The wheel and the axle are not quite as old as the average hill but they still go back a bit. The path from a slice of tree trunk to an FI rear is a long one, well worthy of a story ail to itself, but we shall be more concerned here with ail the complexities of holding it on the vehicle, controlling how it does its job and utilising the small area where it touches the road to the very ultimate. In a word: suspension.
In the early stages of the evolutionary path suspension did not, of course, exist. It was sufficient that man had devised a means to transport, however laboriously, objects that had hitherto been immovable. But war and sport (the latter often a thinly disguised derivative of the former) were incentives to rapid progress. The Romans were a shining example. The Legions had carts and the Colosseum had chariot racing, without doubt the Formula One of the day. Neither appear to have used suspension but the strong metal-tyred spoked wheel had already appeared in the form it would still be taking 2000 years later on the horse drawn English brewery drays of the 20th century.
Why bother to explain or illustrate the past at ail? Because nothing happens in a vacuum. Everybody except the first to do something (often much further back than one migh suspect) is copying to some degree, even if unknowingly. History has an extraordinary number of instances of major inventions made by different people in different parts of the world at about the same time, within milli-seconds of each other if you think in cosmic terms, that is in millions of years. Bitter are the disputes and accusations within science and industry when this happens. So it is that a glance back (in no way totally comprehensive) will hopefully show how history and the designers it left behind laid the groundwork. What died and what survived is a fascinating insight into the state of the art not readily obtainable in any other way.
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