A steering wheel is a circular object used by the driver of a car or boat to change the direction it is moving.
The earliest known use of a steering wheel can be traced back to 1894 when Alfred Vacheron used one on his custom four-horsepower Panhard to participate in the Paris-Rouen race. That race in France in 1894 is one of the earliest known instances of a wheel-shaped device being used to steer a car.