A paraplegic watchmaker built the first self-propelled wheelchair in 1655
In 1655 Stephan Farffler, a 22-year-old watchmaker who could not walk, built himself a three-wheeled chair driven by hand cranks and cogwheels. It looked more like a hand-cycle than a modern wheelchair, but it let its maker move under his own power, something even a king's chair had failed to offer sixty years earlier.
Wheeled furniture is ancient. A Chinese stone inscription and a Greek vase showing a child's bed on wheels both date from the 6th to 5th century BCE, and the Sanskrit grammarian Panini recorded a word for wheelchair. Around three centuries later the Chinese were moving disabled people in early wheelbarrows, and by roughly 525 CE Chinese art shows chairs on wheels built specifically for carrying people.
Europe was slower. In 1595 an unknown Spanish inventor made an elaborate chair with arm and leg rests for King Philip II, but it had no practical way to propel itself, making it closer to a mobile throne. The Parliamentarian commander Sir Thomas Fairfax, badly injured in the English Civil War, used a self-propelled chair in his final years; it is now displayed at the National Civil War Centre in Newark. The Bath chair spread the idea more widely from around 1760, and from 1887 visitors to Atlantic City could rent rolling chairs on the Boardwalk, soon hired by healthy tourists too, complete with servants to push them.
The design most people picture arrived in 1933. Harry Jennings and his friend Herbert Everest, both mechanical engineers and Everest paralysed after a mining accident broke his back, created a light steel wheelchair that folded. Jennings borrowed the idea from folding camp stools turned on their side, and their X-brace frame remains common. Their company became the first mass-market wheelchair maker.
Modern manual chairs usually have two small front casters and two large rear wheels with push-rims. The brakes only hold the chair when parked, so users slow down by pressing their palms on the rims, which is why many wear padded gloves. Rigid, welded frames are lighter and waste less energy than folding ones, and many active users remove the push handles to discourage unwanted help.
Source: Wheelchair
