In The Middle East and Rome
The earliest evidence for this device is in a Babylonian text from about 700 B.C.. These were commonly powered by humans or animals. The device then appeared in ancient Egypt from about 200 B.C., featuring a pair of gear-wheels.
A version of the chain pump was used in Ancient Roman times, sometimes with pots fixed to the chain, which, as they passed over the top pulley, tipped the water out. Philo of Byzantium wrote of such a device in the 2nd century B.C.; the historian Vitruvius mentioned it around 30 B.C. Fragments of these buckets were found on the Roman barges of Lake Nemi.
Complex chain pumps consisting of more than 200 separate components were used extensively by Muslim inventors and engineers in the medieval Islamic world, where they are known as saqiya. The mechanical flywheel, used to smooth out the delivery of power from a driving device to a driven machine, was first employed by Ibn Bassal (fl. 1038–1075), of Islamic Spain, in a saqiya chain pump.
A manuscript by Al-Jazari featured an intricate device with chambered reservoirs, water-wheel scoops, gear-wheels, and a chain pump, powered by the pull of an ox and falling water. The first known use of a crankshaft in a chain pump was featured in another one of al-Jazari's saqiya machines. The concept of minimizing the intermittency is also first implied in one of al-Jazari's saqiya chain pumps, which was to maximise the efficiency of the saqiya chain pump. Al-Jazari also constructed a water-raising saqiya chain pump that was run by hydropower rather than manual labour, though the Chinese were also using hydropower for chain pumps before him. Saqiya machines like the ones he described have been supplying water in Damascus since the 13th century, and were in everyday use throughout the medieval Islamic world.
Chain pumps were used in European mines during the Renaissance; mineralogist Georg Agricola illustrated them in his De re metallica (1556). They were used in dockyards, and several formed part of the Portsmouth Block Mills complex. Chain pumps were commonly used on naval vessels of the time to pump the bilges, and examples are known in the nineteenth century for low-lift irrigation.
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