling away!"
• In the first episode of Dinosaurs, a caveman triumphantly holds his new invention, a stone circle, over his head. Presumably it's the wheel—but no, it's the hula hoop.
• "Caveman Grover" invents the wheel in a Sesame Street skit about shapes. He and Biff are trying to get a heavy rock to the top of a hill. First he tries affixing square wheels, then triangular ones. He finally gets the shape right, and gets the rock to the top of the hill—but it gets away from them and rolls back down the hill, landing on top of Grover. He decides that his next invention will be the Band-Aid.

Radio

• On the Firesign Theatre album Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, the host of a "this day in history" TV show claims that the wheel was invented by Mr. George Antrobus on the 38th of Cunegonde, 1938 BC. ("And just in time!" chirps his female co-host.)

Theater

• George Antrobus invents the wheel(along with the lever, the alphabet, etc.) in The Skin of Our Teeth.

Toys

• It was something of an underlying theme in the original Bionicle saga that the characters knew what a wheel was (since they used clockwork-mechanisms and round disks on a grand scale), but they never thought they could fix it onto a cart or something—they instead slapped mechanical insect-legs on everything that didn't float. When a group of Toa came across an ancient warrior whose feet had been outfitted with wheels to form roller-skates, they began wondering why anyone would want to wear their gears on their feet. Despite the fact that many animals they were very familiar with had tank threads for legs, and that some Toa did in fact use chain-sawed roller-blades already...

Video Games

• Done quite literally in |Age of Empires I.
  • And Civilization. In the fourth game at least, certain civilizations start with knowledge of the wheel, while other will have to research it.
• In Star Control II, the short history of the Zoq-Fot-Pik includes the story of how their distant ancestors discovered the wheel, fire, and religion simultaneously: a Zoq was run over by a round, flat stone that had been knocked off a mountain and super-heated by a lightning strike, and the Fot and Pik assumed he had gone on to a better place, "presumably one without lethal flaming wheels".

Webcomics

• In the rarely seen Caveman Arc of Arthur, King of Time and Space, Gawain invented the wheel ... sorry, I mean "invented a round stone he could wallop Pellinore over the head with".

Western Animation

• According to Darkwing Duck, one of his ancestors invented the wheel and used it to fight crime. Gosalyn pondered what the royalties for the wheel would be.
• A Family Guy flashback had one of Peter's ancestors struggling to market his newly invented wheel. Cave-Brian solves the problem by having Cave-Lois stand next to the wheel while half-dressed, which suddenly makes the other cavemen want one.
  • Ur-Peter: Everybody excited about trapezoid.
• Played with in Futurama; instead of being in the past, it was so far in the future that people had forgotten about the wheel (everything hovered). Not only was it the wrong shape, but they also needed somebody to pull it, which turned out to be Fry, of course. Also they used a whip.
• Casey and Andy invent the Slope-detect-o-mat.
• The "Leonardo da Vinci and His Fightin' Genius Time Commandos!" episode of The Tick (animation) included the "cavewoman who invented the wheel and whose name has been forgotten by history..."

MOTHER OF INVENTION: What is your name, my dear?
CAVEWOMAN: Wheel!

• Done by Donald Duck (or one of his ancestors) in the Disney educational short Donald and the Wheel.
• There were some hilarious, albeit ridiculous bad, attempts of inventing technology in a prehistoric episode of the British Dennis the Menance cartoon. Not only was there a very much non-round wheel, there were also about two attempts at what were supposed to be tanks... with the very much caveman notion of just pushing them off a cliff at the enemy, complete with loud smash as it hit the floor.
• Played with in the Schoolhouse Rock short "My Hero Zero." We see the stereotypical caveman with chisel, but the stone doughnut he's working on is a zero, not a wheel.
• Played with in a Histeria! sketch where, following the invention of the wheel, we meet the invention of the wheel salesman (played by Loud Kiddington).
• On Animaniacs, a caveman has just chiseled a wheel when Cave Buttons accidentally sets it rolling. The inventor seems surprised at how the wheel works, leading one to wonder what he had in mind.
• On the TV series of Super Mario World, the Mario Brothers introduce cave people to wheels and, soon after, Flintstone-style cars. But thanks to the chaos of untrained drivers, followed by the wicked inspiration of Kooky Von Koopa, they discontinue the use of wheels entirely.

Real Life

• We have them, so someone evidently did. However, there WERE cultures that never invented the wheel—generally Mesoamerican ones. These were cultures in which backbreaking weights had to be carried by either pack animals or, more likely, poor people.
  • Perhaps in those locations The Wheel was invented but turned out to be not very useful, as Mesoamerica seems to mostly consist of mountain and jungle.
    • Actually, the Aztecs did have them...but only on toys. Perhaps they literally thought the wheel would never catch on.
    • The Americas lacked any domesticated draft animals suitable for pulling carts. The one possible exception, the llama, lived only in mountainous terrain where carts would have been no help.
• Any example of a "caveman" inventing the wheel is a case of Did Not Do the Research, as the wheel was invented not by beetle-browed cave-dwelling nomads but by modern-looking, village-dwelling agriculturalists.