Steps, stairs, whatever you choose to call them. They’ve been around for some time. Even the Colosseum in Rome had them.
But who invented them?
Was it one person? Was it one culture? I’ve always wanted to know.
Because you have to admit, they are ingenious. Even the elevator kind of pales by comparison (and I did hear on the History Channel, the Romans are the ones who invented that;)).
So who did it? I’d love to shake their hand (even though they are long dead–but you know what I mean).
[Jim B.]
Now, the rest of you, omit what I put in for Mr. Adams, and feel free to answer my question. Yeah, I really would have done a Google search on this one, if I could. But how do you even phrase that question? I wasn’t sure. Thanks in advance, though to all who reply:).
The Collosseum? Ye be modest, sir. steps and stairs precede Imperial Rome by millennia.
I doubt if we’ll ever find an inventor for stairs. I suggest that they are a human improvement on natural breaks in elevation, simply made more regular and standardized. They were oprobably “invented” numerous times by people widely separated in space and time.
They’re also sort of obvious and inevitable. How else are you going to go from one elevation to another? Unless it’s abrupt (use a ladder or a rope), you either use steps/stairs or a ramp. You might as well ask you invented the ramp
I suspect that, like fire and the wheel, it was developed in many places and at many different times. Stairs can be a natural feature in rock formations so as soon as people settle down in one place, they are likely to make life easier.
According to this website however, they were not “invented until 1948, by Swiss architect Werner Bösendörfer. Prior to the advent of stairs (or “stairsteppes,” as they were originally called), most people moved between building levels using ramps or ladders.”
They were not invented, but rather discovered. Even wild animals would climb a steep hill by seeking level footfalls that they could step up to. When early man acquired the ability to re-shape his environment, he duplicated parts of nature that made life simpler.
Furthermore, if a relatively well-trodden path goes up a hillside that is made of softer material than solid rock, steps are pretty much an emergent feature arising from people’s stride lengths being more or less the same as one another, and the tendency to tread on already-flattened areas.
Actually, that column shows that the wheel WAS independently invented in the Americas (pretty famously – the Aztecs and the Incas had wheeled toys). They just didn’t use it for moving large carts. As far as we know. But they certainly had wheels, and I seriously doubt that they got them from the Sumerians.
Pre-Columbian cultures in Mesoamerica and South America used stairs and certainly would have invented them independently from cultures in the Old World.
Stairs are such an obvious “invention” I have no doubt they were independently “discovered” hundreds of times.
It simply seems to me that it’s so obvious that it’s like asking “Who decided to use a stick as a weapon?”
People climbing ragged landscapes would use intermediate points for foot placement. It only seems logical when they needed ways to climb from one man-made level or platform to the next, they would put intermediate stepping points between. Putting one or more rocks where they make climbing up easier is pretty obvious. The regularity I attribute to man’s anal OCD tendencies, and solid rock and flat and level are the best attributes for stairs. So the idea probably existed by the time man started making either mud bricks or carved rocks.
The original was from geocities in a parody tour of the White House The page can be found at archive.org.
Scholars have developed some different ideas in the three decades since. In the aptly titled The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions, Richard W. Bulliet, the foremost scholar of wheeled vehicles, places their invention in the mines of the Carpathian Mountains around 4000 BCE for the purpose of moving heavy loads of ore. That’s a millennia before Sumer.
Let’s first distinguish the wheeled cart from the potter’s wheel. Neither can be dated with certainty but the former (probably derived from the latter) was widespread in Eastern Europe and Mesopotamia by about 3200 BC. The invention spread so rapidly that its origin cannot be located with archaeology.
“Although Mesopotamia has the oldest known wheel, linguistic evidence is used to support the claim that the wheel originated in the Eurasian steppes.”
No less than six words (with reflexes found in both Western and Eastern branches) related to wheels or wagons have been inferred for PIE (which expanded from its homeland in the Russian steppes before 3200 BC). Among these six PIE words are the sources for English ‘rotary’, ‘axle’, ‘wagon’ and ‘wheel’. (‘Cycle’, like ‘wheel,’ is cognate to PIE ‘k[sup]w[/sup]ek[sup]w[/sup]los’.)
Notched-log ladders are actually pretty similar to built stairs in appearance and usage - they’re one of the simplest forms of ladder, and found at least back as far as the iron age
Not only did those wily Eurasians invent the wheel, but after a while they noticed they were always climbing up and down those Eurasian steppes, and were inspired to invent the Eurasian stairs, a compact version that they used inside their houses.
