"To carry stones and rakings of garden to places, appointed to receive'em or, to carry earth...."
Francis Gentil, The Solitary Gardener (1706)
The wheelbarrow is reputed to have been invented by a Chinese chancellor, Zhuge Liang (181-234) during the Han Dynasty, who used the device in military campaigns to transport supplies for injured soldiers. It was said to have been kept secret because of the advantages it gave the Chinese over their enemies.
It was also used for early Chinese agriculture, which was said to have been thirty times more efficient than that in Europe. Designed to transport heavy loads, wheelbarrows are now used in the construction industry as well as in gardening.
A wheelbarrow is a small cart, with one or two wheels, designed to be pushed by one person using two handles at the rear. Chinese wheelbarrows often had two wheels, and the Chinese sometimes attached sails to them so that the wind could take part of the load, as is recorded by European travelers of the sixteenth century.
Wheelbarrows were seen in Europe in the twelfth century, as evidenced by a stained-glass window at Chartres Cathedral in France, dating around 1220. This is believed to be the earliest image of a wheelbarrow in Western European. A manuscript illumination of 1286 also shows the European wheelbarrow. This design differed from the Chinese one in that the wheel was moved from the center to the front of the box, and the propelling power was at the rear.
Designs of wheelbarrow have been developed in recent years, such as British inventor James Dyson's Ballbarrow of 1974 that uses a spherical plastic wheel, and is easier to steer than those models based on the conventional wheel design.
