Technology and Engineering Atlas

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Technology and Engineering Atlas

Disputed Statements

Claims this atlas currently marks as unsettled or as tested and found false. A debated fact is one scholars hold competing positions on; a debunked one has been checked against the record and found not to hold. Both are kept in view rather than quietly smoothed over, with the reasoning that put each one where it stands.

103 statements.

Wheel, Year3500 BCE

Wheel, Inventions

Standing

Concerns Year

Currently States 3500 BCE

Wheeled-vehicle depictions on Sumerian pictographs from the Eanna district of Uruk are dated to about 3500 to 3350 BCE, but the potter's wheel and disk-on-axle wheels of similar age appear across several Copper Age cultures, so historians treat the wheel as roughly simultaneous independent invention rather than one place of origin.

Source Wheel (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors

Wool Combing Machine, Year1790

Wool Combing Machine, Inventions

Standing

Concerns Year

Currently States 1790

Wikipedia says the machine was originally patented in April 1790; the Dictionary of National Biography entry on Cartwright says his first wool-combing patent was taken out in 1789. The existing entity description credits Heilmann in 1845, which this source does not support for the original invention.

Source Wikipedia: Wool combing machine

Wrought Iron, Origin Year-1200

Wrought Iron, Materials

Standing

Concerns Origin Year

Currently States -1200

Bloomery-smelted wrought iron is attested in the Near East and Anatolia from around the twelfth century BCE, marking the start of the Iron Age in the region.

Source A History of Technology, Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors