The artillery wheel was developed for use on gun carriages when it was found that the lateral forces involved in horse artillery manoeuvres caused normally-constructed cart wheels to collapse. Rather than having its spokes mortised into a wooden nave (hub), it has them fitted together (mitred) then bolted into a metal nave. Its tyre is shrunk onto the rim in the usual way but it is also bolted on for security. A normal wagon wheel is dished so that in its lowest part, the spokes are perpendicular to the ground thus supporting the weight (with the axle not truly horizontal but angled downward toward the outside about 5 degrees). This is not done with artillery wheels.
When higher speeds and consequently higher lateral forces were attained with the introduction of motor vehicles, the artillery wheel was used in those too. By the 1920s, motor cars used wheels which looked at a glance like artillery wheels but which were of forged steel or welded from steel pressed sections. These too were usually called artillery wheels. By the 1930s they were obsolete having been replaced by wheels pressed from heavy-gauge steel sheet or in sports cars and lightweight cars, by wire spokes.
Famous quotes containing the words artillery and/or wheel:
“Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentiment in mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same house of being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)