The Evolution of Cartwheels

Part 2 :: The Evolution of Spoked Wheels

Part 1 | Part 3

It is a sad fact of life that many of the wonderful inventions which are such a blessing to all mankind, set off originally to appease the greed of the rich and famous, whose aggressive behaviour causes them to make war on others. So it must have been with the invention of the spoked wheel, to provide a rapid means of military transport by light carts, carrying only one or two people, which could be drawn by swift little horses in place of ponderous oxen. Only because the load was small, was it possible for the Celts to construct these little wheels as early as 800BC, and it took over 2,000 years for the design to be applied to large commercial vehicles in any numbers.

There is only uncertain evidence of the use of waggons, four wheeled vehicles whose front wheels could be steered, before Tudor times. Ginzrot, an Austrian wheelwright postulated their use by drawing a Roman box waggon and a log waggon, but he drew wheels which most archaeologists consider to be of much later academic design, revolution not evolution. The wheel with deep felloes was one of four from a funeral bier, but they were close-coupled with no apparent steering device. The only hard, if dubious evidence comes from a rock drawing which shows a second "A" frame cart attached to one in front. This is the most likely forerunner of waggon undercarriage anyway, which probably appeared in the first century BC.

The Celts were certainly precocious blacksmiths and carpenters; they were able to make one piece wheel rims which they must have steamed, and iron tyres or hoops for their wheels. Some of these they may have shrunk on hot, though not universally. Their tyres were thin, initially bands to bind the felloes together, and held on with large headed studs which took the wear. Without any dish to the spokes and especially in the case of wheels with single piece rims, they would have had insufficient strength to withstand the pressure of the contracting iron, and would have buckled.

If wheels were shod with hot hoops in 700BC, why was it, that George Sturt said with great authority, that the practice was re-invented in the late eighteenth century? The reason was, of course that the Celts made small wheels, never more than three feet in diameter. Large waggon wheels were up to six feet in diameter, and the problem was to obtain and handle a red hot strip of iron nearly 3 inches wide, 1 inch thick and 18 feet long.

Modern historians dislike the phrase the "Dark Ages," but in the world of the cart wheel it was a period of consolidation when disc wheeled ox-wains did the work, and spoked wheels, almost, but not entirely were found only on cult vehicles. Around 1,000AD, a monk at Canterbury was illuminating an agricultural diary. He depicted mundane tasks such as ploughing and wood gathering, and drew an "A" frame ox-cart with spoked wheels. It is to be presumed that he was recording work on a rich ecclesiastical estate, for most ox-wains would surely have used disc wheels. The wheels which he drew were just like those drawn by the artist Van Hillegaert, depicting the "Siege of S’Hertogenbosch" in the late sixteenth century. The spokes, large and wedge-shaped, were inserted into the felloes from the inside and held with pegged mortise and tenon joints.

This brings me somewhat sketchily to our wool trade with the Low Countries which took place from Medieval to Tudor times. Superficially the wheels might be Celtic, but there are two major developments; they are large and strong enough for commercial work, and "cotter bolts", long metal bolts held by keys, the cotters, before nuts could be cut, were strong enough to hold the axle-tree rigidly to the body. It seemed a small enough change, but probably had far reaching consequences for it stiffened up the whole structure.

<< Back | Next >>