FOLLOWING the news that Barnsley is to be the UK’s first Tech Town (true) with AI being renamed EeeAye in our honour (not true) I decided that it’s now time to reveal Barnsley’s role in two of the most exciting technological advances in the history of mankind.
I refer of course to The Wheel and The Fork. I’ll leave you to work out whether I’m telling the truth or not.
You might think that the wheel was, and remains, a more important and indeed more technological invention than the fork but in the next few paragraphs I hope to convince you otherwise.
It’s true, of course that the wheel has been vital in human development; imagine sitting on an X19 that has no wheels.
We can call a wheel-less bus a bus but it may as well be a house if it’s not going anywhere. The same is true of any mode of transport and so we in Barnsley have to thank the un-named Early Man, or to be more precise, Early Yorkshireman, who first put the wheel on the map. Where it left some muddy tracks (not true).
What happened was that, thousands of years BC, the aforementioned Early Yorkshireman was sitting in his terraced cave preparing his favourite meal, a Yorkshire pudding made with dinosaur eggs, dinosaur milk, and flour created from the ground up teeth of dead dinosaurs.
Unlike most, if not all, of the Yorkshire puddings we have these days, this early example of a Yorkshire was actually triangular because it was cooked in the oven at the back of the cave on the triangular sharp area of a spear.
Fossils of these triangular puddings have been found by members of the Gilroyd Tuesday Afternoon Archaeology Club in 1934 and were considered Gradely and Champion, to use a technical term.
One day the Yorkshireman went out hunting for sabre-toothed tigers with his trusty spear with the triangular point and, when he saw one running by, let fly, missed the tiger and the spear hit the side of a cliff with such force that it shattered.
The Yorkshireman was bereft, not only because he’d missed his prey but because that was the only spear-tip he’d got and he’d promised the family some Yorkshires round the campfire that evening.
When he got back to the cave he scouted round for something to cook the Yorkshires in and came across a plate that he’d made from the trunk of an old tree one evening last winter when there was nothing on the telly (the trunk of the old tree: true. Nothing on the telly: not true).
He put the batter on the plate and cooked it over the fire and result was a cross between a Yorkshire pudding and a pancake.
He showed it to his family but they’d got used to the triangular puddings and they weren’t impressed, so much so that his mother got hold of the round pudding and flung it away down a hill
where it started rolling and rolling and it would have still been rolling today if it hadn’t come to a halt at the feet of another early Yorkshireman, who had been experimenting with early forms of public transport and had set up a system of moving people across vast distances on giant sledges towed by Mastodons.
The thing about these sledges was that they took a very long time to go, well, not very far. When the round Yorkshire pudding landed at his feet, though, the stone-age entrepreneur had a flash of inspiration, cooked three more round Yorkshire puddings, put one at each corner of the sledge and the rest is history, as they say.
All aboard!
So that’s the invention of the wheel covered, in the early days of the Town of Tech, but what about that other creation that’s essential to humanity, the fork? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?
Have you ever tried eating a Yorkshire pudding with a spoon? You might as well try eating soup with a knife! The accidental round Yorkshire pudding was an anomaly and the triangular pudding was the norm.
But every time hungry folks tried to pick one up with a spoon it was a struggle until someone picked one up with a forked twig from the forest floor. And the rest is history as they say again. Gerrem darn thi!
So we’ve always been a Town of Tech and we’re proud of it! Long may it continue!
