62
Pulley and Two Buckets.
[Book I.
(without the expenditure of anj additional time and labor to lower it, aswith the single bücket,) while its weight in descending, conlributed towardsraising the charged one.
These advantages were not the only results of the simple addition ofanother bücket; though they were probably all that were anticipated bythe author at the time. It really imparted a new feature to the apparatus,and one which naturally led to the development of that great machine, inwhich terminated all the improvements of the older meehanies on theprimitive cord and bücket—and to which, modern ingenuity has added—nothing—viz: the endless chain op pots —indeed nothing more wasthen wanting, but to unite the two ends of the rope together, and attacha number of vessels to it, at equal distances from each other, through thewhole of its length, and the machine just named was all but complete.
No. 13. Ancient. No. 14. Modern.
[From sepulchral monuments.]
The Anglo Saxons used two buckets hooped with iron, one- at eachend of a chain which passed over a pulley. 3 And in the old Normancastles, water was raised by the same means. In one of the keeps or towers,still remaining, which was built by G-undulph, bishop of Rochester, inthe reigns of the Conqueror and William Rufus , the mode of elevatingthe water is obvious. “ For water, there was a well in the very middleof the partition wall; it was also made to go through the whole wall, fromthe bottom of the tower up to the very leads, (i. e. theroof) andoneveryfloor were small arches in the wall, forming a communication betweenthe pipe of the wall, and the several apartments, so that by a pulley,water was communicated every where.” And in Newcastle, a similartower exhibits the same de vice for obtaining the water i “a remarkablepillar from which arches branched out very beautifully on each side, in-closed a pipe, (that is, the continuation of the well,) which conductedwater from the well.” b It appears to have been, in the middle ages, theuniform practice to enclose Wells within the walls of towers, that in caseof sieges, the water might not be cut off. It was the same in earlyRome : the capitol was supplied by a deep well at the foot of the Tar-peian Rock, into which buckets were lowered through an artificial grooveor passage made in the rock. c The double bücket is still used in inns inSpain . See a figure in Sat. Mag. Vol. vii, 58.
A simple mode is practised in Italy , by which a person in the Upper Storyof a hoüse, and at some distance from the well or cistern, (which is ge-nerally in the court yard,) raises water without being obliged to descend.
One end of a strong iron rod or wire, is fixed to the house above thewindow of an upper landing or passage, and the other end in the ground,