Not any simple but far-reaching invention emerges in human brains for no reason and there must be something triggered the inspiration. Just as seeing wood floating on water, the ancients invented canoes, the invention of wheels might also owe to the triggering by some things in the nature. It is saying in an ancient book Huai Nan Zi that our ancestors “were inspired to make vehicles by seeing erigeron rotating.” Erigeron is a kind of grass with stem of about one inch high, big leaves and shallow root. Once in windy days, the erigeron is very easy to be pulled out of the earth and rotates with the wind. It is very possible that the ancients have invented wheels and axles by the inspiration from the phenomenon. Like the legend that Lu Ban (a carpenter living at the end of the Spring and Autumn Period and the beginning of the Warring States Period 403 BC – 221 BC) has invented saws for being enlightened by lindernia ciliate, the saying is also possible to be only a legend, since we can find models of wheels in the nature.
Primitive peoples had ever worshiped the sun and the moon in the sky. The ancients in the ancient Green Age had been thought that sphere was the most perfect shape and till the time of ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato has still thought that the sphere was the most perfect shape. Maybe the ancients in the New Stone Age had been capable of imitating the figures of the sun and the moon naturally; when they had occasionally found that the disk shaped objects could keep the shape unchanged in rotation, they have been very interested in further developing for their usage.
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