’Murica!
Posted on 03/01/2025 10:28:01 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Actually the Mayans did have a wheel but used it only on kid’s toys. One of those things you find when you read too much as I have done in the past.
https://uncoveredhistory.com/mesoamerica/wheeled-toys/
https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/home/the-concept-of-the-wheel-in-ancient-mesoamerica
“Those look like giant rotor-tillers with a power take-off. Very versatile.”
when i was there, they used those things for everything ...
they could pull a plow or a cart and could be used as a stationary engine to power pretty much anything that didn’t need a huge amount of horsepower ... and occasionally along the rural roads there would be a smithy shed with it’s front open to the road, and you could see an acetylene torch for cutting, brazing and welding, and there would be a whole passel of v-belts hanging from the rafters ... and there would be a smith who looked like a chinese version of the billy bob thorton mechanic character in the movie U-Turn ...
but like i said, only the rich farmers had them, and the poor farmers hooked up their women folk and children to pull wooden plows ...
that was 44 years ago, and it’s mind boggling the progress China has made since then ... The Japanese did the same thing in the late 19th century and early 20 century ... the orientals are truly an amazing people ...
“I worked in China Fall ‘76 to Spring ‘77 in a fertilizer plant being built in Shuifu village in Yunnan Province on the Yangtze River. When I arrived, there were men hauling barges up the river using towlines. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
They built an enormous dam there and now river navigation is all with modern freighters. I don’t recognize the place in the photos!”
in 1981 they were widening the narrow, harrowing road from Beijing to the Great Wall tourist site ... they had a plethora of workers literally breaking rocks by hand with hammers and chisels and using hand-drawn, two-wheel wooden carts to move the rocks about ... the Great Wall hotel they built for the Reagan visit visibly leaned from the vertical ...
today they have superhighways and incredible skyscrapers everywhere ... Japan did a similar thing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries ... the orientals are an amazing people ...
The poor people have very primitive conditions even now. It is amazing what they can do with small numbers of very simple tools.
Right now they are the world's premier surveillance state, and "justice" closes in quickly.
Their cities are gorgeous, but the price is too high for me. I'd be moved to a gulag somewhat quickly.
They cast a concrete foundation for the boiler stack a couple feet two tall. It was about 12 feet in diameter. They put a crew on it with crude rebar chisels to reduce the height by two feet. By hand!
Same as you saw.
It’s solid rock, now. When it was mud it may have done weird things with whatever shape the tracks were. Why did the lighter “human” leave tracks as deep as the “dinosaur” tracks?
Dunno - have to ask those archeologists. Could be that the mud was not so deep and there was solid ground beneath.
’Murica!
They had reservations about such things
I think the Aztecs or the Mayans had a spinning toy, like a pinwheel.
Heron of Alexandria made a tiny steam engine in the first century AD.
Scaling up is the issue.
Imagine if those civilizations did.
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