What was the first means of transportation?

If you were stranded on a desert island and you wanted to get something from one place to another, what would you do? You would carry it! In primitive times human muscles were the only means of transporting anything. Man was his own “beast of burden.”

In time man tamed certain animals and taught them to carry riders or other loads. The ox, the donkey, the water buffalo, the horse, and the camel were used by early man in various parts of the world for transportation.

This satisfied man for thousands of years, but then he wanted to find some way by which animals could transport more goods. So he developed crude sledges and drags to hitch to his animals.

Flat-bottomed sledges and sleds with runners were fine on snow, but not much good on regular ground. So man developed the rolling drag. This consisted of sections of logs used as rollers under a drag or platform. When the platform was pulled, the logs under it rolled. This made the work easier than pulling the platform along the bare ground. As the platform moved along, it passed completely over the logs at the back. Then these were picked up and put under the front end of the platform.

After a long time, someone thought of cutting a slice from the end of a log and making a hole in its center. This was a wheel, one of man’s greatest discoveries. When two wheels were joined by an axle and the axle was fastened to a platform, man had made a crude cart.

Solid wooden wheels were heavy and clumsy, and they wore down quickly. In the course of thousands of years, man improved the wheel. By building wheels with separate hubs and spokes and rims, he made them lighter and more efficient. He made rims and tires of copper or iron so that the wheels would last longer. At last he learned to use rubber tires, and improvements in these are being developed by scientists experimenting with synthetics.

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