Improved windmill and watermill designs

Despite the fact that windmills and watermills convert an essentially free resource of moving air or water into usable power, the standard designs suffer from the problem that if the wind stops or the river flow reduces they are unable to work.

There are however a number of improved designs of mills available that do not suffer from this problem.

M C Escher (1898-1972)

This ingenious design arranges things so that the water that drives the waterwheel then flows back along the watercourse, and over the wheel once again. With no reliance on an external water supply, this means the water will never run out, and will make it possible to build watermills in locations where they were once impractical, due to there being no rivers. (Indeed Escher's original design appears to show the mill built high up the hillside, where there is unlikely to be a river flowing down from above). Some of the details shown in this design are unclear - I have not been able to determine what the devices on the tops of the towers are for, though there is some suggestion that these are there to disguise mobile phone masts.

Robert Fludd (1574-1637)

Robert Fludd also worked to improve the design of watermills, by recirculating the water back to the top of the device using an Archimedean screw. This is a much more compact design than Escher's, and thus can be entirely self contained within quite a small building.

[Update: Böckler's Theatre of New Machines from the late 17th century improved on Fludd's design even more. There are other similar designs shown in this collection of archimedes screw engravings].

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519)

Leonardo Da Vinci also sketched out a design combining a waterwheel and an Archimedes screw. The objective here appears simply to be that of raising water - an unusual slip up for Leonardo here in not taking that extra step so artfully added by Fludd of actually adding a set of mill stones to get even more work out of the design. This probably stems from Leonardo's emphasis on the theoretical, leaving others to fill in more of the practical bits of his designs. (I bet it was that Mona Lisa woman who distracted him from completing the design).

Francisco di Georgio

Francisco di Georgio also designed a recirculating watermill, this time using some form of bucketed arrangement to raise the water. This design initially looks to be quite compact, but on second glance it appears that there were problems with it - either the waterwheel and buckets are huge, or if they are drawn normal size then it is only capable of driving very tiny millstones. That's the problem with Medieval inventors - they simply didn't know how to draw properly dimensioned drawings.

Mark Anthony Zimara (1460-1523)

Zimara was a designer who turned his attention to wind rather than water mills. His self-blowing windmill uses the power generated from the windmill to work a set of bellows, which thus blows the windmill sails round. Unfortunately I've not been able to locate an illustration of his design, but this is just so obvious that I'm sure you can sketch yourself out one on the back of the nearest envelope. If you need a hint, perhaps you can see if your local library has a copy of his book called "Directions for constructing a Perpetual Motion Machine without the Use of Water or a Weight".

I know of no examples of surviving mills built to any of the plans on this page. If any reader knows of such a survivor, or indeed manages to construct a modern mill based on these designs then please let me know.

Last updated 1st April 2003