Wansworth
Well-Known Member
Centuries old use of water
Water based technology
- Thread starter Wansworth
- Start date
Wansworth
Well-Known Member
mjcoon
Well-Known Member
When you've got a cloth cap, what would you want a hard hat for?
Wansworth
Well-Known Member
Yes cloth caps have protected the workingman seemingly for ever!
2Tizwoz
Well-Known Member
Leather gloves have been worn from at least early Egyptian times.
Wansworth
Well-Known Member
Handy with all that stone to be manhandled
RunAgroundHard
Well-Known Member
There is a paper making place in Amalfi, Italy, entirely water powered. There was some electric conversion but the paper making process from cloth was superseded. The machinery could have been junked but eventually it got saved and is now a working museum. The water wheels turned shafts where large pegs in the shaft lifted a series of huge beams with a hammers on the end that dropped and pounded the cloth to pulp.
It was such a simple but fascinating process.
Museo della Carta
The OPs video reminds me of the Dutch saw that revolutionised shipbuilding in Holland, at the start of their “Golden Age”, wind powered. https://www.google.com/search?q=Cor...2ahUKEwjjv5L7oaWSAxVfdUEAHUuWGpQQgK4QegQIARAC Invented the mechanism that inched the wood into the reciprocating saw blade.
Edit
Name corrected and wind powered not water.
It was such a simple but fascinating process.
Museo della Carta
The OPs video reminds me of the Dutch saw that revolutionised shipbuilding in Holland, at the start of their “Golden Age”, wind powered. https://www.google.com/search?q=Cor...2ahUKEwjjv5L7oaWSAxVfdUEAHUuWGpQQgK4QegQIARAC Invented the mechanism that inched the wood into the reciprocating saw blade.
Edit
Name corrected and wind powered not water.
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Wansworth
Well-Known Member
In the naval museum in Madrid they have a model of a tidal mill powering something like Ten saw blades and thereis a tidal mill here in Muros that powers a mill that I have forgotten what,still it was restored recently
Wansworth
Well-Known Member
mjcoon
Well-Known Member
Which reminds me that I got drawn into the Tally Ho project with the ship saw reconstruction: Restoring a HUGE vintage Ship Saw _ Bandsaw
Leslie frank
Well-Known Member
There used to be a tide mill grinding flour at the top of Southampton water.... I am going to say Ealing but that could be wrong . Fab place by a nice pub. Wonder if it's still going. The mud there was very gloopy if you went in your dinghy
Leslie frank
Well-Known Member
Correction... Eling tide mill... reopens this spring
Blue Seas
Well-Known Member
We live in an ex-Water Mill - about 250 year sold. It is unrestored but the mill ponds, races, sluices and machinery are still there in sufficient quantities to work out what was what (the machinery is roughly the same size as the sawmill in the video).
The mill building (now our living room) is about 40 feet high to allow the water sufficient drop and to accommodate the water wheel. The upper road (originally a farm track) allowed the horse and cart to pull up to the top level and offload the grain which would work its way down as it was processed - only to be collected by the same cart which had been taken down the track (now our drive) to the bottom.
All of the mills locally were owned and run by either royalty or, more often, the Bishops. The farmers had to rent the fields and tend / cut the crops, they would then be instructed to take them to a particular mill at a specified time / day. Any crop losses were shouldered by the farmer even though it was the Bishop's grain being sown on the Bishop's land.
The grain price was determined by the Bishop after cutting and after milling and once land rents had been deducted.
Restoration is an ambition.
The mill building (now our living room) is about 40 feet high to allow the water sufficient drop and to accommodate the water wheel. The upper road (originally a farm track) allowed the horse and cart to pull up to the top level and offload the grain which would work its way down as it was processed - only to be collected by the same cart which had been taken down the track (now our drive) to the bottom.
All of the mills locally were owned and run by either royalty or, more often, the Bishops. The farmers had to rent the fields and tend / cut the crops, they would then be instructed to take them to a particular mill at a specified time / day. Any crop losses were shouldered by the farmer even though it was the Bishop's grain being sown on the Bishop's land.
The grain price was determined by the Bishop after cutting and after milling and once land rents had been deducted.
Restoration is an ambition.
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Wansworth
Well-Known Member
Thanks,interesting how the economy functioned!….Here in Galicia there are many small water ills,one hamlet we lived in over one winter there was a small water mill about the size of two garden sheds.Eachresident had a fixed time to use the mill to grind their grain,Cornor maize is still grown for personal use as feed for chickens and cooking……not far from where we live now is a water powered blacksmith shop were the water works a hammer and various belt driven gizmos……now a restaurant,still it’s maintained
mjcoon
Well-Known Member
Water-driven tenderising?
2Tizwoz
Well-Known Member
So much of our conservation area property was built before present day planning controls existed. Owning protected property has been made anightmare. The result is that it's not unknown for them to be destroyed by fire and development of the site can then take place. Building a new watermill would take a decade to acquire necessary approvals and be financially impossible.
AngusMcDoon
Well-Known Member
Neeves
Well-Known Member
Using cloth to make paper was common place before wood based paper pulp became the norm, hence part of the income of the 'rag and bone' man. I assume the bone went into the ceramic industry.
The fibres would all have been natural, flax and cotton. Even today, though volumes must be lower than, as recent as, 30 years ago cigarette paper is still made from hemp/flax. Some paper mills specialised in only making cigarette papers.
Jonathan
johnalison
Well-Known Member
I believe that rag paper was the best quality. My ancient 1911 Britannica is printed on beautiful thin rag paper.
LittleSister
Well-Known Member
I used to work in a paper mill!
Though not actually making paper, you understand.
The Mill was at Wookey Hole, near Wells in Somerset. There had been a number of paper mills in the wider area, and the one at the village at Wookey Hole (now famous for its caves) since at least 1610, harnessing the power of a stream flowing off the Mendip Hills behind it.
Over the years there had sometimes been problems from other mills downstream causing pollution yet further downstream because of the particular materials (rags and straw?) they were using for the type of paper they were making, and then Wookey Hole Mill began being adversely affected by pollution of its incoming stream being used for minerals washing upstream on the Mendips, precluding the higher quality papers it had been making. Legal action over that was eventually settled in the Wookey Hole Mill's favour. So it wasnt all rustic sweetness and light.
In the 19th century the Wookey Hole Mill business was thriving and a grand large building was erected by new owners at the front of the earlier higgledy-piggledy collection of buildings and sluices, with a huge undershot (IIRC) water-wheel on the side of it (earlier wheels may have been overshot). In the 20th century the business declined, eventually paper-making ceased and in the 1970s the Mill's land and building was sold to Madame Tussauds, who I think already owned the caves and tourist facilities next door.
Their intention was to incorporate the paper mill site into their tourist business, but the size and complexity of the jumble of buildings in various states of disrepair was a challenge. A survey of the existing buildings was undertaken, but among other things it was not able to definitively establish the paths of various subsidiary watercourses than ran under the buildings.
Thus it was that by the early 1980s the upper floors of the big frontage building housed Madame Tussaud's collection of traditional fairground machinery and artistry, but the ground floor was rented out to a company making absolutely state-of-the-art electronic wizardry, and it was there that I worked.
We were the prototypes and special models division of company building advanced data recorders that had been taken over by EMI. Strange to think now these data recorders were the size of wardrobes, and based around multi-track 2" tape recorders (the sort of thing you'd see in old film of computer centres). The company's regular models were built somewhere up near London, and our specialist division had previously been based in part of an EMI factory just down the road in Wells.
The specialist models we were building for the military (used in AWACS etc. (do I recall submarine communications?)), universities and NASA (the American space project, not the cheapie marine gadgetry company), would speed and slow the tape according to the amount of date coming in (down to half cassette speed 15/16ths inch per second, and repeatedly doubling in speed up to IIRC 120 inches per second), and remember and reproduce those various speeds for 'replay'. (There might be no, or negligible, incoming data for hours or days, then sudden rapid bursts of information.) The speeds and speed changes involved were extremely challenging in terms of tape handling (not just to avoiding breaking/stretching the tape, but the tape being lifted off the record/playback heads by air cushions/waves etc.), and the electronics not at all less tricky. The maximum data speeds involved would now be considered quaint, but at the time were considered phenomenal.
I was a contractor, and my job was quality control of the wiring of these. One of my biggest challenges was keeping track of the dozens, sometimes hundreds, of the revisions, and subsequent alterations and reversals of revisions, in the course of building each of these machines as the design and construction sought to achieve the previously impossible, and iron out all the adverse side effects one small change would often have on the functioning of some other related element. Our specialist customers were always looking to go one step further, our sales people were only too pleased to say we would do it (to be fair, that's how the company survived and flourished), and our engineers and others like myself, would then have the challenge of turning the ambitious concept into reality, and against the clock! We were working at the absolute frontier of what was technologically possible at the time, and doing things that had never been done before.
So it was all the more strange that we would be doing this in a rural area, in an historic building the other side of the wall from a huge waterwheel, and as I worked I could hear through the floor above my head (and can still remember to this day) the thump and chords of a fairground steam organ playing a famous march!
Though not actually making paper, you understand.
The Mill was at Wookey Hole, near Wells in Somerset. There had been a number of paper mills in the wider area, and the one at the village at Wookey Hole (now famous for its caves) since at least 1610, harnessing the power of a stream flowing off the Mendip Hills behind it.
Over the years there had sometimes been problems from other mills downstream causing pollution yet further downstream because of the particular materials (rags and straw?) they were using for the type of paper they were making, and then Wookey Hole Mill began being adversely affected by pollution of its incoming stream being used for minerals washing upstream on the Mendips, precluding the higher quality papers it had been making. Legal action over that was eventually settled in the Wookey Hole Mill's favour. So it wasnt all rustic sweetness and light.
In the 19th century the Wookey Hole Mill business was thriving and a grand large building was erected by new owners at the front of the earlier higgledy-piggledy collection of buildings and sluices, with a huge undershot (IIRC) water-wheel on the side of it (earlier wheels may have been overshot). In the 20th century the business declined, eventually paper-making ceased and in the 1970s the Mill's land and building was sold to Madame Tussauds, who I think already owned the caves and tourist facilities next door.
Their intention was to incorporate the paper mill site into their tourist business, but the size and complexity of the jumble of buildings in various states of disrepair was a challenge. A survey of the existing buildings was undertaken, but among other things it was not able to definitively establish the paths of various subsidiary watercourses than ran under the buildings.
Thus it was that by the early 1980s the upper floors of the big frontage building housed Madame Tussaud's collection of traditional fairground machinery and artistry, but the ground floor was rented out to a company making absolutely state-of-the-art electronic wizardry, and it was there that I worked.
We were the prototypes and special models division of company building advanced data recorders that had been taken over by EMI. Strange to think now these data recorders were the size of wardrobes, and based around multi-track 2" tape recorders (the sort of thing you'd see in old film of computer centres). The company's regular models were built somewhere up near London, and our specialist division had previously been based in part of an EMI factory just down the road in Wells.
The specialist models we were building for the military (used in AWACS etc. (do I recall submarine communications?)), universities and NASA (the American space project, not the cheapie marine gadgetry company), would speed and slow the tape according to the amount of date coming in (down to half cassette speed 15/16ths inch per second, and repeatedly doubling in speed up to IIRC 120 inches per second), and remember and reproduce those various speeds for 'replay'. (There might be no, or negligible, incoming data for hours or days, then sudden rapid bursts of information.) The speeds and speed changes involved were extremely challenging in terms of tape handling (not just to avoiding breaking/stretching the tape, but the tape being lifted off the record/playback heads by air cushions/waves etc.), and the electronics not at all less tricky. The maximum data speeds involved would now be considered quaint, but at the time were considered phenomenal.
I was a contractor, and my job was quality control of the wiring of these. One of my biggest challenges was keeping track of the dozens, sometimes hundreds, of the revisions, and subsequent alterations and reversals of revisions, in the course of building each of these machines as the design and construction sought to achieve the previously impossible, and iron out all the adverse side effects one small change would often have on the functioning of some other related element. Our specialist customers were always looking to go one step further, our sales people were only too pleased to say we would do it (to be fair, that's how the company survived and flourished), and our engineers and others like myself, would then have the challenge of turning the ambitious concept into reality, and against the clock! We were working at the absolute frontier of what was technologically possible at the time, and doing things that had never been done before.
So it was all the more strange that we would be doing this in a rural area, in an historic building the other side of the wall from a huge waterwheel, and as I worked I could hear through the floor above my head (and can still remember to this day) the thump and chords of a fairground steam organ playing a famous march!
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