It’s not known who first started using fish wheels, but they may have been invented in China. Fish
wheels have been used in the past in Japan, in France on the Garonne, and in Rome the Tiber. They were
first used in the United States in North Carolinian in 1829, but their major deployment was on the
Columbia River by the late 1870s where they became tremendously effective at landing upstream
migrating salmon. One single fish wheel near The Dalles, pulled 418,000 pounds of salmon out of the
river in 1906 alone, and it was just one of more than 75 fish wheels working the river that year.
~ Amusing Planet