 This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. This year is potentially one of the most groundbreaking and important discoveries ever made. The wheel and its axle. But of course today it's so common and ubiquitous that we hardly think of its importance. But this design has found nowhere in nature and had to be completely invented by humanity. So today I'll be making this leap myself as well and attempt to literally reinvent the wheel and use its revolutionary concept to build a few tools that were direct developments from it. Everything we use comes from 8,000 generations of collective innovation and discovery. But could an average person figure it all out themselves and work their way from the stone age to today? That's a question we're exploring. Each week I try to take that next step forward in human history. My name is Andy and this is how to make everything. Be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss the next step in this journey. The challenge of the concept isn't so much the wheel part. Rolling things is pretty straightforward and can be witnessed in nature. It's the axle for a spin on that's a real challenge. That's why the wheel likely wasn't invented until 3500 BCE. After metal tools have been developed they can more finely shape the wheel and axle to the necessary sizes. Another event at this period that also helped drive this invention literally the domestication of horses and other pack animals. In the Americas they had no easily domesticated animals to harness and the wheel never really took off. And massive empires would be built and run without the idea even spreading. There's evidence showing they figured out the concept of the wheel but only ever used it for novelty toys. However there was a good several hundred years from the invention of the wheel to its use with chariots and other forms of transportation. The first driving force for the wheel was pottery. Likely first developed in Sumer and Mesopotamia making symmetrical ceramic containers and other items led to the first forms of the potter's wheel. Just a brown base that could be slowly pivoted and allow the artist to quickly reposition their work. This then evolved into a slow wheel that could be slowly turned while working on the item. Then after a few more iterations this turned into the fast wheel using a full axle to allow complete and smooth rotation. Next there was the eventual attachment of what is called a flywheel which would assist in maintaining momentum. For another example of the flywheel let's make a tool I'll be needing in the rest of the builds. A pump drill. But first today's video sponsored by the Great Courses Plus. They actually sponsored us like three years ago on our telescope video. Since then it's been probably my favorite sponsor we've had. They have really great lectures. I listen to them all the time whenever I feel like learning something new. Pretty often. A lot of times I use them for research for many of these videos. Specifically ones like minting my own currency on the history currency. More recently making bread in the history of agriculture. Today's video on the potter's wheel actually pulls from one of my favorite series they do which is understanding the inventions that change the world. And they have a specific video on the invention of the potter's wheel and metallurgy and how they fit in with the greater development of human history. Really good series definitely recommend checking it out. So basically it's just a subscription based video learning service. You get access to over 11,000 different lectures on pretty much every topic from history to mathematics to cooking, photography. I highly recommend checking out the free trial. It's a really great product and it's a great way to support our channel. So check it out at thegreatcoursesplus.com slash htme. Previously Annalise made a basic bow drill for fire starting which can also be used to bore holes. For a slightly more powerful version I'll construct one that utilizes a flywheel. So with the addition of one of the utilizations of the wheel or the flywheel which by adding the ceramic disc and attaching it to the spindle it acts as extra weight that'll capture rotational inertia allowing it to continue spinning that allows it to wrap back up the other direction and then you can kind of cycle back and forth. So this should make this a little bit more efficient than the bow drill a little bit faster to use and the flywheel was previously used actually with the drop spindle that Annalise made before to help her with the twine. This will make it a lot easier to drill holes. So the concept of a flywheel something that'll be useful for a lot of other things including the Potter's wheel that I'll be making next. Now with the push drill I can add it to my assortment of other Bronze Age tools I've previously cast and made before. The assortment of axes, chisels, now serrated dagger, and hammer. I also finally had some success at casting a full sized sawd now. With all my tools now to make my own wheel the Potter's wheel was one of the first examples of industrialization in human history as its invention greatly increased the ability to produce pottery. The importance of this tool becomes much more apparent to me since we did the reset as I've quickly realized ceramics is very versatile and one of the few materials that have been mastered at this time period but we're still before the invention of glass, steel, and the widespread use of many other metals. For my design I'm going to pull from a slightly more modern style a Japanese kick wheel which I've previously used before in one of the first videos we made on making a ceramic bottle. One of my Patreon supporters, Dax, has previously built his own and wrote me a great guide to help me build my own. The design is fairly simple the wheel head is attached to a flywheel with the use of tie rods and then the whole wheel sits on a mounted rod with a round rock between them acting as a bearing. So first to get started I'll need to collect some wood. Several small and straight trees for the tie rods and a large log for a wheel head and flywheel. My initial instinct was to use a slice from the log for the wheel head as it already be a circle. However Dax's directions pointed out that the rings are likely to break and be much better to use a cross grain wood. So I'll need to hew my log into some flat boards. All right so it kind of roughly went through and hewed this log on the two sides to get somewhat flat. I wanted to do that mostly to reveal what was on the inside and see what I wanted to use. It's got a fair amount of rot to it actually and that's kind of a risky take when you just grab a dead tree from woods which has made it a little bit easier to do the hewing. It seems to be concentrated mostly around here. See it's actually got some nice spulting patterns which woodworkers actually seek out but I think it's still salvageable. Some parts are softer than others. This area seems to be where most of the rod is, where this knot is. I just want to avoid just because it's really hard to cut. So that is widest right here. I'm just going to use that for the top of the wheel and then I'm going to use these two pieces here cut into two put them side by side to make a wheel on the bottom and uh yeah. Now for the tie rods they'll connect the wheel head and the flywheels together but then the glue holding my boards together broke. So I'll have to re-glue that again later but for now this might actually make cutting the inner hole a little bit easier. Very much too bad. For the mounted rod I need a strong and super straight pull for it. The best option I could find was actually what used to be your Christmas tree which I previously cut down for our Zegmuck celebration. The easiest way to mount the rod is to you bury it deep in the ground so that offers a secure and solid base. All right so we weren't able to actually bury it. Landlord wasn't too fond of us digging a bunch of deep holes so we're going to do a kind of a modern assistance with the mounting and use a little bit of imagination to make this work. And now this is the the mounting rod that the whole thing will sit upon and in between I got a round river rock that will act as a ball bearing so I'm going to grease that up. So I have some of the olive oil we previously pressed and use as a lubricant to get this thing spinning. There's a little bit of wobble because the hole in the flywheel is a little too big so I'm going to try wrapping that area of the post with some twine to thicken it up so it bounces around less. All right so this isn't going to be working with wet clay on wood. Put a little bit of waterproofing by applying a layer of wax on the surface. Rope is usually wrapped around the tie rods so there's no risk for your foot accidentally getting caught in the spinning wheel. Looks like it actually works. If I were to make a little pot here it spins but I think those those are the benchmarks of success for this project. There's a bit of wobble but I'm actually surprised how well it does work. It actually spins pretty well. I also talked about adding cob to the flywheel to add extra weight and that would help it spin a little bit more. As it is right now it's actually pretty good. This is really an important invention in the history of humanity. Kind of tell why it took a while to do it. I suspect it took so long because they needed metal tools and a mastery of carpentry. The various tools that I used were somewhat effective. There's a lot of work. The fact that we didn't have an ideal starting wood was definitely a challenge. We had to find a dead log that was a little bit rotten, full of maggots apparently. It made things a little bit harder when using some dull Bronze Age tools. Milling of this to get it squarish was really challenging. Trying to do anything with actual precision with using such imprecise tools is really hard. It has some definite room for improvement. The wobbles, the circles are definitely not perfect but technologies I developed out of the wheel are ones that will help improve this. I mean just the fact that I can spin it now means I can almost use it as a lathe itself. That was invented pretty shortly after the wheel and that could help with the the mounting pole and the other poles to actually get them perfectly cylindrical. Even with a little bit of wobble, a little eccentricity to the actual shape, it's pretty effective. I mean the real challenge now is the actual pottery skills which I don't have. The only pottery I've really done before this five years ago and did an episode on making an eight ceramic bottle and we went up to St. John and learned from a professional potter. He ended up doing most of the work. He kind of just held my hands literally as I did it. Gone through some of our old footage and we put in our secondary channel so you want to see a little bit better of a look at how much he ended up helping me, how much I actually did myself. You check that out on a secondary channel. We're going through some of our old content or new content and pulling some of the extra stuff that kind of didn't quite make the cut. So in the end let's take about 37 hours to actually complete. You could probably use a few more hours of refinement and everything. It's going to take many more hours than that to actually learn how to use it but it'll be an ongoing learning process. It did manage to make a little pot, I feel pretty proud about. But 37 hours at today's minimum age that means it's about a $300 pottery wheel. So next up we're going to do some spicy chicken wings and try and cook them up using the available technology of the Bronze Age. After that our next major milestone is going to be written language which was invented shortly after the wheel itself. So I'm going to try and invent my own language. Thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon. I'm going to try and make you up some custom pieces for all of our $75 plus patrons. Thanks for watching and thanks for your support. If you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also if you've enjoyed these series consider supporting us on Patreon. 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