Reinventing the Wheel

You’ve probably heard it’s futile, but that hasn’t stopped plenty from trying—some successfully, shockingly. Hey all, Ernie here with a piece from a periodic contributor, John Ohno, who last showed up in these parts around 2019. We’re happy he remembered the URL. Anyway, let’s get to it:Today in Tedium: Wheels (along with mousetraps) are the iconic inventions. And why not? The wheel is among the simplest of machines, and yet, just in terms of its applications for locomotion, the speed and volume of transportation it enabled was literally revolutionary. Despite this, the wheel has two major downsides: One, it requires an entire infrastructure of roads to unlock its full capability; and two, the wheel only goes in the direction it’s pointing. For the past nearly 200 years, a mostly obscure lineage of inventions attempted to address these problems, largely unsuccessfully. These are the new wheels. — John @Tedium Sponsored By … Well, Us Ever wanted to read Tedium without having those…