After he got a flat tire for the second time in a month, it occurred to Bart Bigsby of Nashville, Tennessee, that the problem might not be the tire itself but its round shape, which, to his knowledge, had not been upgraded in at least a decade.
“I’m not sure how long they’ve been making wheels round, but I would estimate it’s at least since the 1920s and the Great Depression,” said Bigsby. “Trying to save on materials by smoothing out various geometrical shapes.”
Bigsby went on to posit that while some cultural habits and routines, as with enslaved Americans who ate organs and other leftover animal parts because they did not have access to more desirable forms of animal flesh, might have served a purpose in their day, we need not, and indeed should not, be bound by the assumption that simply because something has always been done a certain way, that way is necessarily the best way.
Which got Bigsby's wheels spinning about, well, the wheel.
“There’s a certain aesthetic appeal to it, to be sure,” said Bigsby. “But I personally value function over form. And after getting those two flat tires, I sensed there must be a better way.”
Bigby’s intuition led him to experiment with several different shapes, including a square and even a diamond. “The diamond was tricky, because that’s essentially a square perched on a corner, which is challenging to replicate using rubber,” he noted. “But there’s no getting around the fact that the diamond does have a certain panache.”
He chuckled and added, “Yes, I’m a function-over-form kind of guy, but I’m not opposed to some badass form.”
Thus far, Bigsby’s tweaks of the wheel have not yielded any options definitively better than the current version, but Bigbsy says he is hopeful that he will nail the new design and go on to potentially become the most famous inventor in human history by modernizing the wheel that most of us have come to know as round.
“With persistence, open-mindedness, and creativity, I think I’ll get there,” said Bigsby. “People talk about thinking outside the box. But in this case, I’m thinking outside the wheel.”
