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76-576: Skotfoss Bruk was a paper mill located in Skotfoss , Skien , Norway . The mill was part of the Union Co. , founded in 1890. It closed production on 31 December 1986. The first electric industrial railway in Norway opened in 1892 at Skotfoss Bruk. 59°12′34″N 9°31′34″E  /  59.2094°N 9.5262°E  / 59.2094; 9.5262 This Norwegian corporation or company article

152-455: A forge , fulling stocks in a fulling mill and so on. However, in corn mills rotation about a vertical axis was required to drive its stones. The horizontal rotation was converted into the vertical rotation by means of gearing, which also enabled the runner stones to turn faster than the waterwheel. The usual arrangement in British and American corn mills has been for the waterwheel to turn

228-515: A "mill", without further specifying its exact power source, has increased the difficulty of identifying the particularly efficient and historically important water-powered type. The use of human and animal powered mills was known to Muslim and Chinese papermakers . However, evidence for water-powered paper mills is elusive among both prior to the 11th century. The general absence of the use of water-powered paper mills in Muslim papermaking prior to

304-437: A dam on the river above the mill and a more elaborate millpond, sluice gate, mill race and spillway or tailrace. An inherent problem in the overshot mill is that it reverses the rotation of the wheel. If a miller wishes to convert a breastshot mill to an overshot wheel all the machinery in the mill has to be rebuilt to take account of the change in rotation. An alternative solution was the pitchback or backshot wheel. A launder

380-745: A day. By 610 or 670 AD, the watermill was introduced to Japan via Korean Peninsula . It also became known in Tibet by at least 641 AD. According to Greek historical tradition, India received water-mills from the Roman Empire in the early 4th century AD when a certain Metrodoros introduced "water-mills and baths, unknown among them [the Brahmans] till then". Engineers under the Caliphates adopted watermill technology from former provinces of

456-452: A horizontal shaft on which is also mounted a large pit wheel . This meshes with the wallower , mounted on a vertical shaft, which turns the (larger) great spur wheel (mounted on the same shaft). This large face wheel , set with pegs, in turn, turned a smaller wheel (such as a lantern gear ) known as a stone nut, which was attached to the shaft that drove the runner stone. The number of runner stones that could be turned depended directly upon

532-427: A horizontal water wheel on a vertical axle, and the other with a vertical wheel on a horizontal axle. The oldest of these were horizontal mills in which the force of the water, striking a simple paddle wheel set horizontally in line with the flow turned a runner stone balanced on the rynd which is atop a shaft leading directly up from the wheel. The bedstone does not turn. The problem with this type of mill arose from

608-608: A mostly rural work process, than the ancient urban-centered literary class had been. By Carolingian times, references to watermills had become "innumerable" in Frankish records. The Domesday Book , compiled in 1086, records 5,624 watermills in England alone. Later research estimates a less conservative number of 6,082 that should be considered a minimum as the northern reaches of England were never properly recorded. In 1300, this number had risen to between 10,000 and 15,000. By

684-475: A reference in al-Biruni in the 11th century to stones "fixed to axles across running water, as in Samarkand with the pounding of flax for paper," a possible exception to the rule. Hill finds the notice "too brief to enable us to say with certainty" that this was a water-powered triphammer. Thomas Glick warily concludes that "it is assumed but not proved" that Islamic Xàtiva had hydraulic papermills, noting that

760-463: A shaft with a horizontal axis to one with a vertical axis. Although to date only a few dozen Roman mills are archaeologically traced, the widespread use of aqueducts in the period suggests that many remain to be discovered. Recent excavations in Roman London, for example, have uncovered what appears to be a tide mill together with a possible sequence of mills worked by an aqueduct running along

836-412: A sheet of paper that can be used in diverse ways. Modern paper machines can be 150 metres (500 ft) in length, produce a sheet 10 metres (400 in) wide, and operate at speeds of more than 97 kilometres per hour (60 mph). The two main suppliers of paper machines are Metso and Voith . It has also become universal to talk of paper "mills" (even of 400 such mills at Fez !), relating these to

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912-420: A single waterwheel driving more than one set of stones was drawn by Henry Beighton in 1723 and published in 1744 by J. T. Desaguliers . The overshot wheel was a later innovation in waterwheels and was around two and a half times more efficient than the undershot. The undershot wheel, in which the main water wheel is simply set into the flow of the mill race, suffers from an inherent inefficiency stemming from

988-477: A source of water, used to provide additional power to watermills and water-raising machines. Fulling mills, and steel mills may have spread from Al-Andalus to Christian Spain in the 12th century. Industrial watermills were also employed in large factory complexes built in al-Andalus between the 11th and 13th centuries. The engineers of the Islamic world used several solutions to achieve the maximum output from

1064-408: A vertical-waterwheel via a gear mechanism, and the other equipped with a horizontal-waterwheel without such a mechanism. The former type can be further divided, depending on where the water hits the wheel paddles, into undershot, overshot, breastshot and reverse shot waterwheel mills. The Greeks invented the two main components of watermills, the waterwheel and toothed gearing, and used, along with

1140-581: A water-powered grain-mill to have existed near the palace of king Mithradates VI Eupator at Cabira , Asia Minor , before 71 BC. The Roman engineer Vitruvius has the first technical description of a watermill, dated to 40/10 BC; the device is fitted with an undershot wheel and power is transmitted via a gearing mechanism . He also seems to indicate the existence of water-powered kneading machines. The Greek epigrammatist Antipater of Thessalonica tells of an advanced overshot wheel mill around 20 BC/10 AD. He praised for its use in grinding grain and

1216-419: A water-powered paper mill. This is seen by Leor Halevi as evidence of Samarkand first harnessing waterpower in the production of paper, but notes that it is not known if waterpower was applied to papermaking elsewhere across the Islamic world at the time. Robert I. Burns remains sceptical, given the isolated occurrence of the reference and the prevalence of manual labour in Islamic papermaking elsewhere prior to

1292-499: A watermill. One solution was to mount them to piers of bridges to take advantage of the increased flow. Another solution was the ship mill, a type of watermill powered by water wheels mounted on the sides of ships moored in midstream . This technique was employed along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in 10th-century Iraq , where large ship mills made of teak and iron could produce 10 tons of flour from corn every day for

1368-431: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Paper mill Historical investigations into the origin of the paper mill are complicated by differing definitions and loose terminology from modern authors: Many modern scholars use the term to refer indiscriminately to all kinds of mills , whether powered by humans, by animals or by water . Their propensity to refer to any ancient paper manufacturing center as

1444-627: Is also completely without substance. Clear evidence of a water-powered paper mill dates to 1282 in the Iberian Crown of Aragon . A decree by the Christian king Peter III addresses the establishment of a royal " molendinum ", a proper hydraulic mill, in the paper manufacturing center of Xàtiva . This early hydraulic paper mill was operated by Muslims in the Moorish quarter of Xàtiva, though it appears to have been resented by sections of

1520-653: Is by an essential trait about their location: tide mills use the movement of the tide; ship mills are water mills onboard (and constituting) a ship. Watermills impact the river dynamics of the watercourses where they are installed. During the time watermills operate channels tend to sedimentate , particularly backwater . Also in the backwater area, inundation events and sedimentation of adjacent floodplains increase. Over time however these effects are cancelled by river banks becoming higher. Where mills have been removed, river incision increases and channels deepen. There are two basic types of watermills, one powered by

1596-420: Is by wheel orientation (vertical or horizontal), one powered by a vertical waterwheel through a gear mechanism, and the other equipped with a horizontal waterwheel without such a mechanism. The former type can be further subdivided, depending on where the water hits the wheel paddles, into undershot, overshot, breastshot and pitchback (backshot or reverse shot) waterwheel mills. Another way to classify water mills

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1672-803: Is carried out in the UK at Daniels Mill , Little Salkeld Mill and Redbournbury Mill . This was boosted to overcome flour shortages during the Covid pandemic. Some old mills are being upgraded with modern hydropower technology, such as those worked on by the South Somerset Hydropower Group in the UK. In some developing countries, watermills are still widely used for processing grain. For example, there are thought to be 25,000 operating in Nepal, and 200,000 in India. Many of these are still of

1748-666: Is no papermaking in these documents, much less hydraulic mills. Watermill#Tide mills A watermill or water mill is a mill that uses hydropower . It is a structure that uses a water wheel or water turbine to drive a mechanical process such as milling (grinding) , rolling , or hammering . Such processes are needed in the production of many material goods, including flour , lumber , paper , textiles , and many metal products. These watermills may comprise gristmills , sawmills , paper mills , textile mills , hammermills , trip hammering mills, rolling mills , and wire drawing mills. One major way to classify watermills

1824-428: Is the tide mill . This mill might be of any kind, undershot, overshot or horizontal but it does not employ a river for its power source. Instead a mole or causeway is built across the mouth of a small bay. At low tide, gates in the mole are opened allowing the bay to fill with the incoming tide. At high tide the gates are closed, trapping the water inside. At a certain point a sluice gate in the mole can be opened allowing

1900-502: Is the preeminent role of France in the introduction of new innovative uses of waterpower. However, he has drawn attention to the dearth of studies of the subject in several other countries. The waterwheel was found in China from 30 AD onwards, when it was used to power trip hammers , the bellows in smelting iron , and in one case, to mechanically rotate an armillary sphere for astronomical observation (see Zhang Heng ). Although

1976-474: The Aurelian walls in the late 3rd century. A breastshot wheel mill dating to the late 2nd century AD was excavated at Les Martres-de-Veyre , France. The 3rd century AD Hierapolis water-powered stone sawmill is the earliest known machine to incorporate the mechanism of a crank and connecting rod . Further sawmills, also powered by crank and connecting rod mechanisms, are archaeologically attested for

2052-534: The Byzantine Empire , having been applied for centuries in those provinces prior to the Muslim conquests , including modern-day Syria , Jordan , Israel , Algeria , Tunisia , Morocco , and Spain (see List of ancient watermills ). The industrial uses of watermills in the Islamic world date back to the 7th century, while horizontal-wheeled and vertical-wheeled watermills were both in widespread use by

2128-473: The Roman Empire . So-called 'Greek Mills' used water wheels with a horizontal wheel (and vertical shaft). A "Roman Mill" features a vertical wheel (on a horizontal shaft). Greek style mills are the older and simpler of the two designs, but only operate well with high water velocities and with small diameter millstones. Roman style mills are more complicated as they require gears to transmit the power from

2204-597: The Romans , undershot, overshot and breastshot waterwheel mills. The earliest evidence of a water-driven wheel appears in the technical treatises Pneumatica and Parasceuastica of the Greek engineer Philo of Byzantium (ca. 280−220 BC). The British historian of technology M.J.T. Lewis has shown that those portions of Philo of Byzantium's mechanical treatise which describe water wheels and which have been previously regarded as later Arabic interpolations, actually date back to

2280-548: The Sui dynasty (581–618 AD) was said to operate hundreds of them by the beginning of the 6th century. A source written in 612 AD mentions Buddhist monks arguing over the revenues gained from watermills. The Tang dynasty (618–907 AD) 'Ordinances of the Department of Waterways' written in 737 AD stated that watermills should not interrupt riverine transport and in some cases were restricted to use in certain seasons of

2356-512: The ancient world ". It featured 16 overshot waterwheels to power an equal number of flour mills. The capacity of the mills has been estimated at 4.5 tons of flour per day, sufficient to supply enough bread for the 12,500 inhabitants occupying the town of Arelate at that time. A similar mill complex existed on the Janiculum hill, whose supply of flour for Rome 's population was judged by emperor Aurelian important enough to be included in

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2432-632: The granary in Baghdad . More than 300 watermills were at work in Iran till 1960. Now only a few are still working. One of the famous ones is the water mill of Askzar and the water mill of the Yazd city, still producing flour. Typically, water is diverted from a river or impoundment or mill pond to a turbine or water wheel, along a channel or pipe (variously known as a flume , head race, mill race , leat , leet, lade (Scots) or penstock ). The force of

2508-556: The 11th century is suggested by the habit of Muslim authors at the time to call a production center not a "mill", but a "paper manufactory". Scholars have identified paper mills in Abbasid -era Baghdad in 794–795. The evidence that waterpower was applied to papermaking at this time is a matter of scholarly debate. In the Moroccan city of Fez , Ibn Battuta speaks of "400 mill stones for paper". Since Ibn Battuta does not mention

2584-408: The 13th century. Hill notes that paper mills appear in early Christian Catalan documentation from the 1150s, which may imply Islamic origins, but that hard evidence is lacking. Burns, however, has dismissed the case for early Catalan water-powered paper mills, after re-examination of the evidence. The identification of early hydraulic stamping mills in medieval documents from Fabriano , Italy,

2660-547: The 6th century AD water-powered stone sawmills at Gerasa and Ephesus . Literary references to water-powered marble saws in what is now Germany can be found in Ausonius 4th century AD poem Mosella . They also seem to be indicated about the same time by the Christian saint Gregory of Nyssa from Anatolia , demonstrating a diversified use of water-power in many parts of the Roman Empire . The earliest turbine mill

2736-614: The 9th century. A variety of industrial watermills were used in the Islamic world, including gristmills , hullers , sawmills , ship mills, stamp mills , steel mills , sugar mills , and tide mills . By the 11th century, every province throughout the Islamic world had these industrial watermills in operation, from al-Andalus and North Africa to the Middle East and Central Asia . Muslim and Middle Eastern Christian engineers also used crankshafts and water turbines , gears in watermills and water-raising machines , and dams as

2812-461: The British chemist and sinologist Joseph Needham speculates that the water-powered millstone could have existed in Han China by the 1st century AD, there is no sufficient literary evidence for it until the 5th century AD. In 488 AD, the mathematician and engineer Zu Chongzhi had a watermill erected which was inspected by Emperor Wu of Southern Qi (r. 482–493 AD). The engineer Yang Su of

2888-561: The Chinese and Arabs used only human and animal force. Gimpel goes on to say: "This is convincing evidence of how technologically minded the Europeans of that era were. Paper had traveled nearly halfway around the world, but no culture or civilization on its route had tried to mechanize its manufacture."' Indeed, Muslim authors in general call any "paper manufactory" a wiraqah - not a "mill" ( tahun ) Al-Hassan and Hill also use as evidence

2964-539: The Greek 3rd century BC original. The sakia gear is, already fully developed, for the first time attested in a 2nd-century BC Hellenistic wall painting in Ptolemaic Egypt . Lewis assigns the date of the invention of the horizontal-wheeled mill to the Greek colony of Byzantium in the first half of the 3rd century BC, and that of the vertical-wheeled mill to Ptolemaic Alexandria around 240 BC. The Greek geographer Strabo reports in his Geography

3040-775: The Museos Municipales de Historia in the Instituto Municipal de Historia at Barcelona, has popularized a version of that thesis, in which Christian paper mills multiplied marvelously along the Catalan rivers "from Tarragona to the Pyrenees" from 1113 to 1244. His many articles and two books, valuable for such topics as fiber analysis in medieval paper, continue to spread this untenable and indeed bizarre thesis. As Josep Madurell i Marimon shows in detail, these were all in fact cloth fulling mills; textiles were then

3116-399: The basic mechanized industry of the Christian west. Fabriano's claim rests on two charters - a gift of August 1276, and a sale of November 1278, to the new Benedictine congregation of Silvestrine monks at Montefano. In each, a woman recluse-hermit gives to the monastery her enclosure or "prison" - Latin carcer ; misread by Fabriano partisans as a form of Italian cartiera or paper mill! There

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3192-416: The buckets fill, the weight of the water starts to turn the wheel. The water spills out of the bucket on the down side into a spillway leading back to river. Since the wheel itself is set above the spillway, the water never impedes the speed of the wheel. The impulse of the water on the wheel is also harnessed in addition to the weight of the water once in the buckets. Overshot wheels require the construction of

3268-454: The date of the earliest tide mills, all of which were discovered on the Irish coast: A 6th century vertical-wheeled tide mill was located at Killoteran near Waterford . A twin flume horizontal-wheeled tide mill dating to c. 630 was excavated on Little Island . Alongside it, another tide mill was found which was powered by a vertical undershot wheel. The Nendrum Monastery mill from 787

3344-455: The distributors of paper products. It was said to be the only business of its kind in the world, and was started in 1931 by Tompkins. It prospered in spite of the business depression. " Log drives " were conducted on local rivers to send the logs to the mills. By the late 20th and early 21st-century, paper mills began to close, and the log drives became a dying craft. Due to the addition of new machinery, many millworkers were laid off and many of

3420-600: The draining water to drive a mill wheel or wheels. This is particularly effective in places where the tidal differential is very great, such as the Bay of Fundy in Canada where the tides can rise fifty feet, or the now derelict village of Tide Mills, East Sussex . The last two examples in the United Kingdom which are restored to working conditions can be visited at Eling , Hampshire and at Woodbridge , Suffolk . Run of

3496-458: The early 7th century, watermills were also well established in Ireland . A century later they began to spread across the former Roman Rhine and Danube frontier into the other parts of Germany . Ship mills and tide mills , both of which yet unattested for the ancient period, were introduced in the 6th century. In recent years, a number of new archaeological finds has consecutively pushed back

3572-492: The earth, we taste again the golden age . The Roman encyclopedist Pliny mentions in his Naturalis Historia of around 70 AD water-powered trip hammers operating in the greater part of Italy. There is evidence of a fulling mill in 73/74 AD in Antioch , Roman Syria . The 2nd century AD multiple mill complex of Barbegal in southern France has been described as "the greatest known concentration of mechanical power in

3648-421: The fact that the wheel itself, entering the water behind the main thrust of the flow driving the wheel, followed by the lift of the wheel out of the water ahead of the main thrust, actually impedes its own operation. The overshot wheel solves this problem by bringing the water flow to the top of the wheel. The water fills buckets built into the wheel, rather than the simple paddle wheel design of undershot wheels. As

3724-399: The historic paper mills closed. Paper mills can be fully integrated mills or nonintegrated mills. Integrated mills consist of a pulp mill and a paper mill on the same site. Such mills receive logs or wood chips and produce paper. The modern paper mill uses large amounts of energy , water , and wood pulp in an efficient and complex series of processes, and control technology to produce

3800-562: The hydraulic wonders of Islamic society in the east and west. All our evidence points to non-hydraulic hand production, however, at springs away from rivers which it could pollute. European papermaking differed from its precursors in the mechanization of the process and in the application of water power. Jean Gimpel , in The Medieval Machine (the English translation of La Revolution Industrielle du Moyen Age ), points out that

3876-530: The lack of gearing; the speed of the water directly set the maximum speed of the runner stone which, in turn, set the rate of milling. Most watermills in Britain and the United States of America had a vertical waterwheel, one of four kinds: undershot, breast-shot, overshot and pitchback wheels. This vertical produced rotary motion around a horizontal axis, which could be used (with cams) to lift hammers in

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3952-522: The local Muslim papermakering community; the document guarantees them the right to continue the way of traditional papermaking by beating the pulp manually and grants them the right to be exempted from work in the new mill. The first permanent paper mill north of the Alps was established in Nuremberg by Ulman Stromer in 1390; it is later depicted in the lavishly illustrated Nuremberg Chronicle . From

4028-477: The mid-14th century onwards, European paper milling underwent a rapid improvement of many work processes. The size of a paper mill prior to the use of industrial machines was described by counting the number of vats it had. Thus, a "one vat" paper mill had only one vatman, one coucher, and other laborers. The first reference to a paper mill in England was in a book printed by Wynken de Worde c.  1495 ;

4104-503: The mill, near Hertford, belonged to John Tate. An early attempt at a machine to mechanise the process was patented in 1799 by the Frenchman Nicholas Louis Robert; it was not deemed a success. In 1801, however, the drawings were brought to England by John Gamble and passed on to brothers Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier, who financed the engineer Bryan Donkin to construct the machine. Their first successful machine

4180-610: The most thorough account of Muslim papermaking at the time, the one by the Zirid Sultan Al-Muizz ibn Badis , describes the art purely in terms of a handcraft. Donald Hill has identified a possible reference to a water-powered paper mill in Samarkand , in the 11th-century work of the Persian scholar Abu Rayhan Biruni , but concludes that the passage is "too brief to enable us to say with certainty" that it refers to

4256-468: The mould rotates, the water is sucked through the wire, leaving a thin layer of fibres deposited on the cylinder. These cylinder-mould machines, as they are named, were strong competition for Fourdrinier machine makers. They were the type of machine first used by the North American paper industry. It is estimated that by 1850 UK paper production had reached 100,000 tons. Later developments increased

4332-428: The paper markets. By the end of the century there were less than 300 UK paper mills, employing 35,000 people and producing 650,000 tons of paper per year. By the early 20th century, paper mills sprang up around New England and the rest of the world, due to the high demand for paper. The United States, with its infrastructure and mill towns , was the largest producer in the world. Chief among these in paper production

4408-483: The pertinent Arabic description was "a press." Since the "oldest" Catalan paper is physically the same as Islamic Xàtiva's, he notes, their techniques "can be presumed to have been identical" - reasonable enough for Catalan paper before 1280. My recent conversations with Glick indicate that he now inclines to non-hydraulic Andalusi papermaking. Currently Oriol Valls i Subin't, director of the History of Paper department of

4484-627: The power available for British grain milling. By the early 20th century, availability of cheap electrical energy made the watermill obsolete in developed countries although some smaller rural mills continued to operate commercially later throughout the century. A few historic mills such as the Water Mill , Newlin Mill and Yates Mill in the US and The Darley Mill Centre in the UK still operate for demonstration purposes. Small-scale commercial production

4560-608: The power from a toothed annular ring that is mounted near the outer edge of the wheel. This drives the machinery using a spur gear mounted on a shaft rather than taking power from the central axle . However, the basic mode of operation remains the same; gravity drives machinery through the motion of flowing water . Toward the end of the 19th century, the invention of the Pelton wheel encouraged some mill owners to replace over- and undershot wheels with Pelton wheel turbines driven through penstocks . A different type of watermill

4636-675: The production of paper; one such was the Brown Company in Berlin, New Hampshire run by William Wentworth Brown. During the year 1907, the Brown Company cut between 30 and 40 million acres of woodlands on their property, which extended from La Tuque , Quebec , Canada to West Palm , Florida . In the 1920s, Nancy Baker Tompkins represented large paper manufacturing companies, like Hammermill Paper Company, Honolulu Paper Company and Appleton Coated Paper Company to promote sales to

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4712-465: The reduction of human labour: Hold back your hand from the mill, you grinding girls; even if the cockcrow heralds the dawn, sleep on. For Demeter has imposed the labours of your hands on the nymphs , who leaping down upon the topmost part of the wheel, rotate its axle; with encircling cogs, it turns the hollow weight of the Nisyrian millstones . If we learn to feast toil-free on the fruits of

4788-448: The river schemes do not divert water at all and usually involve undershot wheels the mills are mostly on the banks of sizeable rivers or fast flowing streams. Other watermills were set beneath large bridges where the flow of water between the stanchions was faster. At one point London bridge had so many water wheels beneath it that bargemen complained that passage through the bridge was impaired. In 1870 watermills still produced 2/3 of

4864-633: The side of the River Fleet . In 537 AD, ship mills were ingeniously used by the East Roman general Belisarius , when the besieging Goths cut off the water supply for those mills. These floating mills had a wheel that was attached to a boat moored in a fast flowing river. The surviving evidence for watermills sharply increases with the emergence of documentary genres such as monastic charters , Christian hagiography and Germanic legal codes . These were more inclined to address watermilling,

4940-401: The size and capacity of machines as well as seeking high volume alternative pulp sources from which paper could be reliably produced. Many of the earlier mills were small and had been located in rural areas. The movement was to larger mills in, or near, urban areas closer to their suppliers of the raw materials. They were often situated near a port where the raw material was brought in by ship and

5016-756: The statement by Robert Forbes in his multivolume Studies in Ancient Technology that "in the tenth century [AD] floating mills were found on the Tigris near Baghdad." Though such captive mills were known to the Romans and were used in 12th-century France, Forbes offers no citation or evidence for this unlikely application to very early papermaking. The most erudite authority on the topography of medieval Baghdad, George Makdisi, writes me that he has no recollection of such floating papermills or any papermills, which "I think I would have remembered." Donald Hill has found

5092-406: The supply of water available. As waterwheel technology improved mills became more efficient, and by the 19th century, it was common for the great spur wheel to drive several stone nuts, so that a single water wheel could drive as many as four stones. Each step in the process increased the gear ratio which increased the maximum speed of the runner stone. Adjusting the sluice gate and thus the flow of

5168-548: The use of water-power and such a number of water-mills would be grotesquely high, the passage is generally taken to refer to human or animal force . An exhaustive survey of milling in Al-Andalus did not uncover water-powered paper mills, nor do the Spanish books of property distribution ( Repartimientos ) after the Christian reconquest refer to any. Arabic texts never use the term mill in connection with papermaking, and

5244-486: The water past the main wheel allowed the miller to compensate for seasonal variations in the water supply. Finer speed adjustment was made during the milling process by tentering , that is, adjusting the gap between the stones according to the water flow, the type of grain being milled, and the grade of flour required. In many mills (including the earliest) the great spur wheel turned only one stone, but there might be several mills under one roof. The earliest illustration of

5320-596: The water's movement drives the blades of a wheel or turbine, which in turn rotates an axle that drives the mill's other machinery. Water leaving the wheel or turbine is drained through a tail race, but this channel may also be the head race of yet another wheel, turbine or mill. The passage of water is controlled by sluice gates that allow maintenance and some measure of flood control; large mill complexes may have dozens of sluices controlling complicated interconnected races that feed multiple buildings and industrial processes. Watermills can be divided into two kinds, one with

5396-456: The year. From other Tang-era sources of the 8th century, it is known that these ordinances were taken very seriously, as the government demolished many watermills owned by great families, merchants, and Buddhist abbeys that failed to acknowledge ordinances or meet government regulations. A eunuch serving Emperor Xuanzong of Tang (r. 712–756 AD) owned a watermill by 748 AD which employed five waterwheels that ground 300 bushels of wheat

5472-453: Was Holyoke, Massachusetts , which was the largest producer of paper in the world by 1885, and home to engineers D. H. & A. B. Tower who oversaw the largest firm of paper millwrights in the US during that decade, designing mills on five continents. However, as 20th century progressed this diaspora moved further north and west in the United States, with access to greater pulp supplies and labor. At this time, there were many world leaders of

5548-561: Was found in Chemtou and Testour , Roman North Africa , dating to the late 3rd or early 4th century AD. A possible water-powered furnace has been identified at Marseille , France. Mills were commonly used for grinding grain into flour (attested by Pliny the Elder ), but industrial uses as fulling and sawing marble were also applied. The Romans used both fixed and floating water wheels and introduced water power to other provinces of

5624-399: Was installed at Frogmore Mill , Hertfordshire , in 1803. In 1809 at Apsley Mill , John Dickinson patented and installed another kind of paper machine. Rather than pouring a dilute pulp suspension onto an endlessly revolving flat wire, this machine used a cylinder covered in wire as the mould. A cylindrical mould is partially submerged in the vat, containing a pulp suspension, and then, as

5700-436: Was placed at the end of the flume on the headrace, this turned the direction of the water without much loss of energy, and the direction of rotation was maintained. Daniels Mill near Bewdley , Worcestershire is an example of a flour mill that originally used a breastshot wheel, but was converted to use a pitchback wheel. Today it operates as a breastshot mill. Larger water wheels (usually overshot steel wheels) transmit

5776-637: Was situated on an island in Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland . Its millstones are 830 mm in diameter and the horizontal wheel is estimated to have developed 7 ⁄ 8 horsepower (650 W) at its peak. Remains of an earlier mill dated at 619 were also found at the site. In a 2005 survey the scholar Adam Lucas identified the following first appearances of various industrial mill types in Western Europe. Noticeable

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