The Kent History Forum
Industry => Mills => Topic started by: bertroid on November 02, 2019, 02:12:29 PM
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Deleted, so it can't be plagiarised (ironically)
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I must admit I was a bit baffled by the Horizontal Mill ,Having a look around on Google came up with this very helpful site which explains the system in easy terms for oiks like me to understand. I have put up the link for anyone interested.
http://www.milldrawings.com/html/hoopers.html (http://www.milldrawings.com/html/hoopers.html)
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Thanks for the link.
Examining these illustrations you can see why one of these would be so expensive to build. Being so complex in construction it's hardly surprising there may have been operational issues.
Looking at maps old and new all I can find in the area is "Windmill Common" and a building called "Windmill Bank".
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Thanks for the link.
Examining these illustrations you can see why one of these would be so expensive to build. Being so complex in construction it's hardly surprising there may have been operational issues.
Looking at maps old and new all I can find in the area is "Windmill Common" and a building called "Windmill Bank".
That's an earlier post mill.
This extraordinary building stood in the fields numbered 703 and 727, behind Newlands House, towards Crockham Hill, marked on the Tithe map as Mill Field and Great Mill Field from memory.
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It must have been a spectacular sight, the link from Grandarog gives form to the description, and if it was 70ft tall could only have been extremely impressive in an age when radical engineering was not that common.
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The link from grandarog is of drawings done of the mill at Margate, and a 3D reconstruction of the mill done by John, who is a good friend of mine.
As I indicated, although there is no real proof, the one at Westerham must have been similar to Margate and Battersea, and in some of the sale notices dimensions not given.
It must have been a spectacular sight, the link from Grandarog gives form to the description, and if it was 70ft tall could only have been extremely impressive in an age when radical engineering was not that common.
As sadly there are no pictures of the Westerham structure, here is one of the Margate one, giving an idea of size.
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As for engineering, to open up half a building with whirring cogs etc, to a gale force wind, could potentially be disastrous and very damaging. There are tales of regular destruction at all of these mills, and ultimately the reason why they became very expensive failures!
Interestingly Captain Hooper suddenly disappeared from owning a big chunk of Margate. Perhaps a disaster led him to leave quickly. He ended up being buried in Islington a few years later.
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The basic idea has been revived for power generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_axis_wind_turbine
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To explain where Captain Hooper got his idea from, we can look at one of the places which the old seafarer visited. 1000 year old horizontal mills still survive and work in Iran, but at a much gentler pace!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ugw7-BwsmI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ugw7-BwsmI)
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That's an extraordinary sight, but as for them being 1000 years old, I think there may be a touch of the Ship of Theseus going on here :)
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That's an extraordinary sight, but as for them being 1000 years old, I think there may be a touch of the Ship of Theseus going on here :)
Certainly not suggesting that what you see is original, in any way, and about 20 years ago they were restored, and apparently now under threat again.
They've been there a thousand years, and scheduled a world heritage site. Some mud dating etc. I would guess they've been renewed dozens of times over that time, but let's not forget Persian records were a lot better than ours back then. ;)
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A contemporary view of Hooper's Mill, Margate c.1800
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Some information and a picture of the Battersea Mill:
https://www.fivenine.co.uk/family_history_notebook/background/Battersea%20Flour%20Mills/bolingbroke_horizontal_windmill.html