The Bookwheel, invented in 1588 by Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli, was a heavy, 600-pound wooden rotating bookcase that let scholars easily use up to eight open books at once. It had a clever gear system to keep the books upright as the wheel turned by hand, saving time for readers who didn’t have to fetch books from shelves. Featured in Ramelli’s book of machines, it was a creative Renaissance tool for studying, though it’s uncertain how many were actually made.
The Bookwheel, invented in 1588 by Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli, was a heavy, 600-pound wooden rotating bookcase that let scholars easily use up to eight open books at once. It had a clever gear system to keep the books upright as the wheel turned by hand, saving time for readers who didn’t have to fetch books from shelves. Featured in Ramelli’s book of machines, it was a creative Renaissance tool for studying, though it’s uncertain how many were actually made.
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in 1994 our excavations at Flag Fen revealed one-third of a Bronze Age three-part wooden wheel, dating to about 1300 BC.7 Technically speaking, such wheels are known as slab wheels because they are made from three shaped wooden planks, or slabs, which are held together by braces slotted into dovetail housing joints and by pegs or dowels, fitted int
... See moreWagons with four solid wheels were heavy and slow and, lacking steering, could only make gentle turns, which limited their usefulness. Two-wheeled vehicles, or carts, which had emerged by 3000 B.C.E., were more maneuverable and could make much tighter turns, particularly if the wheels could turn independently, rather than being fixed at the ends of
... See moreThe earliest-known wheeled object is a clay model of a bull, mounted on four wheels, found in the Carpathian Mountains of western Ukraine and carbon-dated to 3950–3650 B.C.E., hundreds of years before any sign of wheeled vehicles in Mesopotamia. A representation of a four-wheeled vehicle, scratched onto a pot found in Bronocice in southern Poland,
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