Millwrighting has been on the Heritage Craft Association Red List of Endangered Crafts since 2019. Without increased opportunities and interest for millwrighting in Britain, the number of mills will slowly decline. To bring the craft into the public eye and highlight its importance in the preservation of our milling heritage, we have put together an…
Alan Stoyel (1939-2021), a miller at Venn Mill, Oxfordshire, millwright and author of milling books The Alan Stoyel Foundation Collection is one of the four foundation collections of the Mills Archive Trust. Alan played an essential role in setting up the Mills Archive. His collection contains vital technical information and documentation of watermills across the…
Though the use of iron in millwrighting is not as traditional as that of wood, iron has firmly cemented its place as a valuable material in the craft. Two types of iron have been used in millwrighting, these being wrought iron and cast iron. Wrought iron was used mainly for bearings and hinges, as it was…
John Smeaton F.R.S (1724-1792) by Mather Brown. Credits Science Museum Group. John Smeaton, Civil Engineer. By his definition, John Smeaton was not a millwright but a ‘civil engineer’. However, his contributions to millwrighting are too influential to ignore. Smeaton was born in Leeds in 1721. He attended the Leeds Grammar School before becoming a mathematical…
Portrait of John Rennie by Sir Henry Raeburn, 1810. Credit: National Galleries of Scotland John Rennie was born in 1761 in East Lothian in Scotland. Rennie showed a natural taste in engineering at a young age and trained in the workshop of the famous Scottish millwright Andrew Meikle on his dad’s farm in East Lothian…
Vincent Pargeter at David’s Tower, Jerusalem in 2007 Vincent was born in Islington in late 1943. After attending school, he worked in Westminster Bank from 1961 until 1969. At the age of 27, he decided to leave to start working on mills. Vincent had been interested in windmills since the age of 5, as a…
Since mills first appeared in Britain, the main material that has been used to construct them has been wood. The first mills reported in Britain date back as early as the Domesday Book in 1086. Though there is no mention of windmills, it is confirmed that both water and animal powered mills existed at this…
Ulrich Hütter was an Austrian-German engineer and professor who pioneered in the generation of electricity through wind power. After completing school in Salzburg, Hütter studied mechanical engineering and shipbuilding at the Vienna University of Technology from 1930 to 1936. In 1932, during his time in Vienna, Hütter joined the NSDAP, which later become the Nazi…
Hermann Honnef was a German inventor and a visionary for the use of wind power for energy. At the age of fifteen, Honnef began an apprenticeship at the metalwork company Jacob Hilgers Bruckenbau in Rheinbrohl. By the age of seventeen, Honnef was a heading one of the company’s offices. At the same time, he attended…
Albert Betz was a German physicist and a pioneer of wind turbine technology. Betz was born in Schweinfurt in Bavaria in 1885. After graduating as a naval engineer in 1910, Betz became a researcher at the University of Göttingen aerodynamics laboratory in 1911. He was awarded a PhD in 1919 for his work on ship…
