Ancient hydro-power
Posted: Sat Jun 12, 2021 9:47 pm
I have just seen a re-broadcast of Palin's New Europe / from Pole to Pole about Poland. He does several things that we did on holiday there on different visits, in fact we may well have been inspired to go to N Poland by the programme. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b ... le-to-pole (I think we went to the South and on into Slovakia befrore it was broadcast...)
Anyway, from about 5 to 10 mins in he is on the Elblag canal where instead of several slow flights of locks they have 5 waterwheel-worked inclined planes where the water flowing down the canal powers the machinery which pulls the boats up each plane in turn. No fossil fuel or non-renewable electricity is used at all, apart from signal bells, except that even then most are just gongs! It was built to take timber out of the Polish interior (so the weight was going downhill) but the waterwheels are powerful enough to pull the current trip boats up unbalanced.
There are lots of videos of it on YouTube including a lovely archive film of a family-worked boat in the 1920s or 30s. Enjoy!
A
Anyway, from about 5 to 10 mins in he is on the Elblag canal where instead of several slow flights of locks they have 5 waterwheel-worked inclined planes where the water flowing down the canal powers the machinery which pulls the boats up each plane in turn. No fossil fuel or non-renewable electricity is used at all, apart from signal bells, except that even then most are just gongs! It was built to take timber out of the Polish interior (so the weight was going downhill) but the waterwheels are powerful enough to pull the current trip boats up unbalanced.
There are lots of videos of it on YouTube including a lovely archive film of a family-worked boat in the 1920s or 30s. Enjoy!
A