In 1870, a year after the first rickshaws appeared in Japan, three inventors separately applied for exclusive rights. Already, there were too many workshops serving the burgeoning market. We will never know which of them, if any, invented this internationally popular, stackable, hand-drawn passenger cart. Just three years after its invention, the rickshaw had totally displaced the palanquin (a covered litter carried on the shoulders of two bearers) as the preferred mode of passenger transport in Japan. In the course of his story of the wheel, Richard Bulliet, a historian of technology, asks some very good questions. He marshals a simple argument to explain why the rickshaw never caught on in the West until recently, with the arrival of streamlined bicycle rickshaws in well-touristed cities.
展开▼
