Annual Tide Mill Conference Rescheduled for May 4, 2024, in Kittery, ME

Kittery Community Center. (Photo courtesy of OurKittery.com and Charles Denault.)

Last October’s Annual Tide Mill Conference was postponed because of a local emergency, but it has now been rescheduled for Saturday, May 4. The conference theme, “Harnessing Tides for Energy and Agriculture,” remains the same.

The May 4 conference will convene at the Kittery Community Center in Kittery, Maine, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (12:30 UTC) for in-person and for online participants via Zoom conferencing.

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Free Water Miller’s Handbook Offered by Millers’ Guild

Our friends at De Hollandsche Molen (The Dutch Mill, Molens.nl) informed us that Het Gilde van Molenaars (The Guild of Millers) in the Netherlands has made its English translation of Handboek Watermolenaar (Manual for Water Millers) available as a free PDF file on its website, GildevanMolenaars.nl.

The 350-page handbook (49MB as a PDF) is intended as a training manual for those seeking to work as millers. In the Netherlands, miller certification requires completing a water miller course and passing a national examination administered by Vereniging De Hollandsche Molen (The Dutch Mill Society), a process that typically takes two years. Learning what the craft of the miller entails, says the manual’s foreword, also gives the craft “a cultural and historical value.”

The manual covers history, technology, and operation of virtually all types of water-driven mills, but much of its content applies to tide mills. This makes it a worthwhile addition to the tide mill enthusiast’s digital library. The content is well illustrated with color photographs and clear diagrams throughout.

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Are Taccola’s Tide Mill Images the Earliest?

By Bud Warren

Italian Mariano di Jacopo (1382 – c. 1453) may have drawn the world’s first tide mill images. He was a versatile engineer and artist of the early Renaissance, whose style was later copied by Leonardo da Vinci and others. Known as Taccola (the Italian word for jackdaw, a relative of the crow) probably because of the shape of his nose, he created two volumes of drawings, notes and descriptions of many devices for hydraulic, milling and military purposes. These volumes were titled De ingeneis (1433, 1449) and De machini (1449).

These drawings do not show specific tide mills; they represent a good conceptual understanding the essentials of how water is controlled by sluice gates. The following Taccola sketch shows an open lift gate allowing water to flow into a mill pond and a simple vertical wheel (which looks very much like a horizontal wheel). No exit gate is shown.

“Mulino a marea” (“Tide mill”). From Taccola’s De ingeneis, Libri III-IV. (Image courtesy of Museo Galileo.)
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Tide Mill Painting Subject Identified on Long Island, N.Y.

About a year ago, Tide Mill Institute posted a painting of a mill along with an article asking for help in identifying it. Good news! The subject of the mystery mill painting has finally been identified, thanks to help from Tide Mill Institute Co-Founder Bud Warren, the Southold, N.Y., Town Historian Amy Folk and Southold Historical Museum Executive Director Deanna Witte-Walker. What a great team of detectives.

Bud Warren jump-started the discovery process when he found the place name “Mattituck” on a document associated with the painting. Since Mattituck is the name of a tidal inlet in Southold on the north shore of Long Island, TMI inquired with the Southold Historical Museum to see if someone there could ID the painting. At that time, the Mattituck connection seemed strong: news articles on line reported on an old inn on the inlet that was in the process of reopening as a restaurant. Many years earlier, the inn had been a tide mill. Photos of the old Mattituck mill building bore a resemblance to the scene in the painting.

Mystery mill painting.
Peconic or Goldsmith Inlet mill photograph discovered by Southold, N.Y., Town Historian Amy Folk.
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Preserving a Tide Mill Foundation – Again

Kurt Dietrich at Van Wyck-Lefferts tide mill. The protective bulkhead he engineered in the early 1980s is visible in the lower right and will be renewed in the next few weeks. (Click to enlarge.)

In the early 1980s and fresh out of engineering school, Kurt Dietrich was assigned to engineer a foundation restoration and preservation project at the historic Van Wyck-Lefferts tide mill in Huntington, N.Y. The stone work was deteriorating badly from the action of rising and falling salt water tides and needed repair to keep the 200-year-old building from falling into Puppy Cove on Long Island’s north shore. His solution: repoint the foundation stones and then protect them with a timber bulkhead to fend off the action of waves and ice.

At the time, Dietrich probably never imagined he’d be revisiting his project in 2023 when his 1980 solution was reaching the end of its lifetime. But that’s exactly what happened. Now he’s on the board of directors of Van Wyck-Lefferts Tide Mill Sanctuary and the old mill foundation once again needs attention. (But this is no criticism of the 1980s preservation project. Forty years is a respectable lifetime for a foundation structure under constant attack by 7-1/2-foot tides, storms, and floods.)

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New Life for Old Tide Mill Sites?

A Belgian company named Turbulent has developed turbine systems requiring a head of only 5 feet (1.5 meters) and a flow of only 53 cu. feet/second (1.5 cu. meters/second) to generate a useful amount of electric power, according to company literature. The systems are also compact and relatively simple to install, which could make them suitable for installation at former tide mill sites, where water height difference is determined by tidal range at the site. Such installations could produce 15 kW or more as distributed energy sources.

Turbulent’s vortex turbines extract energy from water falling vertically from an input basin shaped to create a swirling low-pressure flow (low pressure vortex) before the water enters the turbine. The company says installations do not obstruct normal water flow and let “all fish and aquatic life pass by unharmed.”

In addition to the turbine, the core unit contains a gearbox and high efficiency generator. Turbines are available with impeller diameters from 51 inches (1.3 meters) to 75 inches (1.9 meters) and with power output capacities from 15 kW to 70 kW.

Vortex turbine with integral gearbox and generator. (Courtesy of Turbulent.)
Actual vortex turbine installation in Chile, operational since 2018. (Courtesy of Insider Tech.)
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