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This clearly written, beautifully illustrated, and well-argued book ought to be read by every historian of technology. Richard Bulliet here broadens and greatly amplifies his The Camel and the Wheel (1975). The Wheel is an ambitious survey of three different kinds of wheel, covering 6,000 years. Wheels fixed on axles that spin together (on railroad cars, for example) cannot make sharp turns, while those that spin independently of one another (as with automobiles) can turn more sharply. The third kind of wheel, the caster, emerged in the eighteenth century; it “rotates on an axle and also pivots in a socket situated above it,” for example in desk chairs (p. 2).
To illustrate the properties of these three kinds of wheel, Bulliet begins with how they were adapted to different forms of transportation in recent centuries (pp. 1-36). He then examines the wheel’s origins in the fourth millennium bce, suggesting what prompted its invention and adoption in some but not all cultures. Dismissing the orthodox view that the wheel was invented in Mesopotamia, he argues for its origin in...