

How to Downsize a Transport Network: The Chinese Wheelbarrow (2011) - poissonpie
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarrow.html

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analyst74
An interesting fact I learnt from the article is that both European and
Chinese went backwards in terms of infrastructure at some point. So maybe dark
age is not a singular historical event, and could re-occur in the future?

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pgrote
Interesting. Wouldn't having a lasting archive of previous knowledge and
advancements prevent another dark age?

In the past, most knowledge was transferred among people verbally or located
in geographically separate areas.

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potatolicious
Preservation of knowledge itself is insufficient to prevent things from being
lost.

It's something the US is dealing with, particularly in military and aerospace.
You stop doing something long enough and, despite having schematics and
documentation around, nobody is left that _actually_ knows how to do it. See
for example the retirement of the Space Shuttle and the resumption of
classical capsule-based spacecraft, we're still in the process of re-learning
a lot of knowledge we already gained during the Apollo era. And that's merely
a few decades.

Not to mention "dark ages" aren't necessarily the loss of knowledge, but
rather the loss of governance. Neither China or Europe ever lost the ability
to build roads, but yet the infrastructure deteriorated and was not replaced.
This suggests economic, political, and/or religious causes, not the loss of
knowledge.

I don't think we've figured this governance thing out to the point where we're
safe from regressing to a state where public infrastructure breaks down in a
massive way.

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mikepurvis
Coordination is huge, too—most things have a huge number of upstream
dependencies. Knowing how to build advanced circuits is of little use if the
chip foundries can't make semiconductors and ship them to you.

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Gravityloss
The european wheelbarrow is used for short distances at construction sites,
farms etc, and the wheel is at the front to enable tipping the wheelbarrow
forwards for full unloading. Different use case, different design.

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infinity0
You can do that with the chinese wheelbarrow as well. Here, its design enables
more use-cases.

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riffraff
I am unconvinced by "The Europeans[..]did not adapt and subsequently lost the
option of smooth land transportation for almost one thousand years."

By the subsequent text, "Roman road infrastructure remained relatively useful
until about the 11th century AD" and they started building them again in the
late middle age. The middle ages by definition in the 15th century so the 11th
is already near the late middle age.

Moreover:

"New roads appeared during the economic revival of the late Middle Ages, but
these were not paved or hardened in any other way. This made them at best
inefficient in good weather and nearly impassable when (and after) it rained.
"

But that is also true of the chinese ones. I imagine pushing a wheelbarrow
balancing on a single central wheel in the mud is not easier than a two
wheeled cart.

Good article nonetheless, but I thought the "dark ages" trope was already
discredited?

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jt2190
You may find one of the comments on the article interesting. Here's a excerpt:

    
    
      > "Niether can you compare the road systems. Europe never 
      > had a mercantile road system because it never needed 
      > one because of the excellent water transport. Europe 
      > has the highest density of navigable rivers in the 
      > world as well as the longest fractal coastline. Few 
      > places in Europe were more than a half-day travel by 
      > wagon from water transport. All they needed were short
      > stretches of local road to connect 
      > to the nearest water transport.
    

[1] [http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-
wheelbarr...](http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-
wheelbarrow.html?cid=6a00e0099229e8883301630458494f970d#comment-6a00e0099229e8883301630458494f970d)

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coldcode
Fascinating look at technology history. People in the past may not have had
modern materials or design but they were still really smart about how to make
things work.

