178
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
178 points (99.4% liked)
Illustrations of history
725 readers
150 users here now
This magazine is for sharing artwork of historical events, places, personages, etc. Scale models and the like also welcome!
Generally speaking, actual photos of a historical item should go to !historyartifacts@lemmy.world
Photos of ruins should go to !historyruins@lemmy.world
Photos of the past should go to !HistoryPorn@lemmy.world
founded 5 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I was gonna comment on being the poor sob who has to haul grain up, and flour back down all those stairs.
But then I remembered the Romans had slaves..
The Romans had some really ingenious devices for lifting large loads!
Run by slaves.
Reminded me of thank you slaves.
Why they make that many house if relly ingenious?? Force is the same, so they could have a really large one at the bottom and save slaves for stuff like the feeding of grapes wile laying on sofa
Without modern metallurgy and and the associated industrial manufacturing base it's a lot harder to build a single mill to effectively use all the potential energy. A multiple mill setup like this allows you to extract most of the energy without reaching the limits of how much force you can put through machinery made of wood (the shafts and bearings are likely also wood, not just the wheel buckets), stone, and low strength metals.
Overshot wheels, as the ones displayed in the reconstruction, are more efficient. Theoretically, I suppose, they could have made it one massive structure like a modern dam, but that would have been a lot of architectural effort for no real increase in efficiency.
Dam? Just dont build all the houses and the water falls the same height. The one at the bottom spinns dam fast!
Maybe more manageable consistency in the grist. You would get just about the same level of work from each mill, so you products would maybe be more consistent?
They also had water wheels which could do work, like lifting.