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Brunette Girl Reveals Her Jeans And Shirt In The Wheelbarrow
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The first wheelbarrow in Europe appeared sometime between 1170 and 1250. Medieval wheelbarrows universally featured a wheel at or near the front (in contrast to their Chinese counterparts, which typically had a wheel in the center of the barrow), the arrangement now universally found on wheelbarrows.
Research on the early history of the wheelbarrow is made difficult by the marked absence of a common terminology. The English historian of science M.J.T. Lewis has identified in English and French sources four mentions of wheelbarrows between 1172 and 1222, three of them designated with a different term. According to the medieval art historian Andrea Matthies, the first archival reference to a wheelbarrow in medieval Europe is dated 1222, specifying the purchase of several wheelbarrows for the English king's works at Dover. The first depiction appears in an English manuscript, Matthew Paris's Vitae duorum Offarum, completed in 1250.
By the 13th century, the wheelbarrow proved useful in building construction, mining operations, and agriculture. However, going by surviving documents and illustrations the wheelbarrow remained a relative rarity until the 15th century. It also seemed to be limited to England, France, and the Low Countries. Eastward diffusion of the technology was uneven and not especially fast: the wheelbarrow was still unknown in Russia and its neighbors as late as the reign of Peter the Great. The conscript laborers who dug millions of cubic yards of earth to create the city of St. Petersburg--with its extensive system of canals and the levees and embankments required to keep the city dry--carried dirt either in handbaskets or the fronts of their long, tunic-like shirts. On the occasion of Peter's first visit to England, the young tsar and his traveling companions found a wheelbarrow in the garden of the house where they lodged; not knowing its purpose, they used it for drunken wheelbarrow races.
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