The Pre-Industrial Source of Power: Water Power
Norman A.F. Smith explores the use through history of the water-mill and dams.
Just before the dawn of the Christian era there occur in a handful of classical writings the earliest references to the use of water-power to drive corn-mills. Only one, in Vitruvius's De Architectura of about 25 BC, is sufficiently detailed to disclose the configuration of the machine. It comprised, Vitruvius tells us, a vertical wheel of wood turned by a stream of water flowing underneath and striking repeatedly a sequence of radial blades. Through the medium of a right-angled geared drive the rotation of the water-wheel's axle operated the mill-stones. Vitruvius's description is lucid, unambiguous and adequate, in its fundamentals, to describe exactly the same machine as it was used 2,000 years later for precisely the same purpose.
In the ancient world a variety of machines were needed to lift water for irrigation. One of these devices utilised an animal walking in a circle to turn, by means of right-angled gears, a wheel of buckets. Evidently it was by reversing the action of this machine that antiquity conceived the Vitruvian mill.
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