Time and technology wait for no man

The Heron: the time is now!

Lynnae’s recent post “The Evolution of the Millwright: From Wooden Gears to Hydro Turbines” got me thinking. Time: past, present and future. We have clear notions of all three but we are always stuck in the present whether we like it or not.

Comparing the present with the past, Harold Macmillan took an optimistic view of 1957 - “most of our people have never had it so good”.

Looking to the future, we are always being told to use it or lose it; enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think, etc. Carpe diem in fact.

Lewis Carroll got past, present and future all in one idea in 1871 - “Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today.”

We have a lot riding on the present! We need to cherish the skills and achievements of the past and try to achieve a safe landing in the technological landscape of the future.

Looking forward, everybody knows AI will change virtually everything in the future - it’s been coming for quite a while already and it’s happening right now. But very few people have the skills yet.

Looking back, last year a report highlighted critical shortages in all sorts of heritage roles like blacksmith, thatcher, stonemason. Very few people still have the skills.

The skills needed at work have always changed - think of the Luddites when power looms were invented; ostlers and stable lads when the first motor cars rolled up; typists and typesetters when word processors arrived; or journalists and programmers now that AI is on the scene. My boss used to say “change is the only constant”, though I think he got that from Heraclitus who said “everything changes” about 2,500 years earlier.

It’s the constant development of ideas by inventive people - including millwrights - that keeps technology moving forward. Take the damsel for instance. If you’ve been in the Heron when the machinery is turning, you will be well acquainted with the tap, tap, tap of the damsel gently knocking a few grains of wheat at a time into the millstones. You can see the damsel in action in this video -

The waterwheel changes the linear movement of the river into the rotational movement of the main beam, suitable for driving the millstones and belts etc. As the beam turns, the damsel bumps into the “shoe” that holds the grain, changing the rotational movement of the beam into the sideways movement of the shoe.

The basic idea - exploiting the irregular shape of something that is turning - apparently came from Leonardo Da Vinci, who saw that using a spiral shape instead of a circular shape could gradually move a hammer up and then suddenly let it fall. You can see this idea in operation in this video -

So what happens if you scale this idea up further? You end up with a heavy-duty water-driven forge. In this video there is a horizontal beam coming from a waterwheel outside the building. The man on the right pulls a rope to let the water onto the wheel which starts turning the beam and drives the hammer.

You can read more about this in this excellent blog.

In Shakespeare’s day this kind of machinery would have been familiar. He mentions the banging of a water-driven forge in The Tempest (Act 1 Scene 2 line 334) -

As fast as mill-wheels strike

Well the one in that video certainly strikes!

The Heron got together with the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Pilgrim Trust to run the Near Far Heron project because old skills are slipping through our fingers, like the sands of time.

Now is the time to preserve the past for the future. This is the sound advice in James Joyce’s Ulysses (chapter 9 line 89):

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.