The Wheels of Innovation

The story of human development is the story of innovation, creating something new from something old, whether that be an old idea or an old invention. Civilizations that weren’t able to innovate past their trials, (or at least past their competitors), found themselves thrust into dark ages and — at the very worst — extinction. At Master Muffler, we are drawn to man’s spirit of progress, manifesting spiritually as a dream and physically as movement, as propulsion, as forward momentum. 

The famed Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler once counseled to “trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.” For early man, movement meant following the migrating herds for food or following the river for signs of life. In that early neolithic period, the technology of movement was limited simply to one’s own two legs, though the domestication of animals nearly 10,000 years ago gave early humans the freedom to use beasts of burden to travel. 

The Wheels of Progress Roll Ever On

While our Riverton car repair center is adept at aligning your tires, the earliest peoples in Mesopotamia had been living millennia without a wheel, despite having already been living as an agricultural and artistic society. While the exact moment of inspiration to create the wheel is undocumented — perhaps early people saw rocks rolling down a hill and imagined a tool that did something similar, or they repurposed the device they used for throwing pottery as something that could be turned on its side — the invention nevertheless would change the course of history. 

It is clear that the invention of the wheel seemed extremely purposeful and was almost immediately put to work transporting goods. We can infer this because the oldest known wheel yet discovered dates back nearly 5,200 years ago, is made of wood, and is accompanied, crucially, by an axle. While the wood carving is itself impressive and beautiful, the axle proves a number of things: 

• The wheel originally had a mate that was stuck on the other side of the axle
• The length of the axle indicates that it was a part of a wheelbarrow-like device
• The intricacy of the carving (as well as the presence of other wheels in the area) show that the people of the Copper Age had been living with, and using, wheels in their daily life. 

First Come Cars, Then Come Car Repairs

While the historical record doesn’t support a clean, 1-2-3 order of events from the creation of the wheel, to the creation of the car, to the creation of the airplane, the spirit of innovation dictates that once we had invented the wheel and had incorporated it into our daily lives, mankind would then wonder how we could make it turn faster and with less energy on our part. The invention of the motorized wheel — and eventually the car — set events in motion that would eventually lead to the establishment of Master Muffler and the business of our lives. 

Since humans had been using roads and footpaths since the beginning of time to walk and transport goods safely and conveniently, the invention of motorized vehicles in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries necessitated the invention of paved roads, which would go on to transform our cities and our landscapes. 

Today, our Riverton car repair shop services hundreds of people a week, keeping Utah’s roads and drivers safe. Whether your car is suffering from misaligned tires or a shot catalytic converter, the car repair professionals at Master Muffler will ensure that when you head out to your next adventure, you’ll be doing it in a road-worthy vehicle. After all, as Alber Einstein said, “nothing happens until something moves.”