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The hydraulican-monks: Benedictines and Cistercians We have seen that the earliest Benedictine monasteries at the end of the 8th century already were employing a range of hydraulic techniques to support their activity. Much later, in the 12th century, Saint Bernard founds the abbey of Citeaux in Bourgogne, and with it the order of the Cistercians. […]

The use of wind energy (over and above the powering of sailboats) had begun on the Persian-Afghan plateau in the 7th century. It then spread to China from the 12th centu­ry as we have seen in the preceding chapter. At the beginning of this century, windmills began to see rapid development in Europe as well. […]

The notion of using tidal energy certainly came naturally to the people on the Atlantic coast, already familiar with both the tide and river mills. The appearances of tidal mills at several different locations would appear to have been essentially independent. We have already mentioned the Bassora mill, in Iraq, built in the 10th century. […]

The conquest of the waterways: inland water transport and mills The great technological phenomenon of the Middle Ages is the development of mills, perhaps a natural companion of the revival of interest in watercourses. Since the road network was in bad shape and the countryside was not safe, the development of com­merce in the 10th […]

The death throes of the aqueducts and the end of the Roman way of life With the fall of the Roman Empire, the Romano-Hellenistic urban lifestyle in the West begins to retreat rapidly. The roots of this lifestyle are found in the Cretan cities of the Bronze Age. The forums where citizens met to discuss […]

From the time of the first emperor there was a need for warships in support of military campaigns in the basins of the Yangtze and the Xi (near Canton). These fortified, and sometimes armored, ships were initially powered through oars manned by soldiers. But the specific needs of riverborne military operations led to a very […]

We have seen the first use of hydraulic energy in China under the Han Empire, at the beginning of the 1st century AD. The Chinese devices are quite complex from the very beginning, in contrast to the comparable but simpler devices developed at the same time in the Roman Empire. There, simple horizontal-axis mills are […]

According to tradition Tu Shih, the prefect of Nanyang, “loved the common people and wanted to lighten their work”. This is why he decided in 31 AD to use hydraulic ener­gy to power forge bellows, as we have seen earlier. Later in about 238 AD it is once again a man of Nanyang who spreads […]

Water lifting machines respond to a very basic need of civilization — that of raising water from a river, canal, or cistern for its distribution to agricultural or urban uses. The Near East had used the shaduf (Figure 2.4), a balance-beam device, for a very long time — but this device was not used in […]

The major city of Hangzhou, prominent in the account of Marco Polo as we have seen, is located at the head of an estuary that is nearly 100 km long. The land there is quite flat and thus exposed to the tidal surge and waves associated with strong storms. Moreover in this particular estuary there […]