Who invented the water wheel?
Answer:
The first waterwheels were used only for milling grain, and were referred to as water mills. The oldest reference is in a Greek poem of about 85 BC. The Greek geographer Strabo said that King Mithradates VI was using a "hydraulic machine", probably a water mill, in about 65 BC.
Water mills spread rapidly from Greece to other places, reaching China by the 1st century AD. They were in use throughout Europe by the end of the 3rd century and reached Japan by AD 610.
All these mills had vertical shafts and horizontal wheels, mimicking the hand-operated querns (mills) that they replaced. The earliest known horizontal-shaft water mill was described by the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius in about 27 BC. This was an undershot waterwheel driving vertical-shaft grinding stones.
Early waterwheels up to 6ft in diameter would have produced about three horsepower, more than any other machine at that time. Waterwheels of increasing size continued to be built until the early19th century.
The first use of the water wheel may possibly have occurred in 4th century BC India. According to Terry S. Reynolds, "Joseph Needham noted in 1965 that certain ancient Indian texts from around 350 BC mentioned a cakkavattaka (turning wheel) which commentaries explained as arahatta-ghatĩ-yanta (machine with wheel-pots attached)", on which basis Needham "suggested that the machine in question was a noria and that it was the first water powered prime mover." However Reynolds also writes that "the term used in Indian texts is ambiguous and does not clearly indicate a water-powered device. In fact, as Thorkild Schiøler has noted, it is far more likely that these passages refer to some type of tread- or hand-operated water-lifting device, instead of a water-powered water-lifting wheel."
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