Wheel, Breaking on the, a very barbarous mode of inflicting death at one time, in which the limbs of the victim were stretched along the spokes of a wheel, and the wheel being turned rapidly round, the limbs were broken by repeated blows from an iron bar; this is what the French roué means, applied figuratively to a person broken with dissipation, or what we call a rake.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Wheatstone, Sir Charles * Wheeling