Amsterdam, yellow wheelbarrow

I took this from a boat, while on a canal tour with Rippy in 2012. It's being posted while I'm in the Netherlands again.

another wheelbarrow invention

When I started to make ths blog, I looked to see what might already be out there. Found this article:

Wheelbarrow of fortune: Father and son who rejected £50,000 Dragons' Den offer for gardening gadget net £1.3million in sales
Mike and Joe Smith rejected an offer for invention on Dragons' Den
Duncan Bannatyne and Hilary Devey offered them £50,000 for 50 per cent of their Wheelbarrow Booster business
By ALEX WARD
PUBLISHED: 09:47, 18 October 2012 | UPDATED: 11:46, 18 October 2012


They didn't allow themselves to be "invested in" on a TV show for inventors, but it's available from Tesco and several mailorder places now: Wheelbarrow Booster

(Yesterday's blog post was about the ball barrow, and here's the answer: It's from the 1970's, designed by James Dyson, who apparently likes to design round things.)

"Ball barrow"

Consider when and where this might have been, if you don't know as soon as you look.
Reinventing the wheelbarrow.

---

I've come back seven years later to say it was designed and patented by James Dyson, in the 1970s.
These should link to an article at Designophy with some photos, and the wikipedia page with the patent diagram.

Too small, too small !

You know how sometimes you can just feel someone is looking at you?

I took a photo of a wheelbarrow at a roadside services stop off the M-6. Two burly men were working on something involving a hole in the tarmac there. On turned to look at me when I took the photo and so I didn't take more.

Mostly, I think that wheelbarrow is too small for them. Two big men, one wee wheelbarrow.

That was not so far from "Weeford." I told Adam that Weeford was the place where people went to wee in the river. He laughed, even though he knew it was a joke. (Oh... I guess that's the best reason to laugh.)

I told him I didn't want to go to POOford. And that was no joke. Though in the UK, Pooford might go heavy on the "poof" and forget about the "ford." Language is funny. But that wheelbarrow... It wasn't the manliest of wheelbarrows. Still, either of those guys could probably have lifted it with one hand and set it lightly into their vehicle.

Wheelbarrow neighbors, in the Yarrow Valley

Next door to the Sirokys (who have three wheelbarrows of their own) is an old wheelbarrow I spotted from the road, just the handles sticking up over a low wall. I got out of the car to photograph it, but this is all I could see:




When we got back from town, Ester asked the neighbor if we could take photos of it. The neighbor looked skeptical and said there were better things to take photos of, but said sure, go ahead.

Ester and I took junk off of it and away from it—an old sink, a road sign, a grill made of an oil drum with welded-on-legs—so I could photograph it. I had thought maybe we would set it upright, but it had been against that wall so long that it was as mossy as the stones, so we didn't touch it. One of the support members for the axle had fallen, too. I didn't touch that either.






Ester reminded me they have three wheelbarrows, and offered to show me and pose them, but I wanted to find them and photograph them candidly. She said two were in the shed.

The shed is part of a long stone building with doors on one side and two ends. The first two rooms open from the porch outside the kitchen, and are an ancient washroom, where water could be heated over a fire (looks like a cooking fireplace) and there were sinks and I don't know what. The middle room has firewood and tools. The other, I hadn't seen yet, and there were two wheelbarrows, holding lawncare supplies.

Back out in the garden, I found the third:


When I got back in, Ester asked whether I had seen the two with plants growing in them. I had not. They were in the corner of her property that the neighbors use as their garden, but it was so lush that the wheelbarrows hardly showed. The first photo is the first one, and all the others are different details of the soon-to-be-forgotten second one:

Chelsea Flower Show (the wheelbarrow year)

Elaine Greenwood-Hyde wrote:

There was a wheelbarrow installation/sculpture at the Chelsea Flower show this year. As part of the flower show's centenary, it was a celebration of the wheelbarrow. It's been hard to find pictures.

Elaine sent a link to a blog post where someone collects photos of rust. Rust and wheelbarrow met here:



The photographer and collector there is Gregg Smith, who lives in the UK somewhere, and has a blog he's kept since February 2013 called "Rust Never Sleeps." Each day he's putting up a photo of rust. There are some beautiful things there.

This one he took too, of wheelbarrows that aren't rusty yet, a view of an art installation at that flower show (and at his blog there is another).

On a French blog (in English) by an Englishman (in France), I found more. The wheelbarrow above is the second one in the series shown below.

Chelsea Flower Show - History of the wheelbarrow...
In the early days, before mechanical handling, rocks and other gardeny things were manhandled and carried in wheelbarrows which were carved from solid oak and weighed a couple of tons when empty.

Whimsy

"Violet & Olivia enjoying a wheelbarrow ride around the yard at Grandmas house in Chino Valley, Arizona during July 4th week."

on facebook, the original comment

one small wheelbarrow

This wheelbarrow was far from anything, off a small road on which we were walking, with other people, to see the horses return at the end of the Galashiels Common Riding.

People were looking for the horses. I couldn't help spotting a wheelbarrow. This is as zoomed in as I could get. :-)

Which came first, the chicken or the wheelbarrow?

I photographed this on June 20, 2012, at Legoland, near Windsor.

As wheelbarrows go, it has many flaws. As age goes, it's older than any living chicken, and surely older than the Lego-built chicken next to it.

It has an edge. as a dolly would, but a single-wheeled upright/dolly/handcart wouldn't be very stable. The handles are VERY low. Maybe it once had longer legs.

It was in the Vikings area at Legoland.

How old are wheelbarrows?

The Inventors section of About.com says this:

History of Engineering: Wheelbarrow

Chuko Liang (181-234 A.D.) of China is considered to be the inventor of the wheelbarrow. Liang was a general who used the wheelbarrows to transport supplies injured soldiers. The Chinese wheelbarrows had two wheels and required two men to propel and steer.

I say that a two-wheeled "wheelbarrow" is just a handcart, and not nearly as elegant as a one-wheeled conveyance.

And seriously? Were there no wheelbarrows in the world before the third century? I doubt that very much, but if it's right, let's have it. Anyone who knows or cares anything about wheelbarrows, or just thinks they're great, or maybe has once considered them kind of cute—send links or photos or comments.

Wheelbarrows at Lowe's Home Improvement Store near my house, 2012