Ooha Imandi

Research on Transport, Chapter 1

There is a sadness I feel when I look at trees. All they will ever see is the sky. Never the lands on the other side of the world, the oceans, the skylines, the mountains. Yes, the sky is beautiful every single day, but what a pity not to be able to move.

Maybe that is one of the reasons I chose to be vegetarian for life. I did not want to take that freedom away from another living being. The freedom to move. The freedom to create waves of air. The freedom to dance. The freedom to express without a single word, only through action.

Sounds silly, doesn’t it? But what do I do with that feeling? My mind already travels faster than the speed of light. So I decided to do the next best thing: share my research on transport with the world. I am at a stage of life where actions mean more than words ever will.

I promise, this first chapter is the only one where I will be this personal. From the next chapter on, it is findings and pure technical stuff. Now, let’s begin.

It Starts With a Walk

The freedom to move has made people want more, day by day. More land. Bigger houses. More of the world, and faster!

Imagine a person walking. Walking, walking, walking. One day they wonder: what if I walk all day? Will I cover the entire world? So they start. By midday they are tired, very tired. Their legs hurt. The afternoon gets hotter, the night gets colder. The soles of their feet are wearing off. The body begins craving rest, food, sleep.

And this, right here, is where the whole market begins.

You need clothes. Why? Because of the heat and the cold. You need good shoes. Why? Because your feet will not last. You need packed food. Why? Because you will get hungry far from home. You need water. Why? Because there may be none on the road.

The human urge to see what has not been seen yet is the core of the markets. Humans invented almost everything to make travel better. But walking alone was never going to be the answer.

Borrowing Speed From Other Living Beings

They had all the time in the world back then, but faster is always better. So people found other living beings that were faster than them, and more comfortable to travel with. For hundreds of years, people relied on animals, not only for speed but for the comfort of a companion that also knows the value of life if the journey goes wrong.

Different animals offered different gifts:

• Horses brought speed, but not for very long.
• Elephants could carry enormous weights.
• Camels, with their sturdy feet, kept travellers safe in the summer heat.

Then came something that changed everything.

Then Came the Wheel

The story of the wheel is surprising, because it did not begin with travel at all.

Prehistoric rollers. Early humans moved heavy objects by rolling them over logs or dragging them on sledges. Over time, narrow-axle setups and stationary disks emerged.

Potter’s wheels first. Archaeological evidence suggests the earliest wheels were not made for transport. They were potter’s wheels, used in Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE.

The first transport wheels. Solid wooden disk wheels attached to carts appeared shortly afterwards, around 3500 to 3350 BCE, in Mesopotamia and Europe. The oldest surviving wooden wheel was found in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and dates to roughly 3200 BCE.

Spoked wheels. Around 2000 BCE, lighter and faster spoked wheels were developed by the Sintashta culture and by ancient civilisations in Anatolia and Egypt.

So a tool for shaping clay ended up shaping the whole world’s movement. Surprising, right?

From the Wheel to… No Wheels at All?

Now jump forward. From a solid wooden disk on a creaky cart to the dream of a flying car, a machine that travels with no wheels at all. The magic of time. Or maybe it is time travel. wink

From the invention of the wheel to a machine that lifts off the ground, that is a journey of more than five thousand years, and it is the journey we will walk through, chapter by chapter, in this research.

So lace up your shoes (you now know why you need them), pack your water, and come along.

Next chapter: the first roads, and how humans learned to move together.