My brother Jonathan says, "The wheel. I could have invented the wheel." Meaning, I think, that he understands the advanced scientific principle -- a wheel turns round and round. Unlike, say, the refrigerator or the radio, which he doesn't understand and will concede that he couldn't possibly have invented. As for myself, I don't think that I could possibly have conceived of something so elegant as the wheel. The chair. I could have invented the chair. No moving parts.
And yet the wheel, history tells us, was anything but obvious. Homo sapiens sapiens had been on the planet for half a million years before some Mesopotamian genius, or series of geniuses, figured out the fine art of rolling (in fact, the wheel was apparently used for pottery for centuries before it was adapted for transport). In the Americas, both the Mayans and the Incas domesticated plants and animals, perfected smelting and weaving, carved out roads and aqueducts, but never hit upon the wheel.
If my brother had been born near the Olduvai rift in East Africa in the minus four hundred thousands, would he have been smart enough to come up with the wheel? Would he even have had the opportunity? Wouldn't he, like the rest of us, have spent his time cowering in the cave, occasionally rushing out to grab a hunk of dead gazelle whenever the lions turned their backs? And employing every bit of his brain power learning how better to knap the flint.
And besides, even if you figure out that a tree trunk can be made to rotate, you still have to invent the axle. And the spoke.
The lever? Yes, I think so. Put a hunk of wood or a piece of bone under a rock and pry it up. I could have done that. But how about the pliers -- a double lever, now in use for about 4000 years. I think I could have stared at a three pieces of metal for a zillion years and not invented the pliers.
I'll make a prediction. One day, when the aliens come to visit us from their infinitely more advanced civilization, they will marvel at us the way we marvel at the Incas. How astonishing, they're going to say, they got as far as they did but they never figured out the glugg. The glugg will be something as elementary and as obvious and as useful as the wheel or the lever or the inclined plane. Some simple machine that we've completely overlooked.
So wheel-man, whoever you are, I celebrate you.
Hey Jon, why don't you go invent the glugg?
Could I in actual fact have invented the chair? Well, perhaps I would have been smart enough to think of sitting on a rock or on a tree stump. But a chair with legs? Or with legs strengthened with stretchers? Not very likely that I would have been smart enough to invent a chair. If it had been left to me, we'd still be squatting on tree stumps.
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