Low Tech Magazine: The Chinese Wheelbarrow | Hacker News Reader

Low Tech Magazine: The Chinese Wheelbarrow

lowtechmagazine.com

96 pointsanthonyb18 comments

A good design (like a good scientific theory), like the Chinese wheelbarrow, not only makes the job it's designed for easier but also opens the way for new uses not possible before: I was struck by the wheelbarrow train concept that this design enables.

I also find it interesting to think about the interplay of effects on innovation, e.g:

"It is thought that the primary obstacle to large-scale development of the wheel in the Western hemisphere was the absence of domesticated large animals which could be used to pull wheeled carriages." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel#History)

Note that the wheelbarrow is primarily for human use, but it's not possible without the wheel which, (it is conjectured) is invented to carry loads with the help of domesticated beasts of burden. So, the American peoples could not go through level I (invent the wheel) due to the shortage of domesticated large animals, to arrive at level II (invent the wheelbarrow) which would have freed them from relying on such animals.

While this is an interesting piece of technology, I can't read this article without cringing. The bias towards "Chinese technology" over "European technology" and the constant comparison between the two makes this read like some sort of propaganda piece.

The design really is better - can you imagine pushing a western style wheelbarrow for 20km?

Try some of the other articles on the site (eg. http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/12/hand-powered-drilling...) and you'll see he just has a pro-cool technology bias.

Can you imagine dumping 100lb of earth into a chinese one and tipping it out at the top of a hole - to build a canal or railway?

They are fundementally different concepts. A european wheelbarrow is an earth moving tool - essentially a bucket on wheels. A chinese wheelbarrow is a man powered cart. It's like claiming a sack trolley is better than a pallet truck because it can go down stairs

That is exactly correct. It makes no sense to conflate the two and disregard the purposes of each. In the case of the chinese wheelbarrow it is not clear that it was so superior to the european cart. A person simply can't move the same amount of material as easily as a pack animal. The chinese cart is thus tremendously labor intensive. One person must move a load that could be done by 1/4 of a pack animal on a wheeled cart.

Additionally, the one other advantage of being able to use the wheelbarrow on narrow paths instead of roads is not something that would normally matter. Roads can move people and goods much more effectively and faster than narrow paths. The article alludes to this by referring to the collapse of the road network and the subsequent development of the wheelbarrow. Of course, if they had roads, they may never had adopted to the wheelbarrow in the first place.

What the author describes as inventiveness is really necessity borne of weakness. Only if human labor is relatively cheap would such an invention ever be considered. China fit these conditions perfectly, however. The dramatic rise in population over the course of the first millenium in China made such efficiency concerns moot. Labor intensive rice agriculture also needed large groups of people anyway.

For the requirements - a heavy but symmetric load over narrow roads - it's a pretty good solution. At least until you have to stop!

Interestingly, trading inherent stability and rigidity for more control effort to give you a lighter more manouverable design is something we have only just "reinvented" with some fighter aircraft (and the Segway ;-)

In spite of having active/computer control systems fro 30years we still do seem to stick to the 19C railway engineering mentality of - build it big/strong/stable/rigid/heavy

I think your analysis is somewhat off - at the same time in western Europe, people weren't using carts, they were carrying everything by hand. So it's not wheelbarrow vs. cart, it's wheelbarrow vs. nothing.

Also, narrow tracks would be much easier to build than roads which need carts. Again, it's narrow paths vs. nothing, rather than narrow paths vs. wide paved roads.

Depends on how far you have to move the cut to use it as fill. A few hundred meters probably isn't an issue. At a couple of kilometers transport becomes more of an issue than unloading.

For road building, transporting materials such as paving stones over long distances is an important consideration because roads are useful in places where local materials may not be suitable for quality construction. One might speculate that the Chinese wheel barrow's design helped bootstrap a network of roadways suitable for it's use.

Of course the upside of the collapse of Europe's road network may have been that it allowed localized development of the political structures upon which modern liberal states were developed.

One person holds the cart, the other fills it. Two of you dump it out where it's supposed to go. As long as your cart can carry > 2-3x the load, it should be more efficient (or you can load it with buckets).

You shouldn't push them, it's much easier to pull them along behind you.

Pushing a wheeled cart allows for more control but can obstruct visibility. Pulling one can lead to back problems.

Pushing has far less control because the center of mass is ahead of the applied force and any eccentricity in the applied force causes rotation in a direction other than that in which the force is applied.

On the other hand, pulling a cart means that the cart will rotate toward the direction of the applied force and follow it. The direction of a pulled cart tends to be self correcting (all things being equal).

It's also easier to get it over bumps, since you're pulling upwards, rather than pushing down into the ground. I'm not 100% sure that applies so strongly to the chinese design though.

Going through school, I felt like I received a ridiculous pro-european level of propaganda, as though every innovation that was worth anything came from that continent. And the propaganda worked. Even though I now know better, I am still a little surprised when I hear of a technological marvel that non-europeans came up with.

Basically, you are right. Just about every civilization has produced startlingly clever innovations for their environment. Saying Chinese are clever or Europeans are clever, or Africans are clever, is a bad way of looking at the world. But I don't mind pro-other-continent bias so much because I feel like all it's doing is helping to provide some balance for the pro-europe bias I was raised with.

I cringe every time an article says "gutenberg invented the printing press", without comparison to the corresponding chinese invention at all. =\

The one-wheeled vehicle appeared around the time the extensive Ancient Chinese road infrastructure began to disintegrate. Instead of holding on to carts, wagons and wide paved roads, the Chinese turned their focus to a much more easily maintainable network of narrow paths designed for wheelbarrows.

Necessity and constraints are parents of invention I suppose.

I have only used european wheelbarrows, but I find them deceptively unstable at high loads. You might bee able to push 100 kg of dirt since you only have to lifthalf of the weight, but as soon as you get just slightly off ballance, the full weight will push the wheelbarrow over. There is just no way you can keep it from falling once that happens.

The problem would seem to be Much worse with the chineese design, since the load is much higher (and the center of gravity higher ?).

China has a great record on low tech inventions. The calligraphy pen is another one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com