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60 free The Wheel trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Nobody knows who invented the wheel, but we know a lot about where it turned up first, and this quiz covers it: the 5,200-year-old ash wheel from a Slovenian marsh, the wagon scratched onto a Polish pot, Uruk's clay tablets, the steppe culture that built the first spoked wheels and chariots, and the puzzle of why the Americas made wheeled toys for children but never a cart. From there it rolls through everything the basic idea became: potter's wheels and spinning wheels, wheelwrights' felloes and naves, wire spokes under tension, the vet who made the first practical pneumatic tyre, the tiller that came before the steering wheel, and the bridge engineer who built a 264-foot wheel to out-do the Eiffel Tower. There is also a run on the wheel as a symbol, from Fortuna to the flag of India. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the wheel, its parts, and the specific finds and inventions named, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. For more on how things get made, try our Inventions quiz.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The wheel and axle is one of how many classical simple machines?
Six
On its own a wheel is not a machine at all; it becomes one only when fixed to an axle turning in a bearing.
Q 02The wheel almost certainly evolved from the prehistoric use of what to shift heavy loads?
Log rollers
Rolling round tree trunks under stone slabs goes back so far it has never been dated.
Q 03The English word 'wheel' shares a Proto-Indo-European root with which Sanskrit word for 'circle'?
Chakra
Greek kúklos, the source of 'cycle', comes from the same root, meaning 'to revolve'.
Q 04The oldest wooden wheel ever found was dug out of a marsh in 2002 in which country?
Slovenia
It sat about 20 km south of Ljubljana in a prehistoric pile-dwelling settlement now on the UNESCO list.
Q 05Roughly how old is the Ljubljana Marshes Wheel, according to radiocarbon dating?
About 5,200 years
That makes it older than the pyramids at Giza and roughly contemporary with the first Mesopotamian wagons.
Q 06The Ljubljana Marshes Wheel is made of which wood?
Ash
Its 124 cm axle was oak, wedged so tightly that wheel and axle turned together like a modern railway wheelset.
Q 07The Bronocice pot, incised with one of the earliest known pictures of a wheeled vehicle, was found where?
Poland
It dates to around 3400 BCE and now lives in the Archaeological Museum of Kraków.
Q 08What kind of vehicle is scratched five times onto the Bronocice pot?
A four-wheeled wagon with a shaft
Aurochs bones found with the pot had horns worn as if roped to a yoke, so the wagons were probably ox-drawn.
Q 09Pictographs of wheeled wagons from about 3500 BCE come from the Eanna district of which Sumerian city?
Uruk
Some scholars think the wheel spread from the Near East to Europe; others note that all the oldest actual wheels are European.
Q 10What were the earliest wheels?
Solid wooden disks with an axle hole
Slicing a disk straight across a trunk gave a weak wheel; better ones were built from lengthwise boards.
Q 11The earliest known wooden spoked wheels, from about 2000 BCE, belong to which Russian steppe culture?
Sintashta
Their chariot burials at Krivoye Lake are the oldest chariots known anywhere.
Q 12What did Celtic chariot-makers add around their wooden wheels in the 1st millennium BCE?
An iron rim
Earlier wheels had been bound with wet animal hide that shrank tight as it dried.
Q 13Britain's earliest complete Bronze Age wheel was uncovered in 2016 at which East Anglian site?
Must Farm
A horse's spine lay nearby, hinting that the wheel came from a horse-drawn cart in a village built on stilts.
Q 21How many spokes does the wheel at the centre of India's flag have?
24
India's first vice-president said it stood for the wheel of the law of dharma, truth and the dynamism of peaceful change.
Q 22In Buddhist tradition, an eight-spoked dharma wheel represents what?
The Noble Eightfold Path
The hub, rim and spokes are also read as the three trainings: ethics, wisdom and concentration.
Q 23The medieval image of the Wheel of Fortune was popularised by which early-6th-century book?
Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy
Q 14In the Americas before European contact, wheels have only been found on which kind of object?
Children's toys
Some Mexican wheeled toys date to about 1500 BCE, yet no working cart, barrow or potter's wheel was ever built.
Q 15What is often given as the main reason wheeled transport never took off in the pre-Columbian Americas?
No large domesticated draft animals
The bison was never tamed and native horses had died out about 12,000 years ago.
Q 16Which was the only large animal domesticated in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus?
The llama
It is a pack animal, and its use barely spread beyond the Andes before the Europeans arrived.
Q 17Wheel tracks from about 2200 BCE at Pingliangtai are the earliest evidence of wheeled vehicles in which country?
China
The vehicles were introduced from the west; the country's oldest spoked-wheel hubs come from Qinghai.
Q 18Wheeled vehicles were forbidden in which mountainous Buddhist land where the wheel was sacred?
Old Tibet
There the wheel stood for cycles of rebirth rather than for getting the shopping home.
Q 19A winged wheel appears on the coat of arms of which Central American country?
Panama
The same symbol of progress is used by the Ohio State Highway Patrol and the State Railway of Thailand.
Q 20Besides India, which nomadic people put a wheel on their flag as a nod to their Indian origins?
The Romani
The green-and-blue Romani flag with its red wheel was adopted in 1971.
Fortuna, often blindfolded, cranks a millwheel with kings clinging to it; Tacitus had already complained the metaphor was a cliché.
Q 24What was the Greek equivalent of Fortuna, the Roman goddess who spins the wheel of fate?
Tyche
Cicero mocked a colleague who danced naked at a feast 'without fear of the Wheel of Fortune'.
Q 25Which ancient engineer in Roman Egypt listed the wheel and axle among the simple machines for lifting?
Hero of Alexandria
He probably had the windlass in mind: a crank turning a barrel to wind up a well rope.
Q 26In the worked example, putting a dragged 100 kg load onto four wooden wheels cuts the work needed to what fraction?
One-fortieth
The friction moves from the ground to the small axle bearing, so the sliding surfaces travel only a fraction of the distance.
Q 27Who invented the tension wire-spoked wheel in 1808, long before it appeared on bicycles?
George Cayley
The aviation pioneer never patented it; James Starley later put wire wheels on bicycles.
Q 28Unlike wooden spokes, wire spokes carry loads in which way?
Under tension
Each spoke on an unloaded bike wheel is pre-tightened to about 100 pounds of force, and the rim hangs from the top spokes.
Q 29What did the word 'spoke' originally refer to?
A section of a log split lengthwise
Logs were riven into four or six sections and carved down; the spokeshave was invented for the job.
Q 30In a traditional wooden wheel, what are the curved rim segments called?
Felloes
A wheel could have as few as two half-circle felloes of bent wood, or many, with at least two spokes each.