The rickshaw was (possibly) invented by a Westerner

The rickshaw was invented in 1868 by John Goble, an American missionary living in Tokyo.

The source is Frank Dikötter, Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China, which is also a good book.  Wikipedia offers a more complex story about the possible inventors, with some candidates for the inventor being Japanese.  In any case, I had thought of it as a more ancient device than it turns out to be.