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The potter's wheel is a horizontal wheel or turntable used in the making of many types of pottery.

History

The exact time and place of the first development of the potter's wheel is uncertain. Suggested dates range from as early as the 6th millennium BC to the as late as the 24th century BC. Many modern scholars suggest development in Mesopotamia, although Egypt and China have also been claimed as the potter's wheel's place of origin.

In any case, use became widespread in the early civilizations of the Bronze age.

The earliest versions of the wheel were simply turned slowly by hand or foot while coiling a pot. Later developments allowed the wheel to keep rotating as a flywheel, allowing more symmetrical pots to be more swiftly formed.

By the Iron age a variation had developed with a turntable about a meter above the floor, connected by a long axle to a heavy lower wheel on the ground. This allowed the potter to keep the wheel in rotation by kicking it with his or her foot, leaving both hands completely free for molding the pot.

The potter's wheel became commonly known throughout the Old World, but was unknown in the New World in Pre-Columbian times; all American Indian pottery before the arrival of the Europeans was made without use of the wheel.

Since the Industrial Revolution, motor driven potter's wheels have become common, although human powered ones are still in use. Motorization does not significantly change the amount of skill needed to use a potter's wheel. The wheel is much more difficult to use and to master fully than other ceramic techniques such as the pinched pot or coils.

The potter's wheel in myth and legend

In Ancient Egyptian mythology, the god Chnum was said to have formed the first humans on a potter's wheel.

The potter's wheel in literature

The way in which clay is shaped on a potter's wheel seems, even today, to have a magical quality to it; the clay has the appearance of being a living thing that is being created or shaped by the potter. The potter and his clay have long served as a metaphor for creation, and for the relationship of God to humankind:

But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand.

—Isaiah 64:8

The "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" make sustained use of this metaphor. In FitzGerald's translation, a number of quatrains are collected into a Book of Pots, in which the pots engage in theological speculation:

  And, strange to tell, among that Earthen Lot
      Some could articulate, while others not:
  And suddenly one more impatient cried—
      “Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”

  Another said—“Why, ne'er a peevish Boy,
       “Would break the Bowl from which he drank in Joy;
  “Shall He that made the vessel in pure Love
      “And Fancy, in an after Rage destroy?”

  None answer'd this; but after Silence spake
      A Vessel of a more ungainly Make:
  “They sneer at me for leaning all awry;
      “What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?”

Crankshaft

The simplest way to spin the potter's wheel by foot is to sweep the foot from side to side against the spinning hub. This is rather awkward.

A cleverer way which was invented at an unknown time was to have a crankshaft with a lever, that converts up and down motion into rotary motion. Sewing machines such as those pioneered by the Singer Corporation have manual models operated by this method.

External links

• The Origins of the Potter's Wheel multi-page article on Ceramics Today site

• Pottery