Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
7
P
REINDUSTRIAL
C
OMPLEXIFICATION
Prime Movers and Fuels in Traditional Societies
Nature is so subtil and so penetrating in her ways, that she
cannot be used except by great craft; for she does not openly
reveal that which may be completed within her; this comple-
tion must be accomplished by man.
Paracelsus (1493-1541), Das Buch Paragranum
spoon tilt hammer, the simplest machine (a lever) to use
the energy of running water, did not involve continuous
rotary motion, but large nineteenth-century vertical
waterwheels commonly transmitted their power to heavy
and complex forging hammers (fig. 7.1). Similar advances
can be noted for other mechanical prime movers.
The horizontal wooden waterwheels of Mediterra-
nean antiquity developed no more than 300 W, the
seventeenth-century vertical machines had capacities ten
times higher, and by 1854 the Lady Isabella, England's
largest iron wheel, could deliver over 400 kW, a thou-
sandfold power increment during two millennia. There
are surprising contrasts even for draft animals. A mas-
sive (nearly 1 t), well-fed nineteenth-century draft horse
(a Percheron or a Rhinelander), shod with new iron,
harnessed with a collar, and hitched to a light flat-
top wagon on a hard-top road, could move a load ten
times as heavy as its much smaller (300 kg), poorly fed,
unshod, breast-harnessed predecessor, which pulled a
Four kinds of energies powered the multifaceted evolu-
tion of preindustrial complexification: human and animal
labor, flowing water, wind, and biomass. The capacities
of animate prime movers were inherently limited, and
higher performances could be achieved only through
multiplication of small forces or technical innovation.
These two processes were often combined. For example,
the monumental architecture of antiquity required massed
labor as well as labor-saving levers, inclined planes, and
pulleys. Capacities and efficiencies of inanimate prime
movers increased very slowly, but there were some re-
markable advances by the time these machines began
to energize the earliest stages of industrialization. The
