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equipment which is to be powered outside the horse path. This form of
horizontal machine is often to be found as a portable machine which can be
taken round the farm to do various jobs.
To the vertical and horizontal machines should be added two forms of
animal-powered machines which are outside the above classification. In the
oblique treadmill the animal, usually a horse, is harnessed firmly between two
frames and stands on an obliquely-mounted belt which moves off from under
his feet. The upper end of the belt is on the same shaft as a pulley wheel so
that there is a considerable speeding up between the engine—often called a
paddle engine—and the machinery, which could be a circular saw or a
threshing drum. The other ‘oddity’ is the oblique treadwheel, which consists of
a fairly small-diameter circular tread plate which has treads fixed radially on its
upper face. The underside of the oblique treadwheel carries a gear wheel from
which the drive is taken, and which is used for small tasks like churning butter.
The ancient world
We have considerable knowledge of the use of animal-powered engines in
prehistoric and classical times, but no certainty of their form until the Roman
period. The use of the vertical treadwheel for hoisting purposes is shown in a
relief in the Lateran Museum. This shows a treadwheel with at least four
operatives inside. The windlass on the shaft of this treadwheel is lifting a stone
by means of two two-sheave pulleys in order to give a further 4:1 lift in
addition to the advantage of the treadwheel. Ropes pass from the treadwheel at
the bottom of a single boom to lift a stone on to the roof of a temple. While
this is not the only example, the quality of this relief shows how skilled the
Roman engineers were in being able to set up the treadwheel in a temporary
setting such as a building site.
The Romans were probably the originators of the hourglass animal-
powered corn-grinding mill. There are examples of this form of direct-drive
animalpowered mill in London, Pompeii, Capernaum in Israel, and Mayen in

the Eifel region of Germany, the best being the row of four set up in a bakery
in Pompeii; the example in the Museum of London, from a London site, is
similar. The fixed stone of the mill is a single stone, circular in plan and
finished in a long cone on a short cylindrical base. The runner stone, to use
the analogy of the ‘normal’ pair of millstones, consists of a large stone block
which is carved to form two connected shells in the form of an upright and an
inverted cone. This sits over the base and is cut to be a close fit. The middle of
the runner stone has sockets on either side of the waist to take the fixings of
the rigid wooden frame to which the animal, usually an ass, was harnessed.
The grain, fed into the inverted cone—in effect a hopper—works its way down
and round the lower cone, and is ground by the motion of the runner stone on
WATER, WIND AND ANIMAL POWER
263
it. The meal is collected from the base of the mill after it is ground, but there
appears to be no means of collecting it mechanically; it just remained to be
swept up.
Another direct-drive animal-powered engine used in Roman times is the
trapetum. This is an olive-crushing mill, and it has a successor of more recent
times: the cider apple crusher (see p. 260). In the trapetum two crushing rolls,
in the form of frustrums or spheres, rotate and move around a circular trough.
The spheres are suspended just clear of the trough so that the olive pips are not
crushed, making the oil bitter. The animal is harnessed to arms which are
inserted in sleeves in the roller crushers so that the rollers rotate about the
sleeves while describing a circular path in the trough. The central part of the
trough is raised to form a pillar on which the arms and rollers are pivoted.
In the fertile areas of the eastern Mediterranean there were several forms of
water-raising device which were used principally for irrigation. Some of these
are still in use today in the same manner as they were some 2000 years ago,
except that they are more sophisticated in their construction. The chain of
buckets, raised at first by the action of men on levers, was fitted with a crude

arrangement of gears at quite an early date. An ox or camel could be
harnessed to the arms on top of the gear wheel, and by the movement of the
animal walking round the central point the gear wheel, engaging with the gears
on the same shaft as the chain of buckets, could raise these to the surface,
where they discharged automatically into irrigation ditches. Their successors,
which can be found in Portugal, Spain and the Greek islands, are now made of
metal, but are rarely to be found in use as they have been superseded by
electric or diesel pumps. In a similar way a bucket was wound out of a well on
a drum windlass mounted on an upright shaft which was turned by an animal
walking round the shaft in a circular path. The animal would be harnessed to
one end of an arm socketed into or housed around the shaft. This form of
water-raising device can still be found, regrettably not in use, on the North
Downs, between Canterbury and Maidstone, in Kent.
Mediaeval and Renaissance Europe
As with waterwheels and windmills, the sources of information on the use of
animal-powered engines in the mediaeval period are only archival or
iconographic. There are one or two examples of treadwheels in place in the
cathedrals of Europe where they were installed as lifting devices for the
maintenance of the stone walls, roofs and timbers of the tower, or of spires and
high roofs. These date back to the mediaeval period, and we know that they
also played a large part in the construction of the buildings themselves. As the
great nave vaults were gradually being built the scaffolding followed the
building from bay to bay. A treadwheel crane would be mounted on the
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264
scaffolding, or on the top of a completed vault, and moved along as the work
proceeded. Those which still remain are, of course, well constructed and
properly built into permanent housings, but if they were used as part of the
moveable scaffolding they could have been more crudely constructed. Some of
the English survivors are interesting and worthy of note. At Tewkesbury there

is a single rim supported off the shaft and windlass by a single set of spokes. A
man worked the wheel by treading on the outside of rungs which project on
either side of the rim. This example may date from about 1160 when the tower
was completed. At Salisbury, a similar wheel in which the simple single rim is
replaced by three rims, but which still has only one set of spokes, dates from
about 1220. The conventional treadwheel, in which a man walks on the inside
of a drum, can still be seen at Beverley Minster and at Canterbury. On the
Continent examples of the treadwheel may be seen in Haarlem in the
Netherlands and at Stralsund and Greifswald in the German Democratic
Republic.
While slaves and workmen had used the treadwheel to lift materials and
water in the Roman and mediaeval periods, the deliberate use of machines as a
punishment did not become general practice in Britain until the nineteenth
century. Sir William Cubitt is thought to have invented the prison treadmill in
about 1818, although he did not patent it. In this machine the prisoners trod
the steps on the outside of a wheel which turned away underneath them. The
power generated was used to grind grain into meal, to pump water or merely
to work against a brake. The treadmills, of which the only survivors are at
Beaumaris gaol in Anglesey and the one from York now at Madame Tussauds
in London, appear to have been made from standard castings so that the
length could be determined by the number of prisoners required to tread them.
This form of punishment existed in nearly all British prisons until it was
abandoned in about 1900.
As with the watermill, the documentation of the form of the animal-
powered engine can be seen in Agricola’s De Re Metallica of 1556 (see p.
232). The use of animal-powered machines in mining in the 1550s is also
shown in the Kutna Hora Gradual which dates from the last years of the
fifteenth century. This shows particularly accurately the use of a large-size
windlass for winding ore out of mine shafts. The illustration shows four
horses harnessed in this engine. What is more interesting in the history of

technology is that this machine shows the horses to be harnessed outside a
large-diameter gear wheel which engages with the windlass. The vertical
horsewheel house containing the engine has a parallel in the preserved
example at Kiesslich-Schieferbruch bei Lehesten in the DDR. While these
iconographic examples are artistic, the details provided in De Re Metallica are
factual, and appear quite workable. The horsewheel house (Book VI) with a
conical roof has four arms to which eight horses can be harnessed. The
upright shaft passes below ground where a crown wheel with peg teeth
WATER, WIND AND ANIMAL POWER
265
engages with a pinion in which the teeth are carved out of a cylinder, rather
like a lantern gear. The pinion then drives the lifting drum of a chain pump
which is mounted on the same shaft. Again in Book VI there is a
conventional treadwheel driving a chain pump through a train of a spur gear
and a lantern gear. The evidence is all there to demonstrate a substantial use
of animalpowered machines in the mediaeval period, and it is unfortunate
that only very few examples survive to show how efficient they were.
On ships, and sometimes on land, heavy loads such as the anchor and its
cable or packages for transportation, were lifted by means of the capstan. This
is usually a long wooden drum mounted on one deck with its head projecting
above the main deck. This gives it stability when the load is taken up. Capstan
bars are inserted in the head so that a large number of sailors can push on the
bars and turn the cylinder. The load is drawn up by the chain or cable being
wound on the lower portion of the drum. A ratchet stops the load pulling the
chain off the drum again as it tries to sink back under its weight.
As the industrialization of Europe grew in pace in the period following the
1500s, so the use of animal-powered machinery grew as well, although the
number of these machines could never have been as great as the number of
waterwheels, for they are more cumbersome and not necessarily as powerful.
With the growth of printing, and with it the proliferation of wood-block

illustrations (see Chapter 14), the designs of the various machines were
published throughout Europe. Similarly, people travelling in Europe, either on
the Grand Tour or as master craftsmen moving from job to job, were able to
take the information on the many machines for use in other countries. One
important book was Ramelli’s La Diverse et Artificiose Machine, published in 1588
in Paris. In this book there are many examples of animal-powered engines;
some may be regarded as purely fanciful, but others, such as the horse-driven
corn mill in figure CXXII, are examples of workable machines. This was
followed by Zonca’s Novo Teatro di Machine et Edifici, published in 1607 in Padua.
This showed similar examples to those above, and also the first example of the
oblique treadwheel, driven by an ox, for grinding grain.
The eighteenth century
In the early 1700s the first really good millwrights’ books were published, true
text-books with scale drawings and fairly complete constructional details. The
great millwrighting books of Holland (see p. 251) were in circulation in Europe:
it is known that John Smeaton had his own copies and used them. They were
clearly intended for the new professionals, for they were written by millwrights
and engineers. While these millwrights’ books were comprehensive in that they
dealt with windmill and watermill construction, they also gave details of the
construction of horse-driven corn mills and other horse engines. The use of
PART TWO: POWER AND ENGINEERING
266
horses to drive corn mills in Dutch towns is unexpected, as there were windmills
all round the towns and on the town walls in many cases. These horsedriven
corn mills, called grutterij, were established at the back of bakers’ shops to grind
buckwheat for the production of poffertjes and pancakes.
In the eighteenth century the use of the high-level horse-driven engine
became well established for industrial purposes, although it is now impossible
to determine the scale of this introduction. In Europe the established use of the
horse-driven corn mill is well documented, particularly by the presence of

preserved examples in the open-air museums of the Netherlands, Germany
and Hungary. In Hungary, for example, there are several horse-driven corn
mills and a preserved example of the oblique treadwheel, as shown in Zonca,
drove the corn mill from Mosonszentmiklos in the open-air museum at
Szentendre. These appear to date from the eighteenth century, for although
they do not have sophisticated cycloidal gearing, the cog and rung gearing has
reached a high standard. In England there is a fine example of a horse-driven
corn mill at Woolley Park in Berkshire, but there are not many records to
show that other examples existed in substantial numbers. In industrial terms,
too, there are not many records to identify particular sites where these
machines were used. It is known, for example, that Strutt and Arkwright had a
horse-driven cotton mill in Derbyshire before the foundation, by Arkwright, of
the large water-driven mills in the Derwent valley. In Holland, the use of
horse-driven machinery to drive oil-seed crushing mills was well known. In
these mills, which exist in museums, the horse pulls round the great edge-
runner stones, and by the same motion drives the oil stamps and the rotating
‘cracking’ plates, by means of trains of gears on the head of the shaft. Similar
machines existed for the grinding of black powder in gunpowder works and
for the grinding of pigments in colour mills. In the national open-air museum
at Arnhem there is an example of a horse-driven laundry which was rescued
from a site between Haarlem and Amsterdam. In going round the vertical
shaft, the horse turned a shaft on which cams were mounted which effectively
rotated and squeezed the clothes in three wooden tubs. These laundries, of
which there were several near Amsterdam, provided a service for the twice-
yearly spring and winter washes. The normal weekly wash of a town house
was not done here, for after washing in the mechanical laundry, the linen
would be bleached in the fields.
High-level direct-drive mine windlasses must have been fairly numerous, as
the illustrations from the English mining districts show many examples. The
drawings of T.H.Hair in his book Sketches of the Coal Mines in Northumberland and

Durham show one or two examples of these high-level winding drums with a
good example as a vignette on the title page. This was published in 1839, long
after the introduction of the steam-driven winding engine to the mines. We
know from the insurance papers of 1777 from Wylam colliery,
Northumberland, that there were five horse-driven winding engines (locally
WATER, WIND AND ANIMAL POWER
267
called ‘whin gins’) there. Horse engines, erected temporarily on scaffolding,
were needed when mine shafts had to be dug. There was one at East
Herrington, near Sunderland, which was left in place to service the pumps in
the pump shaft of this mine, and there is the preserved example at Wollaton
Hall Industrial Museum, Nottingham, known to have been built in 1844 as a
colliery gin, and which ended its days being used for shaft inspection and
repair. The same type of horse-driven winding drum continued in use until
much more recently in the Kimberley diamond mining field in South Africa
and in the Australian goldfields. At the turn of the century, the ‘Big Hole’ in
Kimberley was ringed with these winding drums.
While the industrial use of horse-driven machinery remained low, the real
growth in the use of the horse-driven engine was on farms in the last quarter of
the eighteenth century. Andrew Meikle patented a horse-driven threshing
drum in 1788 in Scotland, and this helped to overcome the shortage of labour
which existed on farms in Scotland and the north of England, from which the
country labourer had been driven to more remunerative work in the coalfields
and the expanding industrial towns. These machines did not grow in number
in the south of England where labour was still available to work on the land
and where the ‘Captain Swing’ riots of the 1830s took place to protest against
mechanization. Meikle’s horse engine was a high-level machine with a large
gear wheel mounted so that the horses could be harnessed underneath it.
Clearly, while it was set up in permanent structures attached to the barns, it
could be used for other purposes such as chaff or turnip cutting, wood sawing

and water pumping. The number of these high-level wooden horse engines in
existence is extremely small, but the buildings which housed them can still be
found in quite large numbers in north-east England. More than 1300
horsewheel houses have been identified in Kenneth Hutton’s paper ‘The
Distribution of Wheelhouses in the British Isles’, in the Agricultural History
Review, vol. 24, 1976.
The nineteenth century
The large number of horsewheel houses indicates the number of high-level
horse-driven gear wheels which must have existed at one time. They were
manufactured throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Early in the
nineteenth century the universal use of cast iron made it possible to introduce
the low-level horse engine. In this the horse or horses went round the central
shaft harnessed to the end of the horse arm. The central shaft was usually
short and carried a small-diameter crown wheel of cast iron. The first gear
wheel would engage with a smaller bevel wheel which could be connected
with the farm machinery to be driven by means of a universal joint. Sometimes
the frame carrying the horse wheel would carry a train of gears so that the
PART TWO: POWER AND ENGINEERING
268
shaft, which is the final element in the engine, could rotate extremely fast in
relation to the 4kph (2.5mph) which the horse imparted to the ends of the
horse arms. If the machinery required to be driven with considerable rotational
speed, then the horse engine could be connected with it by means of
intermediate pulleys and belts. Examples of the low-level horse engine exist in
which the engine is mounted on a frame with wheels so that it can be pulled
around as necessary. One or two designs for threshing engines with integral
horse engines are known and these were dismantled and placed on a frame so
that the whole unit could be taken from farm to farm by contract threshers.
These, of course, were displaced by the portable steam engine.
The production of the low-level horse engine must have reached

enormous numbers during the nineteenth century; so much so that
competitions were held at the shows of the Royal Agricultural Society to
evaluate the work done by these machines. The low-level gear came in
several forms, but the type usually met with is the one in which there is no
casing to protect the user from being trapped in the gear. Later, safety
models were introduced in which all the gears were enclosed in a casing, so
that all that was to be seen was the horse arm and upright shaft at the top,
and the drive shaft and universal joint coming out at the bottom for
connection to the machinery. The example of the safety gear produced by
the Reading Iron Works in England, was a cylinder of iron some 90cm (3ft)
high and 60cm (2ft) in diameter. Examples of this Reading safety engine
have appeared in Western Australia, together with the ‘standard’ Reading
Iron Works corn mill. This corn mill had one pair of stones, mounted on an
iron hurst frame, driven by gears from the associated horse engine. The
Reading Iron Works, which had previously been the firm of Barratt, Exall &
Andrewes, maintained offices in Berlin and Budapest in the nineteenth
century, and even printed their catalogues in Russian as well as other
European languages. England exported a great many low-level horse engines.
Hunt of Earls Colne and Bentall of Malden, both in Essex, and Wilder of
Reading are names of manufacturers whose products have been found
overseas. In the USA and Canada horse engines were required in large
numbers and these countries produced their own models. The manufacturers
were usually based in the prairie states, such as the Case Co. of Racine,
Wisconsin. In the USA horse engines were considerably larger than in
Europe, for on the vast prairies reaping machines had large blades and were
hauled by teams of up to twenty-four horses. When the reaping had been
completed, the horses were harnessed to low-level horse engines to drive the
threshing machines. As a result of this, the horse arms grew in size and
number so that they could take twelve horses rather than the three or four
catered for by European designs. The horses were harnessed to the horse

engine and the teamster then stood on the machine to ensure that the horses
pulled their weight. In the USA, too, the paddle engine, or oblique treadmill
WATER, WIND AND ANIMAL POWER
269
(see p. 262), was frequently to be found in farmyards where it was attached
to saw benches or to farm machinery. These were worked by one or more
horses and were usually made to be portable. The oblique treadmill for
churning butter, and worked by dogs, was also known.
On the dry chalk uplands of England low-level horse engines are
occasionally to be found operating pumps to deliver water from deep wells to
isolated houses. In other places they are to be found in use for haulage from
small mine shafts such as the copper mines on the Tilberthwaite Fells in the
English Lake District.
Nowadays, animal-powered machines can still be found at work in countries
where irrigation is necessary, such as Egypt, Syria and Iran, but these survivals
are rare. Occasionally they are to be found in use on farms in Europe. It is to
be regretted that so little remains of this element of natural-power machinery
for it played a significant part in the history of agriculture, and a minor part in
the development of industry.
GLOSSARY

Bell crank a means of turning a pulling motion at right angles. Two arms at right
angles are mounted to pivot about a point between their tips.
Cog and rung gears a gear system in which plain, unshaped teeth engage with a set of
staves held between two flanged rings.
Cycloidal gears gears formed to a precise profile so that when they engage they roll
along the face of the teeth to give a smooth motion and not the striking effect of the
cog and rung gear.
Fantail a means of turning a windmill into the wind automatically. This consists of a
set of blades mounted at the back of the mill at right angles to the sails, which rotate

the cap by means of a gear train.
Grain elevator a series of small rectangular buckets mounted on a continuous belt
inside a double wooden shaft. Grain is poured in at the bottom of the rising shaft so
that it falls into the buckets which empty themselves into a hopper at the top when
the belt goes over the top pulley.
Great spur wheel mounted on the upright shaft in a mill, drives the millstones by
means of the stone nuts and stone spindles.
Greek mill a mill in which a horizontal waterwheel is mounted on the same shaft as
the runner millstone. As the horizontal waterwheel turns so the runner millstone is
turned at the same speed. This type of watermill is in common use from Portugal
across the Mediterranean area.
Hemlath the longitudinal member at the outer edge of a sail frame.
Horizontal feed screw a means of carrying meal horizontally in a watermill. A rotating
shaft in a long square box or sheet metal tube carries a continuous screw of sheet
metal or a series of small paddles set in a screw form. The meal is pushed along to
the appropriate opening by the motion of the screw.
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270
Horizontal waterwheel a waterwheel mounted to rotate in a horizontal plane so that
its rotation is transmitted into the mill by means of a vertical shaft.
Hurst frame the frame of stout timbers which carry the millstones. Often this frame is
independent of the structural timbers of the mill.
Impulse wheel waterwheels, or more particularly turbines, which are driven by the
pressure of the water being forced on them through a nozzle, rather than by the
weight of water flowing on to them directly.
Lantern gears and pinions gears (resembling a lantern) having staves between two
flanges, turned by pegs on the rim of another wheel.
Mortice wheel a cast-iron wheel in which sockets in the rim are set to receive wooden
gear teeth.
Moulin pendant a form of watermill still to be found in France in which an undershot

waterwheel is suspended in a frame so that the whole can be raised or lowered to
meet variations in the water level caused by flood water.
Norse mill another name given to the drive system found in the Greek mill (q.v.). This
form of mill still exists in Scandinavia and was common in the north of Scotland
and the Faroes.
Overshot waterwheel a waterwheel in which the water is delivered to the top of the
wheel so that it turns in the direction of flow.
Panster Muhle the German equivalent of the French moulin pendant (q.v.) which can
still be found in the German Democratic Republic. In some instances the frame
carrying the waterwheel is hinged and raised by chains and large man-operated
lifting wheels.
Pit wheel name given to the first gear wheel in a watermill mounted on the waterwheel
shaft. Because of its large size it usually runs in a pit on the inside of the wall which
separates the waterwheel from the mill machinery.
Querns name given to primitive hand-operated millstones. These can be stones
between which the grain is ground by rubbing or in which an upper flat-faced
circular stone is rotated over a fixed flat-faced stone.
Stream waterwheel waterwheel in which there is no head of water but in which the
floats are driven round by the flow of water striking them.
Tail water the water emerging from the bottom of a waterwheel while it is turning.
Undershot waterwheel a waterwheel in which there is a small head of water driving
the wheel around. The water hits the wheel at about 60° below the horizontal line
through the centre of the wheel.
Vertical waterwheel waterwheel mounted on a horizontal axis and rotating in a
vertical plane.
Vitruvian mill the simplest form of watermill with a vertical waterwheel. The
waterwheel is coupled by a pit wheel to a single runner millstone by means of a gear
on the stone spindle. It is so called because it is described by Vitruvius in the tenth
book of De Architectura which was published in about 20 BC.
Wallower a gear wheel which transmits the drive from the pit wheel to the upright

shaft in a watermill or from the brake wheel on the windshaft to the upright shaft in
a windmill.
WATER, WIND AND ANIMAL POWER
271
FURTHER READING
Baker, T.L. A field guide to American windmills (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman,
1985)
Hunter, L.C. Waterpower, a history of industrial power in the United States, 1780–1930 (The
University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1979)
Major, J.K. Animal-powered engines (B.T.Batsford, London, 1978)
Major, J.K. and Watts, M. Victorian and Edwardian windmills and watermills from old
photographs (B.T.Batsford, London, 1977)
Reynolds, J. Windmills and watermills (Hugh Evelyn, 1970)
Reynolds, T.S. Stronger than a hundred men, a history of the vertical water wheel (Johns
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1983)
Syson, L. The watermills of Britain (David and Charles, Newton Abbott, 1980)
Wailes, R. Windmills in England, (The Architectural Press, London, 1948)
—— The English windmill (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1967)