Steven Vogel - Why the Wheel Is Round: Muscles, Technology, and How We Make Things Move

As surely as we remain animals, biology establishes the baseline for what we do; it did so even more pervasively in our past than it does at present. Just as (to quote Lincoln) we cannot escape history, quite as certainly, our history cannot escape biology. Of course thats easy to say, but its too multifaceted to expound upon with any brevityparasitology, population genetics, plant domesticationjust to pick relevant headings that begin with the letter p. One book could not possibly do the subject justice.

Both by profession and mental habit, I remain a biologist, even if the word interdisciplinary has become ever less appropriate than undisciplined now that I have the intellectual freedom afforded by formal retirement. Beyond that, Im an unreconstructed academic, with the academics peculiar willingness to look elsewhere than the applications of science and look instead at origins, underpinnings, and interrelationships.

No great amount of sleuthing is needed to find out that my basic field is biomechanics. Here that subject worries about how muscles, by pulling on bones, allow us to do our ordinary tasks, plus how the properties of biological materials such as wood, horn, shell, and the like fit them for toolmaking. But Im also indulging my long avocational interest in history, in particular the history of technology, plus a growing interest in anthropologyall seen through the peculiar lens (or maybe kaleidoscope) of a biomechanic. The upshot, though, mixes, in addition to those areas, helpings of archaeology, mechanical engineering, and physics, along with bits of cultural, political, and military history. Ive been nothing if not indulgent in casting a wide net for items of at least arguable relevance.

A few words about sources. Of course the usual onesbooks, journal articles, colleaguescontributed their usual generous service. Beyond those upon which Ive relied on throughout my career, I now add the online ones. Almost every journal I use has now scanned its archives back to the year one, and a remarkable number of old technical works have become available through the kind offices of, especially, www.archive.org. We all use Google, admirable if one has a good search term, and better than most people realize if one takes advantage of its full capabilities to handle a complex search strategy. Im especially fond of Google Scholar; not only does it focus on scholarly and technical literature, but, mirabile dictu, it permits forward searching by clicking on cited by. Thus if one has some classic paper or book, you can find out who gives it as a reference and thus work your way up to the very presentthe opposite of working backward through bibliographies. And I must say good things about Wikipedia, too often maligned in academic circles. I find it splendidimperfect, of course, as are all other sources, as one therefore should expect, but far better than one expects or, perhaps, deserves. The one really misleading article that I might have cited here has been corrected (no, I didnt instigate the correction), and, yes, I do make an annual contribution.

One old resource has proven especially valuable, the more so with so much of it now accessible or at least searchable online. Anthropology took off during the nineteenth century, with a shift from collectors to trained observers visiting the cultures just then on the verge of the loss of identity and traditions concomitant with modern communications. These anthropologists carried few if any cameras in that era before roll film replaced glass plates, so they could depend only on drawings to supplement their words. Those drawings, skillfully and sometimes even artistically done, remain as a record, entirely in the public domain.

Each time I start a book, I promise myself that I will faithfully keep a list of the people who have helped in its creationproviding me with all manner of information, correcting my misconceptions, informing me of significant sources, reading preliminary prose, and so forth. And each time I dont do the job as well as I ought to. So with that disclaimer to recognize the incompleteness of the list, I must thank David Arons, Kalman Bland, Caroline Bruzelius, Steve Churchill, Ed Dougherty, Donald Fluke, Henry Halboth, Bob Healy, Charlie Henderson, Maggie Hivnor-LaBarbera, Michael LaBarbera, Sy Mauskopf, Chuck Pell, Steve and Kathy Rostand, Gillian Suss, Jane Vogel, and Bob Wallace. Im particularly indebted to Christie Henry of the University of Chicago Press for dealing with some unusual aspects of preparing this book. Plus I thank two very helpful anonymous reviewers.

Various groups have been semi-willing test audiences for the material of the present book. Among these are some fourth-grade students at Livesey Elementary School in Tucker, Georgia (instigated by Avery Vogel, an F2); some fourth- and fifth-grade students at Club Boulevard Magnet Elementary School, Durham, North Carolina (at the invitation of Gary Krieger); and a group at the North Carolina Childrens Hospital in the Healing and Hope Through Science Program of the North Carolina Botanical Garden (arranged by Katie Stoudemire and Tami Atkins). An early draft of the book was inflicted on a class in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Duke University, given physically at Croasdaile Village, where I live and write.