In its early years the Rotary Club of Chicago used a wagon wheel emblem, an idea attributed to Paul Harris. He suggested it symbolized civilization and movement. At first, every club had its own version.

 

At the 1911 convention of the National Association of Rotary Clubs it was suggested that delegates adopt a standard emblem. They would base it upon the wheel, which had become the generally accepted emblem of Rotary clubs. The Board of Directors appointed a committee to come up with a design, which copied the emblem used by the Rotary Club of Philadelphia. (It was probably only a coincidence that the design committee members all came from Philadelphia.)

 

Thinking the wagon wheel design didn’t convey the Rotary idea very well, they had added cogs to create a working wheel, symbolizing the members working together, literally interlocked with one another to achieve the organization's objectives. They used 19 cogs in honor of their club, which had been chartered as the 19^th club in the world.

 

The 1912 Rotary convention approved the Philadelphia design for the whole organization, though many clubs continued to use their own designs.  In 1918, a Rotarian engineer from Minnesota petitioned Rotary to amend the design of the wheel. He said that a cogwheel with 19 cogs would not work. He said that the emblem had square-cornered teeth of disproportionate size, that the cogs were irregularly spaced. This Rotarian, Oscar Bjorge, called the emblem "an insult to engineering that only the brain of an artist could conceive."

So he sketched a new wheel, with six spokes (symbolizing the Six Objects of Rotary at that time) and 24 cogs or teeth. He also added a keyway, which locks a wheel to a hub, thus making it a worker and not an idler. We might wonder whether the artists in the organization made some snide comment about a sketch done by an engineer.

 

In 1928, the exact specifications of this engineer were written into the Manual of Procedure, approved at the 1929 Dallas convention. The specifications have been unchanged ever since.

 

(from the Shambala Mountain Center)