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.
