Early Hoists and Cranes

BIRTH OF SYSTEMATIC AGRICULTURE

Favorable climatic conditions stimulated hunters and gatherers to settle in the lower valleys of the Nile, Euphrates, Indus and Yellow Rivers of the Middle and Far East. The annual flow of rich mud allowed plants previously gathered over wide areas to be seeded and harvested systematically by men and women. Although seasonal flooding of the rivers brought new soil once or twice a year, it was necessary at other times to elevate water and send it through irrigation ditches. At first, simple levers ladled water from the rivers to the ditches. Next, came water wheels that raised greater volumes and were driven by human and animal power -- or by the flow of the current, itself. In these river deltas were invented the first wooden gears and the idea of the screw for lifting water.

A lever -- the shaduf -- the earliest device for lifting water was used in Egypt to transfer water from the Nile into irrigation ditches. This lever, with a fulcrum about five feet high, atop a short beam on two poles, contained a bucket on one end and a counterpoise on the other. One dipping, filling and emptying shaduf could move about 600 gallons a day to a height of about six feet. The levers were often used in a series to elevate water to still higher levels. First to challenge this balance device was likely the continous chain of buckets used in the famed hanging gardens of Babylon -- one of the Seven Wonders of the World. (Graphic Source: A History of Mechanic Inventions)

Chinese peasants living along the Yellow and Yangtse Rivers emulated those along the Nile, dipping the most precious commodity of the era -- water -- from the rivers into irrigation channels. The counterweighted lever in China was uniquely constructed of bamboo, native to the region. (Graphic Source: Chinese Technology in the 17th Century)