In The Middle East and Rome
The earliest evidence for this device is in a Babylonian text from about 700 B.C.. These were commonly powered by humans or animals. The device then appeared in ancient Egypt from about 200 B.C., featuring a pair of gear-wheels.
A version of the chain pump was used in Ancient Roman times, sometimes with pots fixed to the chain, which, as they passed over the top pulley, tipped the water out. Philo of Byzantium wrote of such a device in the 2nd century B.C.; the historian Vitruvius mentioned it around 30 B.C. Fragments of these buckets were found on the Roman barges of Lake Nemi.
Complex chain pumps consisting of more than 200 separate components were used extensively by Muslim inventors and engineers in the medieval Islamic world, where they are known as saqiya. The mechanical flywheel, used to smooth out the delivery of power from a driving device to a driven machine, was first employed by Ibn Bassal (fl. 1038–1075), of Islamic Spain, in a saqiya chain pump.
A manuscript by Al-Jazari featured an intricate device with chambered reservoirs, water-wheel scoops, gear-wheels, and a chain pump, powered by the pull of an ox and falling water. The first known use of a crankshaft in a chain pump was featured in another one of al-Jazari's saqiya machines. The concept of minimizing the intermittency is also first implied in one of al-Jazari's saqiya chain pumps, which was to maximise the efficiency of the saqiya chain pump. Al-Jazari also constructed a water-raising saqiya chain pump that was run by hydropower rather than manual labour, though the Chinese were also using hydropower for chain pumps before him. Saqiya machines like the ones he described have been supplying water in Damascus since the 13th century, and were in everyday use throughout the medieval Islamic world.
Chain pumps were used in European mines during the Renaissance; mineralogist Georg Agricola illustrated them in his De re metallica (1556). They were used in dockyards, and several formed part of the Portsmouth Block Mills complex. Chain pumps were commonly used on naval vessels of the time to pump the bilges, and examples are known in the nineteenth century for low-lift irrigation.
Read more about this topic: Chain Pump
Famous quotes containing the words middle, east and/or rome:
“Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me? What is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others? What can I discover?—Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. One charm of travel dies here.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)