Reinvent the Wheel

What was man's very first invention? It would be hard to provide a definitice answer to that question. It would depend on how novel, or imaginitive, something has to be before it classifies as an invention. The use of fire, for example--would that be an invention, or a discovery? At the end of the day, it is probably not an important question to resolve.

It is hard to imagine life before some of the most basic inventions, and hard to imagine what went through the minds of the first inventors. One of the first inventions might have been a pointy stick, or a pointy rock, which could have many useful applications. Imagine being the very first to think or tying the rock to the stick to make an axe, with many times the cutting and chopping power. With that axe, you can now sharpen more sticks and more rocks faster than ever before.

Without a doubt, the most famous of the early inventions is the wheel. Perhaps someone observed that heavy objects are much easier to move if they are also round. Moreover, heavy objects that are not round are easier to push if they are sitting on top of something round, like a log. Before the wheel was invented, I can imagine people pushing a heavy sled piled high with rocks using logs as rollers. At some point, another someone found a way to attach the round logs to the sled, and the wheel was born. Well, that's just speculation, but it could have happened that way.

Now, both the axe and the wheel, and many of the inventions we use every day, were invented a long time ago. More recent inventions such as the light bulb and the computer came at a time when people already knew about the wheel. If everyone had to start from scratch, we would never see any advanced ideas or technology. The wheel has already been invented, and doesn't need to be invented again. This is the background to today's idiom--when someone is working on something that has alrady been done before, we say that they are reinventing the wheel. Usually, this idiom is used in a negative way: "don't reinvent the wheel". If you can build on someone else's work, you will have more time and energy left over to do something new.

However, there is another side to the story. Today, we aren't using the original model of the wheel or the axe. If we never reinvented the wheel, our cars would have heavy wooden or stone wheels and wouldn't be as useful or efficient. The wheel has gone through many improvements and adaptations, and we now use it for many things that the original inventors would never have dreamed of. When someone improves on an existing idea or invention, we say that they are building a better mousetrap. We may also say that they are standing of the shoulders of giants. Isaac Newton helped to made this idiom famous when he said that his own accomplishments in science were made by standing on the shoulders of giants.