The invention of the wheel was what got things rolling.
Why this joke works
The Wheel Gets Things Rolling
The wheel enabled rolling transport, reducing friction and making it easier to move heavy loads. “Get things rolling” also means starting an activity or putting a plan into motion. The sentence credits the invention with progress using an expression that literally describes how wheels move. Unlike a loose pun, the factual and figurative meanings reinforce one another: the wheel helped societies advance partly because it made objects roll.
A closer look
A History Claim Uses Its Subject as the Verb
The sentence adopts the confident tone of a broad historical summary. “What got things” delays the image until the final word, which describes wheels physically and progress figuratively. There is no separate setup or punchline punctuation; the double meaning arrives as one continuous claim. That smoothness makes the observation feel almost literal enough to pass as a textbook caption.
Fact behind the joke
The Wheel Developed in More Than One Major Phase
A Smithsonian Libraries summary describes wheel history through early wheels fixed to axles around 4000 BCE, later wheels turning independently, and eventually casters that both rotate and pivot. The history was not one finished invention appearing all at once. Different wheel-and-axle arrangements answered changing needs in transport, craft, warfare, furniture, and industry over thousands of years.