In 18th-century China, whole fleets of wheelbarrows travelled under sail
Near the southern edge of Shandong in 1797, a Dutch East India Company man named Andreas van Braam Houckgeest was astonished to meet a convoy of big wheelbarrows, each carrying a mast and a sail of matting or cloth roughly as tall as a person. The pusher worked the sheets, tied to the handles, like a sailor.
Those were Chinese barrows, which differed from European ones in a key way. After the third century most had a large wheel mounted in the middle, so the wheel carried the weight rather than splitting it with the person at the handles, and a single machine could carry six passengers. Van Braam Houckgeest described the design accurately, and traditional versions were still in wide use in China into the 1960s.
China holds the oldest firm evidence. A tomb mural in Chengdu, dated exactly to 118 AD, shows a man pushing a one-wheeled cart, and a relief from around 150 AD shows another. Chen Shou's third-century history credits the Shu Han chancellor Zhuge Liang with building a wooden ox in 231 AD to haul army supplies against Cao Wei, and a later commentator described it as a central wheel wrapped in an ox-shaped wooden frame. One story tells of the official Zhao Xi smuggling his wife past rebel brigands around 20 AD by pushing her in a barrow and claiming she was gravely ill.
Whether ancient Greeks had them is disputed. The historian M. J. T. Lewis pointed to building inventories from the temple at Eleusis, dated 408 and 407 BC, listing the body of a one-wheeler, but most historians hold that the device began in China around 100 AD, and no evidence confirms Greek or Roman use. Medieval Europe adopted it between 1170 and 1250, with the wheel at the front. A 1222 record notes barrows bought for the English king's works at Dover.
Most modern barrows are steel or plastic and hold about 100 litres, working as a second-class lever. In the 1970s James Dyson swapped the wheel for a ball in his Ballbarrow, which rolled more easily over soft soil and stayed steadier on rough ground.
Source: Wheelbarrow
