“Burden Waterwheel”

£24.00

High resolution digital image from our catalogue

The Burden Iron Works was an iron works and industrial complex on the Hudson River and Wynantskill Creek in Troy, New York. It once housed the Burden Water Wheel, the most powerful vertical water wheel in history. In order to find the necessary power to run the foundry, in 1851 Henry Burden, the owner, designed and constructed a 60-foot wheel. This was not the largest water wheel of its type, but likely the most powerful. A larger water wheel is at Laxey on the Isle of Man and at Greenock, Scotland. The Burden Wheel appears to have had more buckets. It was sixty-two feet in diameter and twenty-two feet in breadth and was supplied by a small stream. Burden originated a system of reservoirs along the creek to hold the water in reserve and increase the water-supply to power the mills. Burden’s wheel weighed 250 tons and could produce 500 horsepower when spinning 2.5 times a minute