The Most Useful Thing

Cromwell Argus, Volume LXVIII, Issue 3482, 16 August 1937, Page 7

The Most Useful Thing

Recently (writes a visitor to a museum of industries), as I was standing and gazing at one of the scientific marvels there, a little hoy and his father came up.

"Daddy," I heard the little boy say, "what is the most useful thing that has ever been invented?" I was unable to hear what the father answered, but if the question had been put to me, I should have said: "Well, son, they say It is the wheel." Perhaps in a world so full of inventions and discoveries, most of us nave never stopped to think just which the most useful of all these may be, bat I can well believe that the wheel is the foremost among them.

Right back in the past, there was the potter's wheel to make the plates and containers to eat and drink from, and to cook and mix things in, and then the spinning-wheel to make thread and fabrics with which to make garments.

Then, while we are thinkin?, wc can spring forward to the wheels used in the clocks which give us the time by which so much of life it regulated; the wheels of locomotion, beginning with the cartwheel, and following on to train wheels, bus wheels, tramwheeie, car and even aeroplane wheels, not to mention the part wheels play in the sailing of ships. Added to all these uses, there is the tremendous part the wheel plays in the working of industrial machinery, and it is unnecessary to mention how important this is to the progress of the world, isn't it?

Yes, there are hundreds of uses you can think of to which that originally quite simple thing, the wheel, is put nowadays.