Invention Timeline – Benoit Fourneyron, French Engineer; Improved the Whirlpool Water-Wheel, the “Turbine”
b. November 1, 1802 and d. July ? 1867
French engineer. Celebrated for his improvements in the “turbine,” or whirlpool water-wheel. Turbines of a rude construction have been used since a very remote period and their first inventor is unknown.
Not distant far below, a mill
Was built upon a neighb’ring rill:
Whose pent-up stream, whene’er let loose,
Impell’d a wheel, close at its sluice,
So strongly, that by friction’s power,
‘T would grind the firmest grain to flour.
Or, by a correspondence new,
With hammers, and their clatt’ring crew,
Would so bestir her active stumps,
On iron blocks, with arrant lumps,
That in a trice she’d manage matters,
To make ‘em all as smooth as platters.
Or slit a bar to rods quite taper,
With as much ease as you’d cut paper.
For, though the lever gave the blow,
Yet it was lifted from below.
—Labor and Genius: Richard Jago
There is room enough in human life to crowd
almost every art and science in it. . . . The
more we do, the more we can do; the more busy
we are, the more leisure we have; and it is an old
maxim-”He hath no leisure who useth it not.”
—Leisure Hours: Hazlitt
70 B. C.—Mithridates, King of Cappadocia, invented and set up the first corn mill driven by water.
