Archimedes' screw
Archimedes' screw, or the
Archimedean screw, is a
machine historically used for transferring water from a low-lying body of water into
irrigation ditches. It is one of several inventions and discoveries reputed to have been made by
Archimedes, though writings about the
Hanging Gardens of Babylon hint that a similar device was used by the
Mesopotamians as early as
600 BC – over 300 years before his birth.
The machine consists of a
screw inside a hollow pipe. A screw can be thought of as an
inclined plane (another
simple machine) wrapped around a cylinder.
The lower end of the device is put in the water, and the screw is then turned (usually by a
windmill or by manual labor). As the bottom end of the tube turns, it scoops up a volume of water. This amount of water will slide up in the spiral tube as the shaft is turned, until it finally pours out from the top of the tube and feeds the irrigation systems.
The interface between the screw and the pipe does not need to be perfectly water-tight because of the relatively large amount of water being scooped at each turn in respect to the
angular speed of the screw. Also, water leaking from the top section of the screw leaks into the previous one and so on, so a sort of
equilibrium is achieved while using the machine, thus preventing a decrease in
efficiency.
The "screw" does not necessarily need to turn inside the casing, but can be allowed to turn with it in one piece. A screw could be sealed with
pitch or some other
adhesive to its casing, or, cast as a single piece in
bronze, as some researchers have postulated as being the devices used to irrigate
Sennacherib's
Hanging Gardens of
Babylon. Depictions of
Greek and
Roman water screws show the screws being powered by a human treading on the outer casing to turn the entire apparatus as one piece, which would require that the casing be rigidly attached to the screw.
The design of the everyday Greek and Roman water screw, in contrast to the heavy bronze device of Sennacherib, with its problematic drive chains, has a powerful simplicity. A double or triple helix was built of wood strips (or occasionally bronze sheeting) around a heavy wooden pole. A cylinder was built around the helices using long, narrow boards fastened to their periphery and waterproofed with pitch [
1]
Along with transferring water to irrigation ditches, this device was also used for "stealing" land from under sea level in the
Netherlands. Since the primary objective in this case is to lift water to a given height rather than simply move it from a river to the irrigation field, more than one machine was used to successively lift the same water volume, due to the limitations of this machine.
*
Progressive cavity pump*
Auger*
Shadoof*
Shagohod*
Technology and Culture Volume 44, Number 1, January 2003 (PDF) Dalley, Stephanie. Oleson, John Peter. "Sennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw: The Context of Invention in the Ancient World"
