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Wheelbarrows

Was it simply an item of garden equipment or instead a weapon of war?

Wheelbarrows have been around for a long time, but who invented the one-wheeled labour-saving contraption? A Roman road builder? A clever medieval gardener? A wily Victorian entrepreneur?

A Chinese Invention

The wheelbarrow doesn’t appear in the west until the Middle Ages and in fact the earliest evidence suggests that it was first invented by the Chinese nearly 2000 years ago, with the earliest image coming from a carved brick in a tomb dated to 118AD.

But tradition in China usually gives the credit to a Chinese politician in 231 A.D, and he didn’t design wheelbarrows as a useful piece of labour-saving garden equipment, but a weapon of war!

Zhuge Liang [sometimes Chu Ko Liang] was Chief Minister of Shu, one of the warring states that made up China in the third century. In 231 Shu was waging war against one of its rivals, and he had the problem of how to supply his troops in extremely difficult and muddy conditions, when there was also a severe labour shortage. Zhuge Liang (or one of his engineers of course) came up with a prototype wheelbarrow, which had a large, narrow, centrally-placed wheel which could cope with moving heavy loads over soft or boggy ground. And, as he is supposed to have said, unlike oxen or humans it never got tired or needed feeding.

In China the wheelbarrow then developed as a road vehicle, where large loads or even passengers could be taken long distances without major effort. This use, which had no real Western counterpart, was only possible because of a difference in the design of the Chinese vehicle. The large wheel in the middle of the wheelbarrow takes the full weight of the load with the user merely steering it. And it could even be modified and made more efficient by adding sails!

The Western Wheelbarrow

The western wheelbarrow seems to have developed in a completely different way, and much later.

Its forerunner was probably the handbarrow or litter, which required two people to use. The wheel effectively becomes a substitute for one of the carriers. But because the wheel is at the front it means the weight of the load, although it is split equally between the wheel and the person pushing it, can still often make wheelbarrowing hard work, in particular for carrying heavy weights over long distances.

Nevertheless it was a great improvement, and the advantages of the wheelbarrow as a beast of burden in the garden were obviously quickly realised. It soon appeared on every list of essential garden tools, including one written by Alexander Neckam, Abbot of Cirencester in 1190.

Developing the Design

For a basic piece of equipment you wouldn’t think that there could be much variation in design, the most obvious being the length of the handles, but in fact there have been a whole range of other styles and variations such as drop down sides, front stop bars and removable holders.

Many of these were listed by John Claudius Loudon in his comprehensive Encyclopedia of Gardening published in 1826 under his category of ‘machines of Labour’.

More recently of course, wooden barrows have been replaced with metal or plastic and wheels now have tires. There have been other innovations too. But is it still a wheelbarrow if the wheel is replaced with a spherical ball as in the ballbarrow introduced by James Dyson in the 1970s? Or when the barrow is electric power assisted as created by Honda in 1998?

Read Dr. David Marsh’s original full blog post here:
https://thegardenhistory.blog/2015/02/28/the-wheelbarrow-a-weapon-of-war/

Wheelbarrows

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