ABSTRACT
According to the renowned Czech-Canadian scholar Vaclav Smil, “Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to get anything done”. Waterwheels became the most efficient converters of energy in the wood-based era and the early industrial period, opening new possibilities in a variety of fields from agriculture to mining. Waterwheels depended on moving water and steam engines on available clean freshwater to function. Waterwheels were one of the earliest kinds of machine to utilize non-human, renewable energy. Traditionally, the mechanical power of flowing or falling water was converted into rotary motion by waterwheels. In the early nineteenth century, it was converted by water turbines which were used since the 1880s to drive generators to produce electricity.
