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Shark Wheel

wheel manufacturing company based in California, United States

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 18, 2025
Entity authorityQ18636613
Source-derived summary

Shark Wheel is a company based in Lake Forest, California that manufactures helical wheels of the same name. Rather than a traditional circular shape, the Shark Wheel is composed of one or many three-dimensional sine waves. The shape is a hybrid of a sphere and cube, taking on the properties of both shapes while in motion. It has been touted as the reinvention of the wheel by various news outlets. The wheels were funded by a Kickstarter campaign that reached nearly eight times its initial goal. It attracted the attention of award-winning skateboarder Tony Hawk and was used by skateboarders who placed in various competitions around the world. The product appeared on

ABC's Shark Tank in May 2015.

Inventor

The shape of Shark Wheels came to David Patrick while he was designing an alternating wake turbine that was a spinoff from his research. The sine wave design that Patrick's research came up with worked well for the turbine (which Patrick says also has potential uses in wind, water, and other forms of renewable energy generation). Patrick's work has led to support from the LA Cleantech Incubator and the formation of 4sphere, a renewable energy company.

Editorial summary

“Shark Wheel” enters the record as wheel manufacturing company based in California, United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Shark, Wheel and wheel can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewMost valuable as an event-and-institution map that identifies actors, dates and record creators for deeper historical inquiry. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2015—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2013. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Shark, Wheel and wheel.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Shark Wheel” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Shark, Wheel and wheel provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q18636613. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2015.

Critical limits

Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Shark Wheel”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Shark Wheel primary sources, Shark Wheel archive and Shark research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Shark Wheel”?
  2. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
  3. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Shark Wheel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.