Gallic born latin poet by the name of Decimus Magnus Ausonious, described a stone cutting water powered mill in his lyric poem about the Mosella (Moselle) river in Gaul (now France), written circa 360. This water powered mill was cutting marble for the city of Treves. Mills of this type may have been used throughout the roman empire for several hundred years.
Circa 360 CE
Decimus Magnus Ausonious
- Hierapolis sawmill – Wikipedia
The Hierapolis sawmill is believed to be a Roman water-powered stone sawmill at Hierapolis, Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). Dating to the second half of the 3rd century AD, the sawmill is considered the earliest known machine to combine a crank with a connecting rod, although neither clear ancient scripts nor engineering drawings were yet found to support this theory.
- Sawmill – Wikipedia
A sawmill or lumber mill is a facility where logs are cut into lumber. Before the invention of the sawmill, boards were made in various manual ways, either rived (split) and planed, hewn, or more often hand sawn by two men with a whipsaw, one above and another in a saw pit below.
- Roman Mills (Article) – Ancient History Encyclopedia
The Romans constructed mills for use in agriculture, mining and construction. Around the 3rd century BCE, the first mills were used to grind grain.
- 23 – Society for the History of Medieval Technology and Science
Showing a picture of the Villard saw (ill. 1) he described it as the earliest drawing we had of a semi-automatic tool (alluding to the feed back mechanism which advanced the timber to the blade) but not the earliest known such saw, one being recorded at Evreux in 1204.
- Ancient Roman Industrial Watermills – YouTube