Wheelbarrow

A wheelbarrow is a small, hand-propelled vehicle, usually with a single wheel at the front, designed to be pushed and steered by one person using two handles at the rear, distributing the weight of a load between the wheel and the operator. Its origin is genuinely contested: Chinese sources give the strongest evidence, with wheelbarrow-like vehicles depicted in Han dynasty tomb reliefs from around AD 118 to 150 and a tradition crediting the chancellor Zhuge Liang with inventing a one-wheeled cart called the wooden ox for military supply transport around AD 231; the historian M. J. T. Lewis has proposed that a wheelbarrow may also have existed in ancient Greece based on a 408 to 407 BC inventory mentioning a body for a one-wheeler, though he acknowledges no direct evidence proves this, and most historians currently credit the invention to China, with the device reaching medieval Europe only around the 12th or 13th century.