The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 12, Issue 4 (July 1, 1937)
A Wheel-less World
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A Wheel-less World.
Come to think of it, what a queer, silent, slothful place would be a wheel-less world. Everything would move in a “scissors” or “pendulum” fashion instead of on celeritous circles. Everything would bump and bound instead of slide with oleaginous ease. There would be no wheelbarrows to push, no watches to wind, no motors to dodge, no trams, no trains, and—this is a thought for married men—no lawn-mowers or garden rollers to bullock over the greensward o’ Saturd'ys. From the material viewpoint the wheel probably has been the most significant fact in Man's sorry scheme since the
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first barbarian singed his whiskers over the first fire. Truly, the wheel is the heart that beats in the bodies industrial, social and economic; the wheels of industry are cogged, the social wheels are ballooned, the economic wheels are milled. Day and night a million billion wheels beat and pound the earth, transporting, pursuing, servicing the little wheel-less wonder who designed them—Man. For the greatest and most intricate of all mechanisms hasn't a wheel in his interior. Yet he is The Little Wonder, the Modern Mercury, who has enslaved the wheel to do his bidding. And what has the wheel done to him? We wonder!



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