wheeling
Today's plans are off the rails. It doesn't matter. This has been fun — so far — I'm near my ancestral home and tomorrow there's a promise of a visit to Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Royal Albert Bridge.
Before steam drove the industrial revolution, before the Stockton and Darlington Railway, before Brunel's Great Western Railway and of course before electricity, the motive force at Wheal Martyn came from gravity.
It rains in Cornwall. I'm standing in it beneath a New Zealand-made umbrella. I buy my wet weather gear from New Zealand because, like Cornwall, New Zealand has real weather. With all that water and near enough to the same gravity we have everywhere, converting that gravitational potential energy made possible by the heat of solar energy pushing water up hill make a lot of sense. Someone figured out that by letting the water fall, its potential energy converted to kinetic energy could be conserved and used to spin a wheel. Here at Wheal Martyn the rotation of waterwheels is translated into reciprocal motion to do work in various pumps. Here's one they prepared earlier, with motion blur from the wheel's spin.
Almost 50 years before Brunel's birth John Smeaton was fiddling about with waterwheel efficiency and derived an empirical formula with the intent of building a better machine. I can't say that his formula was applied here, on this wheel, at Wheal Martyn. Equally I cannot say that it was not, after all, his works included bits and pieces in both nearby Devon and Cornwall.
Let's get a score update in this Brunel and Telford battle:
Smeaton — 4
Brunel — 2
Telford — 0
wheeling
Today's plans are off the rails. It doesn't matter. This has been fun — so far — I'm near my ancestral home and tomorrow there's a promise of a visit to Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Royal Albert Bridge.
Before steam drove the industrial revolution, before the Stockton and Darlington Railway, before Brunel's Great Western Railway and of course before electricity, the motive force at Wheal Martyn came from gravity.
It rains in Cornwall. I'm standing in it beneath a New Zealand-made umbrella. I buy my wet weather gear from New Zealand because, like Cornwall, New Zealand has real weather. With all that water and near enough to the same gravity we have everywhere, converting that gravitational potential energy made possible by the heat of solar energy pushing water up hill make a lot of sense. Someone figured out that by letting the water fall, its potential energy converted to kinetic energy could be conserved and used to spin a wheel. Here at Wheal Martyn the rotation of waterwheels is translated into reciprocal motion to do work in various pumps. Here's one they prepared earlier, with motion blur from the wheel's spin.
Almost 50 years before Brunel's birth John Smeaton was fiddling about with waterwheel efficiency and derived an empirical formula with the intent of building a better machine. I can't say that his formula was applied here, on this wheel, at Wheal Martyn. Equally I cannot say that it was not, after all, his works included bits and pieces in both nearby Devon and Cornwall.
Let's get a score update in this Brunel and Telford battle:
Smeaton — 4
Brunel — 2
Telford — 0