As I wrote in the introduction, this book has been an attempt to identify fifty illuminating stories about how inventions have shaped the modern economy, and decidedly not an attempt to define the fifty most significant inventions in economic history. Nobody could hope to agree on those. But if we tried, one that would surely make most people’s lists would be the wheel.
The wheel didn’t make the cut in this book, partly because you’d need a book to do it justice. In the modern world we’re surrounded by wheels, from the obvious (cars, bikes, and trains) to the subtle (the drum in your washing machine, the cooling fan in your computer). Archaeologists believe that the first wheels were probably not—as you might expect—used for transport but for pottery. One could reasonably credit the wheel for the contents of your crockery cupboard.
But this book does contain plenty of metaphorical wheels: the simple inventions that do a job so well that “reinventing the wheel” would be foolish. We’ve seen some of these “wheels” already—the plow is one; the shipping container is another; so is barbed wire. One of the ultimate wheels is the idea of writing. One can always try to improve on these ideas, but in each case the basic concept has been brilliantly effective.
I have to admit that in writing this book, my favorite inventions have been the wheels.