Fitz Water Wheels
There'll Always be Water Wheels
By NEIL M. CLARK
Saturday Evening Post
December 3, 1955
Even in the atom age water wheels still provide power for
many farmers and
small, manufacturers. Here are some of the ingenious ways they are put to
use today.
Some folks like the atom. It is modern and stylish. John S. Fitz likes the raindrop, which is old and somewhat outmoded. Both are forces of nature, both are tiny, and both, Fitz agrees, pack a tremendous wallop -the atom when it bursts, the raindrop when it falls. The raindrop's wallop, he thinks, is easier to understand and cope with. So, others can build cyclotrons. He will go on building water wheels.
That's what his family has been doing for three generations. Samuel Fitz, his grandfather, started the Fitz Water Wheel Company at Hanover, Pennsylvania, in 1840, when water wheels were used everywhere to power American industry. John Fitz, his father, developed the steel water wheel, bringing it to high efficiency. John S. Fitz, the third in the succession, carried the business on when most water-wheel companies were folding. It is one of the few firms left in the United States making the old-style, non-turbine type of water wheels, and instead of dragging its heels in the wake of "progress," the company is doing very nicely.
It is amazing to learn through his guidance how many water wheels are still
turning in the year 1955; how many new ones are being bought; how many old
ones are being kept in working condition to furnish cheap, reliable power
for a great variety of purposes
"Dozens of mills." Fitz said recently, are using water wheels on
small water-power sites to do a business of a million or more a year. Many
of them earn better profit than some of their competitors who use wired power."
Fitz sits in a high backed swivel chair in a cluttered office in a building next to the water wheel factory. Operations in the factory are of the precision type. Fitz himself at seventy three is precise, dry, & starchy. He doesn't carry an extra ounce of fat on his bones. He never pounds on the desk. But he makes clear his profound convictions that small water powers and water wheels still have an important place in the nation's economy and will long have. He sees them holding their own and in some places corning back. "If," he told me, "you want to see what small batches of raindrops are doing for hundreds of farmers, and could do for thousands, with little cost or care, visit the Pennsylvania Germans."
I took the tip. Beyond the second creek south of White Horse, Fitz and I turned into a farm yard. The name on the mailbox was Stolzfus. The ground was soggy. Stephen Stolzfus nodded a shy welcome. "You'll need rubbers," he warned.
Stephen was wearing the flat black hat of the Amish man. He was about thirty. Big barns, large white house, well-mannered fields were testimony to thrifty generations preceding him and continuing, and the water wheel was evidence of thrift plus determination to use a worth-while tool regardless of fashion or sales talk.
The creek was tiny enough in places for a boy to jump across. Yet a good-sized pond had been collected behind a three-foot-high dam, and water from it was turning two water wheels. The far one was a neighbor's, the near one Stephen's and his father's.
Stephen's wheel, made of steel, smooth-running and noiseless, was forty-two inches in diameter, with a fifteen-inch face, and was mounted in an open-top concrete structure just big enough to allow its running room. It was undershot-that is, the water hit it near the bottom instead of going over the top. Water poured with force from behind the dam, filling the buckets, and the weight caused the wheel to turn merrily. A crank and rod connected the shaft to a large triangular frame hinged at one corner. This rose and fell with the wheel's motion, and pulled a "telegraph wire" back and forth. The wire crossed fields to the house, 1000 feet away.
"Come along," said Stephen; "we'll see it do work." On the kitchen porch he raised a trap door, revealing a forty-foot well. The back and forth motion of the wire was converted by simple gears into up-and-down power and applied to a pump. The latter was sucking up a small stream of icy water, emptying it into the four-inch-deep pan of a "cold box." Jars of foodstuffs stood in the water. "It keeps them as cold as a refrigerator," Stephen's wife said.
Overflow was piped to the barn. There it cooled milk in the milking shed; then vent on to fill a stock-watering tank. "A good system," Stephen said with pride. "We don't turn it off sometimes for a month."
"There is much upkeep?" "Hardly any. A drop of oil once a month." Our wheel has been here since the Forties. Neighbors have had theirs for fifty years."
Half a dozen of these miniature wheels were seen within a mile of Stephen's house. Hundreds are used.
Small water powers and the water wheels that used them are as much a part of American history as the pony express or the covered wagon. "The Industrial Revolution," John Fitz pointed out, "changed manufacturing from hand to machine work. It was powered mostly by water wheels." These wheels ground the pioneer's corn and wheat, sawed logs into boards, crushed apples into cider, made the country's first iron and the first mill-wrought fabrics, ground snuff, rolled hemp, made paper- the list of things done is a long. Along the Brandywine a century and a half ago, men named du Pont set up water-driven mills to grind gunpowder ingredients and modern industrial giant was born.
Eli Terry, the Connecticut clockmaker, boldly pioneered the use of water power to cut teeth in clock wheels previously done tediously by hand and set the pattern for the modern clock-and-watch industry. Cities grew up on water-power sites. An ancestor of John H. Patterson's ground the grain brought in oxcarts to his water-powered mill on the Miami River, in Ohio. A century later, peppery "John H." was creating the National Cash Register Company on almost the same spot, and Dayton was growing up around him into a city of 250,000.
Small waters in those days were used intensively. Sometimes a creek was dammed a dozen times within a mile, and the water was used again and again. A traveler of 1840 reported that eleven mills of various kinds were going full blast within the limits of little Piqua, Ohio, all powered by water from the canal and river. A Massachusetts miller cursed with insufficient water at certain seasons built three identical mills within a hundred yards of each other on the same stream, and during low-water periods used the highest mill Mondays and Tuesdays, the middle one Wednesdays and Thursdays, the lowest Fridays and Saturdays. By Monday, enough water had accumulated for the highest mill, and the cycle was repeated.
The power picture changed with the coming of efficient steam engines, internal combustion engines and electricity; and now, of course, there is talk of atomic and solar engines. "People thinking in billions," Fitz points out, "find it hard to value small waters. Only the mightiest, wildest rivers, such as the Columbia, Colorado, Snake, Tennessee or Niagara, they suppose, are worth harnessing."
But something important, he thinks, is lost by overlooking the little streams and the new developments that are making their use feasible again. He said, "A steel overshoot wheel" the type that takes the water at the top and is better for a good head of water "properly designed and installed, is far different from the wooden wheels which were the only ones our grandfathers had. Such a wheel can operate with upward of ninety per cent efficiency. We have built wheels forty feet in diameter. You'd think it would take tremendous strength to turn such a wheel. Actually, we consider them faulty unless a child can turn them by hand."
There have also been some extraordinary water-wheel developments. During the war, Fitz's company made 120 water wheels for the British Army.
What would a modern army want with water wheels? The British, Fitz says, parachuted them from planes to points behind enemy lines or into liberated zones. They were as tiny as they could be made and still do the work expected of them in fact, they measured barely four inches across. Each wheel, including an attached electric generator, weighed twelve and one half pounds. It was called an impulse wheel and was a perfect little water wheel.
The first thing people do in a bombed-out town," Fitz pointed out, "is restore the water supply. They have to, or die. Advance scouts usually found water in the mains of a ruined town or speedily got it there. These little impulse wheels can do things with a low flow. They are attached by a length of hose to any faucet. The water turns the wheel, the wheel operates the generator, producing electric current. We have tested the wheels at forty pounds' pressure, and they make 1800 revolutions per minute, producing enough electricity to keep three or four bulbs burning brightly.
"We weren't told how the British used theirs. The job was hush-hush. We supposed they charged storage batteries for walkie-talkie communication or things like that.
"Universities also use these impulse wheels. Theirs are usually larger. They use them in courses on hydraulics. We have recently shipped wheels to the universities of Louisiana and California, to the Naval Academy, and to the engineering college of Dacca University, in East Pakistan."
He explained what happened recently, in Marietta, a Pennsylvania town of about 2400 located on the banks of the Susquehanna River. A water shortage was brought on by the town's natural growth plus the location there of the Marietta Transportation Corps Depot. The town's water came from fifty-two never failing springs on the far side of the river, located in up and down country almost inaccessible except by jeep. The springs lie somewhat higher than the town, so that the water flows by gravity s through pipes on the bottom of the river. In order to increase the supply, two wells were drilled near the springs, but on a slightly lower level. The wells produced much of the wanted additional water. But a problem was posed.
The springs flowed; the wells didn't. How to get the water out of the wells and into the town reservoir without keeping a pump tender at that lonely spot night and day? Two Fitz water wheels came to Marietta's rescue. Spring water, bubbling toward the town reservoir, powers the water wheels. The wheels, in turn, operate pumps which transfer the newly tapped water supply from underground wells to the reservoir. The operation is automatic and nearly trouble-free. H. B. Lenhert, Jr., superintendent of the Marietta Gravity Water Company, admits that somebody goes over once in a while to oil what needs oiling. Quite a few communities, Fitz says, use big water-power installations to pump city water supplies.
There are still enough of the traditional types of water wheels in use and needing occasional repairs or renewal, and enough people who are learning to use them for the first time; to keep the Fitz plant busy. Some users are hobbyists who have estates and gardens and like to keep the old alive just because it is old and, they think, picturesque; but, in the main, the wheels are used because they furnish power cheaply and at low upkeep. For a look at a workaday enterprise that has been going for a long time, Fitz suggested a visit to Codorus Creek.
This stream meanders in sweetly rolling Pennsylvania countryside not far from Gettysburg's famous battlefield. In 1790, when Washington was President, a thrifty Mennonite named John Hershey built a stout stone gristmill on the West Branch of Codorus. It was not big-time, but was a substantial mill of the kind needed by a prospering community. Hershey built for comfort, with two fireplaces, one upstairs and one down. People coming to have grain ground made the mill a gathering place. Men and boys sometimes fished while waiting. Wives and daughters chatted and knitted inside by the open fires if it was cold, while the buhrstones turned by the water wheel ground their winter's flour for wheaten bread and their corn meal for johnnycakes, mush or Indian puddings.
Farmers seldom paid cash for the grinding. As they emptied grain into the hopper, they expected the miller to catch some for himself. Hershey's "toll box" held an eighth of a bushel.
That's the way it used to be. John Hershey, the builder, died in 1796. His son, also named John, succeeded him. This John had a daughter named Nancy. A thrifty young man named Peter Menges lived on the adjoining farm. Peter looked at the miller's daughter and thought her the girl for him. Nancy thought so, too, and they were married. When John the younger died at age sixty, his son-in-law bought the property and became the miller, and the Hershey mill became Menges Mills.
Time brought change, storm, war. Armies came and went in that vicinity. The Menges cattle were driven for safety to Columbia, thirty miles away, crossing the Susquehanna on the old covered bridge shortly before it was burned. Through all changes, sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of Peter and Nancy kept and ran the mill. So they still do, 165 years after the mill was built. Rev. David A. Menges and his younger brother, Robert, who run the mill now, showed their visitor exactly how they manufacture their flour, which is well thought of in that part of Pennsylvania and over the line in Maryland. They take pains to supply products as customers want them. Corn meal, they say, is not the same for Pennsylvanians and Marylanders. The former want the corn roasted before milling, so that it tastes slightly toasted; and it must be rich-yellow corn. Marylanders, only a whistle stop away, don't call that corn meal. For them, no roasting, and the corn must be white.
The waters of Codorus flow under the mill building. Two water wheels under the main floor are visible through trap doors or by a trip downstairs. The water is controlled by gates, and the miller can operate one wheel, both or neither. For wheat, steel-roller grinders are used. For corn, the Menges boys use the upper and nether millstones of Biblical parable and their grandfathers' time. They dress the stones themselves, an ancient art. Blacksmith Erwin Zartman, in nearby Spring Grove, sharpens and tempers the quickly dulled dressing tools.
****
The Menges mill has never gone in for food-fad business, which keeps some old water mills going nowadays. Their products are standard stuff for kitchens producing some of the world's finest breads, cakes and pies. If you can do with a spot of spatter bread, they say it's hard to beat this recipe:
