By Bud Warren
Italian Mariano di Jacopo (1382 – c. 1453) may have drawn the world’s first tide mill images. He was a versatile engineer and artist of the early Renaissance, whose style was later copied by Leonardo da Vinci and others. Known as Taccola (the Italian word for jackdaw, a relative of the crow) probably because of the shape of his nose, he created two volumes of drawings, notes and descriptions of many devices for hydraulic, milling and military purposes. These volumes were titled De ingeneis (1433, 1449) and De machini (1449).
These drawings do not show specific tide mills; they represent a good conceptual understanding the essentials of how water is controlled by sluice gates. The following Taccola sketch shows an open lift gate allowing water to flow into a mill pond and a simple vertical wheel (which looks very much like a horizontal wheel). No exit gate is shown.
Another Toccola drawing below shows both an inflow gate (right) and an outflow gate (left), each with a mechanism for lifting and lowering the gate.
“Oldest” Tide Mills
We are sticking out necks out to claim Taccola’s drawings are the oldest drawings about tide mills, and look forward to hearing about older ones. (Please comment below or send email to info@tidemillinstitute.org if you know of any.)
Awarding the title “oldest” to any mill is risky, for someone may come along having found an older one. Attendees at Tide Mill Institute conferences have heard a number of presentations about “the oldest” tide mill. In 2015, Tom MacErlean described his work at the 787 AD Nendrum mill in Northern Ireland. Publicity touting “the oldest tide mill in the world” was rife at the time. Remnants of an earlier mill dated 619 AD were found there, but not “archaeologized.” Some of the literature now describes the 787 mill as “the oldest tide mill to be studied by archaeologists.”
In 2017 dendrochronologist Vincent Bernard described his work at the “oldest tide mill in Brittany,” the 585 mill in St. Pol de Leon. The oldest tide mill in Massachusetts (1630) and in Maine (1634) were described at other TMI conferences.
References
Colin Rynne, “The Technical Development of the Horizontal Water-Wheel in the First Millennium ad: Some Recent Archaeological Insights from Ireland,” The International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology, 85:1, 70-93, 2015. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1179/1758120614Z.00000000055.
Taccola, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Taccola&oldid=1187826139 (last visited Feb. 26, 2024).
About the author: Bud Warren is a co-founder of Tide Mill Institute and author of numerous articles and other documents related to tide mills.