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Watermill
A watermill or water mill is a mill that uses moving water as its power source. It is thus a structure that uses a water wheel or water turbine to drive a mechanical process such as milling (grinding), rolling, or hammering. Such processes are needed in the production of many material goods, including flour, lumber, paper, textiles, and many metal products. Thus watermills may be gristmills, sawmills, paper mills, textile mills, hammermills, trip hammering mills, rolling mills, wire drawing mills, and so on.
One major way to classify watermills is by wheel orientation (vertical or horizontal), one powered by a vertical waterwheel through a gearing mechanism, and the other equipped with a horizontal waterwheel without such a mechanism. The former type can be further divided, depending on where the water hits the wheel paddles, into undershot, overshot, breastshot and pitchback (backshot or reverse shot) waterwheel mills. Another way to classify water mills is by an essential trait about their location: tide mills use the movement of the tide; ship mills are water mills onboard (and constituting) a ship.
== Milling ==
To mill meant to grind, and that usually meant to grind grain. Thus most watermills were gristmills. As a noun, mill referred to the building where the milling took place, and consequently the water mill was a building where milling was done using the power of water.
Originally, grain was pounded and then milled by hand in a pestle and mortar, the invention of the millstone was important and animals were used to turn them. The only other energy source was water, and when this was harnessed the mill became a water mill. Wind was not exploited until several centuries later. The water mill required either a swift flowing current, or a head of water. Water mills became associated with leats, lodges, weirs and dams. The kinetic energy of flowing water and the potential energy of a head of water was converted into rotational energy by a water wheel. Rotational energy was used to grind the grain and soon other uses were found for this energy; and series of other industrial processes took place in watermills. The water mill was tied to its location: industry developed along the valleys of suitable streams, and this fixed the location of the early great industrial cities. The later invention of the windmill allowed milling of grain to take place on the plains close to the harvest. Steam power supplemented the watermill, and then allowed the construction of free standing mills.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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