Eight things wind and water were made to do

Tilt a giant screw inside a tube with its foot in a river and turn it, and water seems to climb against gravity. Each turn traps a pocket of water between the spiral threads and walks it up the slope to spill out the top. The design is over two thousand years old, named for Archimedes, yet it still lifts water in irrigation and sewage works, and run backwards it now spins to make electricity.

The famous Dutch windmills were less about grinding grain and more about staying dry. About a third of the Netherlands sits below sea level, so windmills spun a scoop wheel that lifted water out of the diked fields, called polders, and dumped it toward the sea. Where the climb was steep, mills worked in a gang, each lifting the water a little higher up a staircase of canals.

A windmill only works when its sails point into the wind, and for centuries millers had to heave the whole cap around by hand with a long pole. In 1745 Edmund Lee added a fantail, a little second windmill mounted crosswise at the back. When the wind shifts it strikes the fantail, which turns gears that swing the cap until the sails face the wind again, then quietly stops itself.

In a mill only the upper runner stone turns; the bedstone beneath stays still, and the two never meet. They ride a hair apart, a gap no wider than a sheet of paper, set finer or coarser for the flour wanted. Each stone is carved with grooves called the dressing, and as they cross over each other they work like scissors, shearing the grain and sweeping the meal outward to the rim.

Long before the upright Dutch sails, the earliest known windmills turned on a vertical axis, like a revolving door. Built in the windy Sistan region of Persia around the ninth century, they had sails of reed matting set around a central shaft and were walled in, with an opening that funneled the wind onto one side only so the returning sails would not fight back. They ground grain on the famous hundred-and-twenty-day wind.

A tide mill borrows its power from the sea's rise and fall. As the tide floods in, water pushes through a one-way gate into a holding pond; at high tide the gate swings shut, trapping it. When the tide ebbs and the sea outside drops, the penned water is let out through a wheel and turns it. Because the tides answer the Moon, the mill could run roughly twice a day, a little later each time.

Traditional sails were wooden lattices spread with canvas that the miller furled or opened like a ship's sails to match the wind. In a gale a mill could run away, the sails whirling out of control until the friction of the racing wooden gears, or of the brake clamped on to stop them, threw off enough heat to ignite the timber and the flour dust in the air. Many old mills were lost exactly this way.