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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

I bet the person who invented the wheel did it whilst idling one sunny day.

I highly doubt a single person created the wheel out of nothing. The idea of a circle is part of our innate biology we are hard wired to recognize or create circular shapes.

Most likely several people tried to create the wheel and ideas on what to do with a circular shape were thought of, some cross pollination from physics resulted in it being used for transportation.

So I’d argue it was not done on a sunny day but mostly as an obsession just like most every other game changing idea

The wheel is a natural invention. Just let something (not necessarily very round) roll off a snowy hill, and see what happens.

The wheel isn't the hard part. The hard part is the axle bearings.

The wheel is trivial and obviously anyone could come up with the idea. The reason wheels weren't used universally from the dawn of time is that axels had to be invented first. In order to invent a cart that can support enough weight to be more useful than a donkey, you first need to invent metallurgy.

The simplest form of a wheel is a wooden log. The prototypes were readily available and supplied by nature.

Now to make an actual wheel, with spokes and mostly 'hollow' inside and to put it on an axle - would have required better tools, so the wheel was probably created/invented quite naturally alongside the advances in metallurgy.

It just came to him one day as he was stuck in traffic.

They may have gotten the idea while idling, but it still took work to design and test prototypes. This would obviously be more true for the many more advanced inventions that have come since.

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