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fill work that would have otherwise required manual labor. Much of the technical knowledge underpinning fluid driven machines had been worked out long before Don Quixote ever took his first tilt at a windmill. The accumulated know how, some dating from ancient Persia, was to prove important for a veiy long time; many of our local mills operated through the later part of the 1800s; a few functioned as recently as the 1950s.
A wheel in time
A basic mill captured the energy of falling water via a rotating wheel or turbine and converting the rotation into some other controlled motion that in turn performs some useful task. It is the fall of the water or the head (about 8-10 feet minimum required) and not rapid flow that is most critical to the motion of the primary wheel. Thus even very small streams could intermittently charge millponds to levels necessary to achieve the required head, making the placement of a mill quite flexible. As the placement of these structures could affect such things as navigation, irrigation, and flooding, the mills eventually became thought of as public utilities with government regulation determining the details of location, construction, etc.
Mills could be adapted for processing grain, sawing timber, crushing rocks (for gravel or to extract precious minerals), tanning leather, carding and weaving wool, and in later years, to generate electricity. Wooden gears and shafts from various tree species were critical to the intermediate mechanical operation of the mill.
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