Cart

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"Cart" may also mean cartridge or Center for Advanced Research and Technology.

Image:Australian cart.jpg Image:Horsecart with watermelons.jpg Image:Sculpturecart.JPG

A cart is a vehicle or device using two wheels and normally one horse, for transport. A dray is a heavy transport vehicle with four wheels and normally at least two horses.

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Types and history

References of cart have been as old as 2 millennium B.C. in Indian sacred book Rig Veda, referring man and women to be as equal as two wheels of cart.

Hand-carts pushed by humans have been used around the world. In the 19th century, for instance, some Mormons travelling across the plains of the USA between 1857 and 1865 used handcarts. Perhaps the most common example today is the shopping cart (British English: shopping trolley), which has also come to have a metaphorical meaning in relation to online purchases (here, British English uses the metaphor of the shopping basket). Shopping carts first made their appearance in Oklahoma City in 1937.

The golf cart, designed to carry golfers and their clubs around a golf course faster and with less effort than walking, is another well known modern type of cart – in this case, self-propelled.

A porter's trolley is a type of small, hand-propelled wheeled platform.

Larger carts may be drawn by animals, such as horses, mules, or oxen. They have been in continuous use since the invention of the wheel, in the 5th millennium BC. Carts may be named for the animal that pulls them, such as horsecarts or oxcarts. A dogcart, however, is usually a cart designed to carry hunting dogs: an open cart with two cross-seats back to back; the dogs could be penned between the rear-facing seat and the back end.

An animal-drawn cart can bear the archaic name of wain (from the Old English and German root-word for wagon), for example a haywain, and the builders of such vehicles became known as "cartwrights" or "wainwrights". These terms survive as surnames of families descended from those practising these trades; also note the surname "Carter".

Carts have many different shapes but the basic idea of transporting material (or maintaining a collection of materials in a portable fashion) remains. Carts usually have two or four wheels. Those with four wheels (drays or wagons) will often have a pivoting front axle that has a pole connected to the collars or yoke of the two guiding draught animals. The traces from the draught animals are connected to the pivoting axle and then, by chain, to the rear axle. Two-wheeled carts normally have shafts, one along each side of the draught animal that supports the forward-balanced load in the cart. The shafts are supported by a saddle on the horse. The draught traces attach to the axle of the vehicle. In all cases the traces are attached to a collar (on horses), to a yoke (on other heavy draught animals) or to a harness on dogs or other light animals. One-horse carts are common, on the other hand drays are pulled by many animals, as many as 8 or 10 depending on what is being hauled.

Traces are made from a range of materials depending on the load and frequency of use. Heavy draught traces are made from iron or steel chain. Lighter traces are often leather and sometimes hemp rope but plaited horse-hair and other, similar, decorative materials can be used.

The dray is often associated with the transport of barrels, particularly of beer.

The term "Go-Kart", which exists since 1959, also shortened as "Kart", an alternative spelling of "cart", refers to a small racing car with frame and two-stoke engine; the old term go-cart originally meant a sedan chair or an infant walker since the XVIIth century.

A soap-box cart (also known as a Billy Cart, Go-Cart, Trolley etc.) is a popular children's construction project on wheels, usually peddled, but also intended for a test race.

Carts were often used for judicial punishments, both to transport the condemned, a humiliation in itself (as in Ancient Rome the defeated leaders was often carried in the victorious general's triumph) and even, in England until its substitution by the whipping post under Elisabeth I, to tie the condemned to the cart-tail and administer him/her a public whipping.

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