II Technology and Culture
The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology
•
juLY 1988, VoLUME 29, NuMBER 3
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS I INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUIDRS
Manuscripts should be submitted in triplicate. Submissions are made with implied assurances that the material-in substance as well as form-has not previously been published, nor is it concurrently under consideration elsewhere. Drafts should either be processed on a letter-quality printer or typewritten on 8V2 x II white bond of standard weight, on one side only. They should be double-spaced throughout, including The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill all abstracted quotations and the footnotes, which are to be numbered consecutively on separate pages following the text. Margins should be at least I inch on both sides, 2 inches top and bottom, and the right-hand margin should neither be justified nor JOHN DANIELS AND CHRISTIAN DANIELS have any hyphenated words. Illustrations should be numbered in the order they are referred to in the text, and the placement of each with respect to the text should be precisely indicated; halftones should be in the form of publication-quality glossy prints; line drawings should either be originals or glossies. Captions should be listed sequen Joseph Needham has described the cotton gin and sugarcane mill tially (double-spaced) on a separate page and include full information on sources and as "the ancestors of all steel-rolling mills, mangles and paper or textile acknowledgments. Tables and charts should each be on a separate sheet, with double machinery."' The ancestry and development of the sugarcane roller spaced captions and full source information; each one should be numbered and titled, and all arithmetic carefully verified. Footnotes are to follow the format exemplified in mill are clearly important for the history of technology, but they have any current issue of Technology and Culture; please pay special attention to the way been the subject of ~ur2rising,.<;!ijerpma for over thir_ty J:.~ars.The periodical articles are cited and to the method of referring back to previous citations. Eng~_!l~lteeakingwq,rld until recently has accepted as c!sugar~ was inve~~c;,tr_o,_~.t;S!~!eJJ:l..Sicily specified here, refer to the University of Chicago Press's Chicago Manual of Style, thir inj449 without any evidence of two-roller ~illi~z.J!!].!:!.!'.2£e·In 1955, teenth edition ( 1982). a Brazilian scholar, M<;>~<_:yrSO_!l!:e.l!..-~~~ira, dem_onstrated that this Because the manuscript evaluation process is anonymous, the only place an author's name should appear is on a separate title page; manuscripts cannot be sent to referees dogma, first formuJ.i.iteq_ by Edmund VOl.'!._ Lippmann in 1890, was if submitted in a form that renders the author's identity obvious. Full consideration of manuscripts is in all cases contingent on their conformity to the above instructions.
COPYRIGHT POLICY JoHN DANIELS was a sugarcane researcher in Fiji for twenty years, the last ten as direC"iO"r of agncultural research for the Fiji Sugar Corporation and its predecessor, The code on the first page of an article in this journal indicates the copyright owner's CSR Limited Australia. He returned to CSR in Australia in 1973 and participated in consent that copies of the article may be made beyond those permitted by Section 107 research in sugar technology and information science until retiring as manager of or 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law provided that copies are made only for personal or information services in 1986. He and Christian Daniels are worki~aljistory of internal use or for the personal or internal use of specific clients and provided that su~rtechnology. CHRISTIAN ~·IELSis a lecturer in Chinese at Sh.:i]i~~;;~w~~ the copier pays the stated per-copy fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. "hi:ry Operations Center, 27 Congress Street, Salem, Massachusetts 01970. To request per en'SU'mverslty, i'5kayama, and a research fellow of the Toyo Bunko, Tokyo. He has mission for copying for general distribution, for classroom use, for advertising or published articles on the history of the premo~~,g2z!~i~~~';,.~.'tS!.\~j!)_clustry promotional purposes, for creating new collective works, or for resale, kindly write W> and is the coeditor and translator of State and Society in China: Japanese Perspectives on Permissions Department, The University of Chicago Press, 5801 South Ellis Avenue, Ming-Qing Social and Economic History (Tokyo, 1984). He is also a collaborator on Joseph Chicago, Illinois 60637. If no code appears on the first page of an article, permission Needham's Scienre and Civilisation in China project and is drafting the section on agro to reprint may be obtained only from the author. industrial technology (e.g., sugar, indigo, oil crops). The authors thank Dr. Charles While it is our policy to require the assignment of copyright on most journal articles, Davis, formerly general manager technology, CSR Limited, Dr. Alex Keller of the we do not usually request assignment of copyright for other contributions such as book University of Leicester, and Dr. Joseph Needham of the East Asian History of Science reviews and communications. Although the copyright to such a contribution may re main with the author, it is understood that, in return for publication, the journal has Library, Cambridge, for a critical reading of an early version of the manuscript. They the nonexclusive right to publish the contribution and the continuing right, without also express their appreciation for valuable suggestions from the Technology and Culture limit, to include the contribution as part of any reprinting of the issue and/or volume referees and acknowledge stimulus from the publications of Drs. J. H. Galloway and of the journal in which the contribution first appeared by any means and in any format, Stuart Schwartz cited in the text. Finally, they thank CSR Limited for encouragement including computer assisted storage and readout, in which the issue and/or volume and help with information services. may be reproduced by the publisher or by its licensed agencies. 1Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4, Physics and Physical Technology, pt. 2, Mechanical Engineering (Cambridge, 1965), p. 92. © 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/88/2903-0007$0 1.00 494 John Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 495
2 cle~o.Erect.Nevertheless, the controversy has continued be tative English-language publications. 6 In addition, the controversy was cause of the immense prestige of von Lippmann and because of the stili Q.e_i[lg~J{aill_i~~~in. Portugl:l_~s~'!~!a~c: _a..s_ ! 980by Antonio Barros considerable authority of Noel Deerr, who independently advanced de Castro and continues with other English-speaking authors.7 the dogma in a series of piilihcatiOns culminating In h1s widely used O!!!.. ~s;.,.t.i~es are threefold: to review the evidence so that the 3 Tlie History of Sugar (1949-50). An additional factor has been the S,!silian cJa.i.JEfor the origin of the three-roiier sugarcane miii can be genera 1 oran n Is -s eakin scholars in this field about finaiiy discarded in ~of a New World orig!D; to argue an_"i~i mills. ~oller~basicaiiy consist of two..Imx.qlldQ:.lLl.!QerSJ?~.S.~ES.!?se 2 together anctgeared so that.lhey rotate in OJ2J2~~-ili!:~E.i2.!2.s;Ma Moacyr Soares Pereira, A Origem dos Cilindros na Moagem da Cana (Rio de Janeiro, terials introducea between the rotating cylinders are flattened. Thest 1955 ). So,a~Pers.ira's.fuL tion .from investigating the effects of irn 1c wer,e acceler first record appears in th!,.Jer_usal~!JlTalmud, which was written by 18 ated at that time and most 1 e y caused the revival. the ~l)t!J-.Q'•although mterpolations continued until the early 7th The origin and dating of the three-roller sugarcane mill is clearly century.22 This technology survived until the 12th century or later in very important to a number of debates in the history of technology, Palestine. 23 It is not clear whether the mortars were exclusively hand - ~,...,...... ~<..;.~""~' • the sugar industry, and the eventual development of plantation Amer ica. In addition to these problems it is necessary to revise the widely rTiilror-water-driven trip-hammer,.::.. T quoted accounts of sugarcane roller mills given by Haudricourt and .::_rn its later sta~tfie metri'O'Crwas modified by pressing the broken Daumas 19 and Forbes,20 who claim a Near East origiiiWi'tTiOut pro- cane ii'i"beam or screw presses, rather than boiling it. 25 In our view d~ingant. evi~ - -.. this change was prooa5ry rnff'Im:ed by the shortage of fuel through general deforestation. The washing/diffusion process requires larger Sugarcane Milling in the Mediterraiuan amounts of energy to boil off added water but is very effective in 26 extracting sugar, and it would be discarded reluctantly. A 2,C::~tl.':'2:. Sugarcane was introduced into Europe by the Arabs, and several scholars have mapped its progress from Persia in the 8th century to sta_gh PJoce~;ei?.~a;e: .. ~.f.?,!!O.dJ:..b.e..J.9.!!!..<;:_c:;lU,uD::,_ The QJ,Q~,wasJii:st crus e with..a.J.~e...e.dgerllQ.IJ.er [9.,ll2,wed by a secoy.Jl,ary~pressing Spain and Morocco in the -lOth. Its passage is well marked because in This tech!,1.2logy ~te.Qd,_~~.!.frorn China through to sugarcane manufacture, a,l£!.l~l!:!:.~~eltir~g_,is held to be one of the ~ major_!:,~tor~·responsible f~-~lle general deforestation O"iihe-Medi· ten:i!,Us.a,.Q...regioif.'lT 22S. Avitsur, "Water Power in Traditional Sugar and Olive Oil Production in the Land of lsrael;'Tn""Tra,:;:,;t;~;;,"Third Symposium, the International Molinological Society, Nether lands (Amsterdam, 1973), pp. 175-83, see p. 176; dating of the Talmud from Encyclo paedia (n. 18 above), 21: 768-70. 23Albertus Agnensis, Gestae Dei per Francos (1108), p. 270, through W. Falconer, "Sketch of the History of Sugar, in the Early Times, and through the Middle Age~:';Memoire< of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manche the invention t_h,e vertical sugarcgrain mill, the mold ver versatilis, which has been lifted directly from the 1567 edition of Vi satilis, was used to crush sugarcane in the Middle Ages and the Re tr~1us.33In the center we see a screw press and on the right sugar naissance.30 The evidence rests on a ~inti~gof Sicilian su~ boiling and the production of sugar loaves. Von Lippmann and Deerr manufact~J.llJ.he-Nava....Rep~.a-~us(ca. 1585). The most have accepted the mill as an authentic mola versatilis in a plausible 34 widely reproduced painting of sugar m~nufacturetthis is what Dutch context. We estimate that the minimum size of the pieces of sugar cane shown in the picture are 7 em long by 3 em in diameter, and as "'\ such they would never feed into a mola versatilis from a hopper. Our PF..!!~£:l1i~M\m~ngSh!IIJTJi'.fu (Mmw.&,•!J~!'.~~,n,.:m~arcai?;d}/ ca. 11§9l.,.P· 4o, text mjianting shier zhong..s.d. Cao Yi!l_f~hanghai,1921); fr;!r Sicil~M~.~s.sf!iq,. personal experience with modern cutter grinders indicates that con 1 .(Wi~mmgh Karl Ritter, "Uber die geographische Verbreltung es Zuckerrohrs tinuous pressure from a piece of wood would be absolutely necessary ..,.._ (Saccharum officinarum) in der alten Welt vor dessen Verpflanzung in die neue Welt," for feeding-and it would be a most difficult or impossible task. Agri:. Abhandlungen der Koniglichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu}!,.,~Philologische und His cola describes and illustrates the grinding of ore in a mill of this type torische, aus demjahre 1839 (1841): 306-412, see 402;(l:or S~a!gj...Abu'lI,iha1;r (115.,£) Which had a mechanism to raise and lower the millstone. 35 There is thro~!!.!;ippmann(n. 2 above), p. 244. These citations ave descriptive evidence that is backed up by data from archaeological sites:tfor 'i'e:@.p.obert Mignan, Travels no evidence for this. in the.Nova Reperta illustration, and there is no in Chaldea (London, 1829), pp. 304-9ro~Palestine . P. Abel, Revue Biblique (1910): reason to believe that a mola versatilis ever crushed sugarcaiie}ri 552-54, Avitsur (n. 22 above), p. 178;' f~us, arie-Louise von Wartburg, "The Th~t step was su pposeoto Tiave oeen.the1nven1Ton orthe three _ Medieval Cane Sugar Industry in Cyl?, s: Results o ecent Excavation," The Antiquaries cylinder vertical roller mill in Sicily in 1449. Von Lippmann and Deerr's journal63 (1983): 298-314;., orMorocc , Paul Berthier, Un Episode de l'Histoire de la Canned Sucre: Les Anciennes Sucenes u aro et Leurs"'ftlSeaux Hydrauliques, 2 vols. (Rabat, hypothesis was first ~llengedby S'o~ Per_til3•.~-~ -~~ntto Sicily 37 1966), 1: 143. The e~un~er was)m2_~!}as massara (e,ressl a~ hajfl.r,!SW!.'fi.l.l.n4rabic, in 1952 to investigate their sources. Deerr had only one authority both being descriptive names for the same machine. See Cagw;ln IJa~"-IJi_,Storia dello (also cited by von Lippmann), and it is worth quoting in its entirety . . ,.Zucchero Siciliano (Rome, 1982), p. 50, for a discussion on massara and Berthier (above, g to indicate the quality of the evidence. The passage comes from the ;))! ---·" p. 237) for hajar. Massara is first recorded in Ibn Ha al (978) (iilhard Wiedemann, Opere_ Sq}Jc o[Abat.t_~~Gregorio.J.E_§~~~tand reads: "E ·",/lufsiitu zur Arabischen Wissenscha tsgesc zc te, vols. ew Yor , 970], 2: 180). HW!g_. Pietro Ranzano, scrittore dei tempi, assicura, che Pietro .§.E~s.iale,il first appears in an Arag~apyrusdated~OO. Jean Sauvaget suggests that the hajar is a roller mill (Annates de l'1nstitut d'Etudes Orientales 7 [1948]: 29-38), quale era stato presidente del regno nel 1449, avea piantato di can but Berthier (above, p. 237) rightly refutes this concept. The edg,e runner thus app~ars,_ namele Ia deliziosa campagna detta dei Ficarazzi, ed ivi egli il primo ., in_!J:l.t:._Medite1T3Tlean_duJiQ&....the.-8th J:Cntur,y and probabiX eyolxcd [U!m..l~-":wla avea fabricato un~':_ detta vQ!giirm_en~t;J~!llPf:oJ~~-~tirare gli ~,~oor-··olearia of the Hellenistic world. A. G. Drachmann, Ancient Oil Mills and Presses (Copen- 1 ''h~2},p:"'42;t;:;-a;;scri~dwhat can be interpreted as a small edge runner, for crushing olives, on a sarcophagus in the Palazzo Rondanini, Rome. The edge~c:.r. appears to have had a s.~ti::_Q!:igj!_liftoGI•ina bt!lwEEii [email protected] :;1;)0 (!Seedham [n. I above], p. 403). 28Animal-driven ed!j"e runners remained ru:gp1inent until.t,b.s,.late 16th century in 32C. A. Browne, "Dutch Cane Sugar Loaves;' The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Man- the N~rr.t*"~Jiwj~~mills,when animal-driven, had v;-y_~l~•:r'.sy ufacturer 65 ( !920): 402. ...'" geari~g, ···- ·~charlesCoulston Gillispie, A Diderot Pictorial Encyclopedia . ·.. from "L'Encyclopedie, 33Deerr, History (n. 3 above), 2:535. ou Dictionnaire Raisonne des Sciences, des Artes et des Metiers" of Denis Diderot (New York, 34 Von Lippmann (n. 2 above), p. 413; Deerr, History (n. 3 above), 2:535. 1959), pl. 23. 35 Geor_g!us Agricola, De R,!_})!etallica, trans. Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry 30 Von Lippmann (n. 2 above), p. 413; Deerr, History (n. 3 above), 2:535. Hoover (NewYork, 1950), p. 294. 31For example, von Lippmann (n. 2 above), frontispiece; Deerr, History (n. 3 above), 36 Von Lippmann (n. 2 above), p. 179, and Deerr, History (n. 3 above), 2:535, have vol. I, pl. 6; Trasselli (n. 27 above), p. 129; Singer et al. (n. 20 above), vol. 2, The identified the "Persian millstone" of sugarcane processing as a grain mill. However, the Mediterranean Civilizations and the Middle Ages c. 700 B.C. to c. A.D. 1500 (Oxford, 1956), archaeological data and literary sources already given (n. 27 above) refute this. p. 372, fig. 340. 37Soares Pereira (n. 2 above). "502 John Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 503 45 Z1.!£sP.. is the complete statement, and the von Lippmann/ described edge runners about this ti_!!le. Bex:thier.has recorded-edge ~his 46 Deerr inference obviously depends on the definition of a trappeto and runners in archaeological sites in Mor~ug;~r.<;.ane..areas.. T~~ whether there is more information in Ranzano--although this is not f!!:~t_me_llti.<:>!lofsugar~U~ulliJlip._g_Ji.~b_£edure.. c_?n~.~.i-~g Trasselli and his prefacer, OraziO ancila, assure us that the sugarcane of edg~ d..h~ti!;_pJ:.essiog.We will call this the Med- iterranean technol -···~-..--- -· ··· ··· r.2ll,e~ro 38"And Pietro Ranzano, writer of the time, affirms that Pietro Speciale, who had in 1449 been Head Prefect, had planted sugarcane in the delightful countryside commonly 'i referred to as Ficarassi, and there he was the first to build a machine to extract sugars 45Von Wartburg (n. 27 above); Malcolm Letts, The Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff which was known in the vernacular as the trappeto." Gregorio (n. 18 above), p. 753. Knight ... (London, 1946), p. 99. 39Soares Pereira (n. 2 above), pp. 19-21. (We have also checked Ranzano.) 46Berthier (n. 27 above), p. 143. 40Ibid., p. I I. 47Franci!,.~illughbX.,:'ARelation ofji Voyage Made through the Great Part of Spain," 41Trasselli (n. 27 above). in Observations Toporsraphical. Moral, and Physiological: Made in a journey through Part of 42Ibid., pp. xiv, 249. I the Low-Countries, John Ray (London, 1673), pp. 466-99, esp. pp. 477-79. Two-roller 43In Sicily, sugarcane was chopped up to feed edge runners and static presses. The ho~d..b)l'..static pressing, contin\!e,d.Jlt,ke.~Q!il~t.h<:;...JP~Qp~!Ji·i, ! stalks were fed whole into roller mills and some edge runners. Therefore chopping nt;t century in S[ii;; see the tra"'slat~omJoseph-Antoi!'e V~!*l'sA~":.~!l::Z. .. cane at this time indicates that roller milling was not used. See von Lippmann (n. 2 6eneral (1765-,Jlli 'Thomas Spaulding m £."Merton Coulter, Georgia's Disputed Ruins above), pp. 412-14, and Deerr, History (n. 3 above), 1:78-79, for chopped cane and - "'(Cftapel Hill, N.C., 1937), p. 257. For the two-roller horizontal mill that Napoleon edge runners in the mid- to late 16th century. Bonaparte's experts· found in 19th-century Egypt, see illustration in Watson (n. 21 44Ladislao Reti, "A Postscript to the Filarete Discussion," Technology and Culture 6 above), p. 29. ---- ~---··.. ··- '•,_(1965): fig. 4 (~eenpp. 434 and 435) for illust~ indebted to Dr. Alex •son Asian origin, Father Jean Baptiste Labat, Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de /'Amerique, Keller for kindly allowing us to read his translation in manuscript of the sugar section 2 vols. (Paris, 1724), I :226 (written 1696); Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on of the "Juanelo Codex," which gives the information about the animal-driven version. the Kingdom of New Spain'; 4 vols. (London, 1811), 3:3; Methodio Maranhao (n. 2 above); HisP.aniola, origin, P. L. Simmon FIG. 2.-Drive and gearing for horizontal (a-e) and vertical (j-i) two-roller sugarcane mills; nonscale drawings to indicate the generic technologies involved. Sources: (a) Deerr, History (n. 3), vol. 1, pl. 5; (b) ibid., pl. !Slower; (c) and (d) gears borrowed from water-lifting machinery and what Thorkild Schiflller (Roman and Islamic Water-Lifting Wheels [Odense, 1973], p. 15) calls radial cogs and parallel cogs, respectively. For sugar cane applications, see (c) Watson (n. 21), p. 29; (d) fig. 4; (e) Fraginals (n. 13), p. 104 (a three-roller mill); (/) Rolph (n. 113); (g) Deerr, History (n. 3), 1: fig. 2; (h) Baxa and Bruhns (n. 73), between pp. 228 and 229; (i) fig. 8. The t.hLt:.!:!.:IDll~s.seeds with attached cotton the argument that: fluff, is fed between the rollers. The distance between these is adjusted The sugarcane roller mill evolved from the primitive cotton gin, so that the cotton seeds will not pass through the rollers and drop on which has two horizontal rollers (see fig. 1) and dates from about A.D. 1 the feeding side. In the technology that survived into the 20th century, 1100. the machines had helical, elongated spiral worms or cog gears, or no The. first sugarcane mills had two manually powered, horizontal gears at all. 50 rollers. They were merely scaled-up versions of the cotton gin (see Joseph Needham has pointed out that the cotton gin and the sugar fig. 2a) and were probably develo ed in India ab 500. cane roller mill use the same generic technology, and, as quoted pre The two-roller honz m1 was st powered hydrau 1cally (see viously, he suggests that they were "the ancestors of all steel-rolling fig. 2b}, because the gearing for an animal drive is complex (see fig. mills, mangles and paper or textile machinery." He places the cotton 0 2c, d). The .!rydraulic version probag_IX evolved in the Ne}X.World about gin as primary and their joint origin tentatively in India.51 Haudri- 1520...... -- ~ 5"Needham, ibid., pp. 122-24. '~'"T.hetwo-roller mill had to be converted fro.2!. ho,riz..o~seefig. SIIbid., pp. 92, 204, note f. In this paper we use the term "generic technology" as 2c, d) to~tical-axislayout (see fig. 2 f-i) in order to obtain a simple outlined by Alan R. Fusfeld, "How to Put Technology into Corporate Planning;' '[ech: '\ ani~tl-d_tivenmas;Qine. This is prol!ably a Chinese contribution from n~(l978): 51-55, to indicate the fundamental components of the tech· ·7 · the ate 16th century. - nologies concerned. 506 John Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 507 court and Daumas have essentially the same ideas as Needham but used to describe a machine that consists of a weighted box which is place the sugarcane mill as primary and the likely center of origin in movable by means of cylinders built into its base. It is used to flatten the Near East. The sugarcane mills and gins with which they were cloth.58 This type of manganello could be used to gin cotton in the acquainted had the cylinders linked b)!.l>;!;~nugearing_. They state that fashion of a single roller. the "existence of the screw which the Greeks were acquainted with, There is additional early evidence from China. Paul Pelliot shows permits us to situate the invention of these devices in the near East that cotton was introduced into China (Fujian and Guangdong) from in the period from the seventh to the tenth centuries, when sugarcane the south via Hainan Island during the 12th century. At first, the cultivation began to spread."52 Forbes has given a similar scenario.53 method of ginning was exactly as depicted in the Ajanta paintings, a The occurrence of worm gearing in the machines has had the op single roller disintegrating cotton on a board.59 This process contin posite effect on Needham, who wonders "whether the worm (and ued until the early 14th century when W~~~.describeda two hence the screw) did not originate in the first place in India rather roller ungeared cottOUgl~./u.UlUlt3..~0 (See fig. 1.) This than Greece." As the first cotton gins in China did not have gears, tWO-roller machine was introduced into Songjiang prefecture in the Needham suggests that "on entering China the cotton gin left its worm lower Yangzi region from Hainan Island in 1295 or 1296 by the Taoist 54 61 gear behind." In 19t~enturyIndia there were examples of un nun Huang. geared cotton gins and sugarcanWool, Raw Silk and Indigo in India (London, ince, see Nishijima Sadao, "Chugoku shoki mengyo no keisei to sono kozo" (The for 1836), pp. 294-97 and three pis. For an ungeared horizontal two-roller sugarcane mill, mation of the early Chinese cotton industry), in Chugoku Keizaishi Kenkyu (Studies in see Deerr, History (n. 3 above), vol. I, pl. 5. Chinese economic history) (Tokyo, 1966), pp. 805-72. This article was revised from 56 D. Schlingloff, "Cotton Manufacture in Ancient India;· journal of the Economic and a version in Orientalica 2 (1949) and has been translated by Linda Grove in....§.!!:.l~nd'•· Social History of the Orient 17 (1974): 81-90. Society in China, ed. Linda Grove and Christia~i~ls(Tokyo, 1984), pp. 17-77. See 57Maureen Fennell Mazzaoui, The Italian Cotton Industry m the Later Middle Agm 1100- ~· 20-23 for translations of relevant passages in the two Chinese texts mentioned 1600 (Cambridge, 1981), p. 74 and p. 192, n. I. above. 508 john Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 509 These data are consistent with diffusion from a point of origin in India about the same time as the manganello appears in Italy and pose the question of a European versus an Indian origin. That problem is merely academic in our investigation, however, as the cotton gin was present in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and Asia at the time of the development of the sugarcane roller mill in the early 16th century. The Development of the Two-Roller !f_orizo"l~qJ-~u_gfJicaneMill The most rimitive sugarcane mills were two,-roller, horizont.al.JJ!l ~d, and han riven...J!..QQ..L<:Semhl~d..,scal.ed,upcotton gins. They have ~enrecorded only in northern India and persisted there until ...the 19th century~(See fig. 2a.) As nQ!;_tlilndia from Punjab to B~ngal J was a major~ and cotton-producing area, It IS the JIIW' !j~~ 11ocation whence the sugarcane roller mill developed from the cotton ( gi~outh India is not a contender; although sugarcane was grown for chewing, in the 16th century most sugar was produced from palms 64 or imported. Our most likely date for the i~ntionpfthe two-roller FIG. 3.- Th£..!olh.JW!_n ani,.~al-~riy_~.!'mo.r,g.r. and e.estlli-n:!.U1.f.!2!P-~<;!ia, with a field ~· horlzonr;J.. mi\~ India is aroun{J§OO.:. although the first firm of sugarcane ~ed on the nght. Sugarcane pieces are dropped into the mortar, , datmg o roller milling is with the observations of Careri in 1695. The the rock weights on the beam pull the pestle against the mortar, and the rotating pestle horizontal form in geared and ungeared configurations extended over grinds juice from the sugarcane. This is a detail from a folio of an unpublished Jain manus':!:ipt, the Maha-Purana, copied at Palam, near Delhi, i!l,[email protected] is the first known north )n~iaand survived until the late 19th century when it was ~tlon of a kolhu as well as the earliest representation ot a sugarcane mill in the gradually replaced by two-roller vertical iron mills constructed in Eu- world. (Thanks to Dr. Saryu Doshi, author of Masterpieces of Jain Painting [Bombay, 1985], for providing a slide of the folio, courtesy of the Trustees of the Digambara rope.£-.a£fir, a t;vo-roller, wooden, vertica~il!,eoweredwith elongat~d Jain Bada Mandir, Jaipur.) ,.. worm &..,eat.!.S:.!:~duallyextendecl from Goa mto central and south India iS'tli'e"sugarcane industry expanded. The concept was most probably A development period of 400 years from the cotton gin to the ..., ~l!i!Jntro 63Lalla~J....::§_ugar-MiJkingin A~ientIndia;• [oJ!,U'al oflhe Economic and Social ~-·--- ··-···------..,...,..'"'" ..... History ofthe_Orientl.iJ.2.64): 57-72, details su~arcanegrowing_in ancient nprth India. 1 Cotton was grown in north :l'ii'<'lr.!--by the ancient fndus civilizations, Harappa and the 19th century (Watt, pp. 195, 199,219,222, 234, 236,237,307, 312). In north India Mohenjo-daro (Bridget and Raymond Allchin, The Rise of Civilisation in India and Pakistan the more primitive horizontal form resembling the cotton gin prevailed and was pow [Cambridge, 1982], p. 191). Irfan Habib, An Atlas of the Mughal Empire (Delhi, 1982), ered by gears similar to those used in the "chain of pots" water-lifting machine, the maps 4b, 6b, Bb, lOb, lib, 12b, show the large volume of sugarcane and cotton growing saqiyd or Persian Wheel (see Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study across north India about 1600. (London, 1976], p. 213, pl. 119 for the saqfyd gearing, and fig. 2d for the sugarcane 64 European visitors to south India in the 16th century r~e4 nlfijat ~sg~s mill). This clumsy sugarcane mill survived into the late 19th century. The reason for the different configurations, horizontal in the north, vertical in the center and south, being produce~onu>al~Gopal,ibid., p. 68); in the 19th century palms still pro duced more sugai'tl'ian sugarcane in Madras state (Watt (n. 26 above], pp. 230, 235). was probably due to differences in water-lifting machinery. In the north the same Sugar was imported from Bengal in the 16th century (Caesar Frederick [1567], through village carpenters built this machinery and sugarcane mills, using the same generic K. A. Nilakanta Sa~ History of South India [Oxford, 1976], p. 336), and large quan technology, saqiyd gearing (Watt, p. 304). This resulted in horizontal mills. In central tities were still being imported in the 18th century (William Milburn, Oriental Commerce, and south India irrigation was effected by lifting water from wells using a large skin 2 vols. [London, 1813], 2:270). bucket pulled up by animal power, or flooding from rivers (Watt, pp. 205, 216, 239); 65For Careri, see Surendranath Sen, Indian Travels ofThevenot and Careri (New Delhi, the carpenters, not having any vested interests, used the more mechanically efficient 1949), p. 169. The vertical configuration with elongated worm gears does not appear vertical mill. The history of terminology of irrigation equipment in India is discussed in the northern Indian provinces apart from one small area in Bengal (Watt (n. 26 in detail by Lallanji Gopal, "Aragha~~-thePersian Wheel," in his Aspects of History of above], p. 277), but it extended into all of India south of the Gangetic floodplain by Agriculture in Ancient India (Varanasi, 1980), pp. 114-68. 510 John Daniels and Christian Daniels and oil seeds that it survived in cottage industries until the 20th cen ,.._ "... .:" c -~ tury. This was undoubtedly due to the simplicity of the drive of the :E~ kolhu and the complexity of an animal-driven horizontal roller mill. 66 :; E E ~ The horizontal two-roller mill is a simple machine when operated b().:; .5 v manually or water driven (fig. 2a, b). In the maJority of situations, :;-5 where animal drive is necessary, the gearing is far more complicated "Z~ ~"' (as is shown in fig. 2c, d). The schematic drawings fail to give the effect ~ "' ~ H o how clums these soly.QQ.p.s_arein practice; an actual mill still extant E 5 0 0 in 2Q.t 1!1TY ndia is shown in figure' 4.67 ftg. 211.) J:: u (Co.eWim ce-i 0 . These animal- n urns that they did not im ·.o b(l ~:.c mediately replace the kolhu in India or the edge runner in the New 0..-o ~ c World. The roller mill gained ascendancy only when simple vertical "0 ~ ~0 forms with gears were developed about 1600. Th..;, Chinese had a Co ~"' ;;;:..... I~ e runner from at least the 11th centur , whicitwas--adapt&r ... ~ ;:~< to larg smal S(;a erations. In ~n t e Q!inese had..~ ~"".,_ca. u ~ ~.QJ.e.ap~~~!:_!!as:::~~;:ha diffu_si~which was 8 ~g} more efficient m extractton- her eqmpment. In summary, ""- while the sugar industry remained a cottage industry supplying a small ~11 ~ ;l 0 c surplus to domestic markets, there was no vital need to improve mill ~-. c >- ing in India or China. ]~ modit market for sugar expanded in Europe, China, >"> ~~ ·;; ..... and India early in the t century, eman mcreased to a level :l... .:" VJ .::::; previously unknown; increased production was necessary, and the ~~ bill:"'~ 0 ..... 66For a description of the kolhu in 19th-century India, see George A. Grierson, Bihar ~: ... ~ -~ Peasant Life (Delhi, 1885, repr. 1978), pp. 50-56, and pl. between pp. 46 and 47. It --o ~ c has been claimed that there was a general dearth of technological innovation in India O..c~ from the 12th to 16th centuries because of the Muslim occupation. For a lively dis ..c ·- .::: cussion, see AhsiW.Jan Qaisar, The.Lndf:flrlJ..lJ..,esponse to..!}:!!!!:/!.!fn 11!J!:!!:ologyand Culture s ~ "' (A.~'i{).Z)(New Delhi, 1982), pp. 1-3. :::·a 67 E 8 The mill shown under fig. 2c appears to be simpler, but it presents an engineering '-..C problem. The mandatory different sizes of the vertical gear wheels demand that the I ~ ~ 0 c diameters of the rollers be specifically different in size to achieve similar surface speeds. 6~ This is an insignificant design problem for a modern engineer but a challenge to a ! t:" medieval "tinkerer." An even more complicated gearing arrangement than any depicted ]co t; in fig. 2 has been recently reconstructed for two-roller horizontal milling in Brazil in 2- the 16th century; see Barros de Castro (n. 7 above), p. 688, fig. 4. The elegant solution ·-... "0 to the problem, bevel gearing, which appears as early as Leonardo (Codex At/anticus _gz~ < -:-~ 372r), had to await rediscovery in the 19th century, or more probably the acquisition "i!E skills to gears. l. "";l of make the ..;< • 0 68Wang Zhuo (n. 27 above) mentions the use of an edge runner with a steaming and .bll-, " :.c >- secondary diffusion process. The Nongsang Jiyao (n. 24 above) records the treadle ~:!~ ' operated tilt-hammer mill, and the two following gazetteers from Fujian confirm the ~"' :. use of this same extraction technology during the 16th century, the 1503 Xinghua Fuzhi 12/lla-b and the 1530 Huian Xianzhi 5120a-20b. (Seen. 26 above for the efficiency of the diffusion process.) 512 John Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 513 .r9ller milLci_eveloeed in this climate!!_ It is important to note that the appear in..dle....New World early in the 1~~~nturyin a)lydraulic t'OHermilFditt"nut-extract a higher percentage of juice than the earlier driv~fu,_theingenithIt-was firs~ecifi~;;tlly ,d_escribect in ~y machinery. Rather, it co s of su _ e in less Franc~oHernande~_d.e Tol~doin_ e_'&a.qcJ,s!~ds, but it is pos poor~raction 72 time. The in fact had a beneficial effect, for the sible to trace 1ltpresence back to a~_l~, '\ no~dflllliQgJOJ:ri~l{:Dtsof th~~~r..t6an pure Hernandez, physician to Philip II -~f~g_~in! went to Mexicg_in 1570,.yj~,L:a.naries tec~i~~iamoupt. and had complete Spencer-Meade Cane Sugar Handbook (New York, 1964), p. 61. This arises because the torie~t.!"21~~;~~~vethat rgllet: mills_":ere pr<:'senun Br~rirrr.-·is'ii~Berthe (n. 'hfrte sugar storage cells (parenchyma) are easier to crush than those that contain the 4 above), pp. - , thought that Method10 Maranhao was m error and that e!Xos majority of the impurities. Higher impurities in juice and hence higher extraction are were driving shafts that connected static eres_;,;;;.. ~~) to waterwheels. He iden documented for the kolhu in India and the edge runner/static press in !lwl.zil (~ tified the corresponding terms in Span1sh mventories as ejes and prensas, respectively. Birch, "On-the Production and Manufacture of Sugar in Certain Districts and the Andree Mansuy in her study and translation of Andre Joao Antonil's classic, Cultura North-West Provinces," Sygar 14&13 [)881]: 527; Schwartz [n. 7 above], p. 126). The ":TJparmtrttrto'7fTii:sil of 1711 (Paris, 1968), pp. 174-75, discussed the components of higher extraction of the diffusion process has been mentioned previously (n. 26 above) roller mills and identified eixos and axes as rollers (rouleaux). In 1980, Barros de Castro and that of the kolhu confirmed by modern research (K. S. Saxena, Cur and Kandeshari (n. 7 above), pp:- 682-'86,.ictent'i'l'ie'd;&os as rollers. and gangorras _ discusses the virtues of roller milling including whole-stalk feeding and its effect on first lbil@i ilhlr ffitiie N~wWor~~-~~t~~::it:::i]:.!!.-a.s ~J:;s~p]?earin a 1534 ia¥!ntory · - · labor and fuel efficiencies. to.;iigm•q ::}J)ltl'!'J!I!:~~I'i~7).We advise others investigating these prob- 71 There is a possibility that horizontal mills were present early in China. Von Hum lems that von Lippmann (n. 2 above), p. 405, and Deerr (History [n. 3 above] 1:115) boldt recorded in his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (n. 48 above) that an have confused scholars by failing to recognize that Francisco ~eJ!..~.:s.Quatr_o..LiQ,~o§ __ old Chinese painting he saw in Peru depicted a horizontal roller mill. This is significant de La Naturalezaz__';'irtudes de las Plantas (Mexico City, 1615) was a S~iatJ:~mlationa£'1, because an illustration in J. Nieuhoff, Legatio Batavica ad Magnum Tartariae Chamum ~ez From_~tcop,yo(r.!te manuscript left in Mexico, although it is clearly marked ' Sungteium (Amsterdam, 1668), p. 89, depicts a vertical waterwheel, which could have as such o~~tl'fle'page. They treated it as the work of Ximenes himself and, because powered either a horizontally mounted two-roller mill as per Humboldt or a trip of a 1615 dating, minimize its importance in the history of technology. The confusion hammer mill. There is also evidence for two-roller horizontal milling in the Japanese does not end here; they were probably led astray by Jorge~,__"::~otranslated area. Kimura Yoshiyuki illustrates a two-roller horizontal sugarcane mill in Japan in the sugar section of Ximenes in 1648 (Ximenes, pp. 55-58) into a widely quoted Latin his Sato Seisakuki (Notes on sugarmaking) of 1797 that strikingly resembles a scaled-up version attributing it to Ximenes himself (see Guilherme Piso and Jorge Marcgrave, cotton gin (see Saegusa Hiroto, Nihon Kagaku Koten Zensho [A compendium of Japanese Historia Naturalis Brasiliae [Leyden and Amsterdam, ~· lib. 2, pp. 85-86). This scientific classics] [Tokyo, 1944, repr. 1978], vol. 6, p. 406). This sugarcane mill is confusion continues in ~ecentE!;!.!2.l.i£.:!tipns.such~.a,Q"oMie_Castro (n. 7 above), p. 686, primitive in that one roller is an extension of the driving axle and not a separate roller. wh"""1ie::Xim.enes from Marcgrave and dates the information at 1615. ,._.~---·-'·,- --- ~.q-"''- 514 john Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 515 Hypotheses on the Origin of the Two-Roller Horizontal Sugarcane Mill 1. Origin in the Atlantic Colonies ~s the first of the Atlantic islands to be settled. It was resear ows a a mencement of the industry, the Italian colonized by the Portuguese in 1420, and by 1433 sugar exports were entrepreneurs "arrived with equipment," and Felipe Fernandez being considered. As landholdings were small from the start and Armesto records that the Portuguese, mainly from Madeira, were the mostly continued that way, large-capacity equipment was not neces major source of technology. More explicitly, Verlinden summarizes an sary. The cane was first crush~£1,iu .strUk preS§C§ ~lss;l.,al'-qP~. inventory dated 1.5JlS Fecording a millralbe-that is indicative of ed,g.e later th.$.,eds:e &,U11.ns;.!J.~&"~!)wasused. This is typical Mediterranean-· running 78 This meager evidence indicates the use or'Standard 'Med techno1ogy. I~ a wat~~QJlilll~n{W .W,!lSconstructed by iterranean technology until the second decade of the 16th century-. Diogo de Tieve on the authority of Prince Henry. ?s There is no detail (!he two-roller mill was introduced sometime between 1510 and 1570.j about this mill, but it was most likely an edge runner driv~.}(a Rober!.)$ic~ntJjaspointed out a v~~t for equipment hor~~~- This was the technology useo on Cyprus tor appeanng in the early records, jvc;.enio, lJ!ld!iche....J!!;olirl£!:,;.indicating a sugarcane processing from the 14th century and illustrated in the diversity of equipment and sources. 79 In fact, the Canaries were looked ,,., . early Renaissance engineering book of Francesco di Giorgio Martini on as a center of expertise. The chronicler Oviedo is quite specific: . _ .~·. Q175). 74 As late as 1574 Giulio Landi describes what is probably an the Hispaniola industry was founded using "workmen expert in sugar" ~.'"· ~ edge runner, and recent archaeolpgi&~ligyestia;ations on Madeira have 2 from the Canaries. This was followed up by a royal order of 1519 to uncovered onl orizontaJ Waterwheels-which were usually a~ the governors of Tenerife and Las Palmas, and to Lope de Sosa, the 75 ~ ated with sQge runners m; e 1~thand 16th centuries,. It appears governor of the Castilla da Oro, to send experts in sugar manufacture "'1'fmy that the edge runner was major equipment in Madeira until the to Hispaniola.80 As late as 1569 a cedule royale was issued to the autorites mid-16th century. des Canaries to help with the establishment of a sugar industry on the The CanarlJislands were taken from the autochthonous Guanches island of Puerto Rico.si 76 by tl'f€ Spams toward the end of the 15th century. Pedro de Ve:a The third main Atlantic colony, iao Topf was established by the introduced sugarcane from Madeira and Governor Alonso de Lugo Portuguese in 1483. The sugar in ustry was initiated in 1485 using built the first watermill on Gran Canaria in 148;1. The sugar industry specialists in agriculture and production from Madeira, and by 1522 expanded rapidly, and by the 1550s there were twenty-nine f~ies there were sixth sugar mills.82 Sao Tome was closely associated-with - Madeira, and t ere may have'"been later developments. 77For Gran Canaria, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Canary Islands after.the Conquest 73 1 For landholdings, Virginia~:TheSettlement of Madeira and the Sugar Cane (Oxford, 1982), p. 80; fo_r fact,gPes, Thomas Nichols, "A Description of the Canary · Plantations," Afdeling Agrariche Geschiedenis 11 (1964): 3-12; for presses, Sidney ~L Islands and Madeira," in Thomas Astley, New G'eneraf Collection of Voyage visits to Spain, he spent the next thirty-four years in the Caribbean. 9 85 tO'be"""exported as a complete technoJ.!.uti~.a~~In this context He commenced publishing the Historia in 1535. Fernando Ortiz Trasselli records unnamed autliorities who indicate Morocco as a source reproduces in full Oviedo's chapter on sugarcane, and the passage of sugarcane varieties that went to other centers~two-rollermill about the mill reads: "Gonzales de Velosa built a horse powered mill was available in Morocco in the early 16th century, it certainly could and first made sugar on this island, he alone deserves thanks as the have been transmitted to the Canaries and the other Atlantic colonies principal inventor of this rich industry." It is evident that Oviedo's via the contacts described above. remarks apply to the "invention" of the industry rather than a roller Paul Berthieu,hP. conducted archaeological investigations on the miJJ.86 rums of sugarcane factories in Morocco during the 1960s, has sug If the two-roller mill was developed in Hispaniola, Licenciado Alonso gested avec prudence that three-roller vertical milling was the most likely Zuazo is the most likely inventor. Zuazo was sent to Hispaniola with interpretation to fit his archaeological data. He was influenced, how ~ry judicial powers by the regent, Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de ever, by the Deerr hypothesis and did not favor an alternative of edge Cisneros, to examine the state of the new colony. In a letter to Cardinal running, althou h Jar e ed e runners were actuall found at two sites Ximenes in J.,.l~,hereports on the settin up of cotton gins to harvest and J.h~was PQ actual ev~ence o o er mi mg. He suggeste ro er / . native cotto'il:This is most stgm cant m tlie e tscusston on 1 milling because there was lnsutfiCient space in the "crushing house" ~hove and the additional fact t~ata short time later Zuazo to cut up cane-the usual procedure for edge running in the Medi terranean technology. Perhaps the cane was cut up outside in the SSRicard (11. 79 above), p. 93. tropical climate of Morocco. But there is the distinct possibility that 84 For example, Simmonds (n. 48 above), p. 156. F. R. de Tussac, Flore des Antilles the technology had advanced and whole cane was fed under these (Paris, 1808), p. 156, cites the early 17th-century historian, Antonio de Herrera, as the source of the hypothesis that de Velosa invented milling equipment on ~niola. edge runners without cutting. The edge of these runners was wide · 85Boies Penrose, Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance, 1420-1620 (Cambridge, Mass., (45 em) and this would have facilitated whole-cane feeding. While it 1955), p. 293; Daymond Turner, "The Aborted First Printing of the Second Part of Oveido's General and Natural History of the Indies," Huntington Library Quarterly 46 (1983): 105-25. 87Ibid., pp. 272, 258. BBFor West Indies, J. H. Parry, Trade and Dominion (New York and Washington, D.C., 860rtiz (n. 80 above), p. 254. This is supported to some extent by another statement 1971), fig. 77; Leonardo (n. 10 above); for Asia, a gin with a light wheel with a handle of Oviedo (Ortiz, p. 254) that de Velosa obtained his workmen and equipment from which could have been a prototype for a "flywheel" has been illustrated in 19th-century the Canaries. It is not clear, however, whether this refers specifically to his first horse India (see letter from Charles Lush to E. H. Townsend [n. 55 above]. pl. 3). ~1 _powered mill and whether these technicians could construct waterpowered mills. 8 %;·., "Trasselli (n. 27 above), p. 249. ~ ~ 518 john Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 519 4. Origin from Metal Rolling Rudolph of Nuremburg is said to have used miniature roller mills for making gold lace in 1471.91 However, the first substantial rojkJ;: 4 mills were illustrated b Leonardo da Vinci in his Mq_zrJ!~!>PJit~ !...... :..eonardo shows a pair o two-ro er m1l s, one wide for rolling f ( plate, the other considerably narrower. Both mills have one roller powered, with the other freewheeling similar to the early cotton gin. The smaller mill in fact has a large flywheel on the powered roller, which resembles the cotton gin widely used in the American colonies, as was noted previously. 92 The first illustration of a two-roller metal mill, with both rollers independently powered, appeared in Giovanni Agostino Panthea's Voarchadumia, published in Venice in 1530 (fig. 6). This illustration depicts a two-roller mill with cranks on each roller for turning by hand. The mill is being used to pull a strip of metal through an aperture in a draw plate. Panthea's roller mill displays an uncanny resemblance to a cotton gin depicted in the Chinese Nong Shu of 1313 (fig. 1), completed well before the appearance of any roller mill. Ru dolf Hommel has in fact suggested that "in Italy a ginning machine was used, probably an adaption of the 'churka' of India, which is in principle the same as the Chinese contrivance. The Italians learned FIG. 5.-In this first representation of sugarcane milling in the New World, an edge their cultivation of cotton from India and call their ginning machine runner crushes the cane; the refuse then undergoes further extraction in a vertical 93 wed e e s obscured by the ed e r nner . A worker can be seen driving home 'manganello.' That sounds suspiciously like mangle." We can conclude a w ith a large rna e . ppears to e t e first illustration of this press in a that the European metal rolling mill had its origin in the cotton gin working situation, although it dates back to Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks (Codex from Asia rather than from a sugarcane roller mill.94 Madrid I, fols. 46v and 47r). To the right is an overshot waterwheel, pjioabalslj •hi ing "1 a horizontal tw - arcane mill concealed in the shed. These watermills, along There is some doubt about whether very many of Leonardo's ma wit uman- and animal-driven e ge ru ners, were the standard sugarcane processing chines were ever built. Still, W. J. Hocking has presented a case based equipment in the New World for a significant part of the 16th century. (Theodor de on Leonardo's records that a roller mill was probably used in the mint Bry, Americae, Pars Quinta [Frankfurt, I~ pl. Nigritae Exhaustis Venis Metallicis No. 2; of Rome about 1514 to roll out uniformly thick strips of gold and courtesy of the-Mitcheii-Librar.y~State'1:iilraryof N .S. W:, Sydney.) silver from which coins were stamped.95 is not mandatory to cut up cane for edge running, it is more conve! nient when plenty of labor is available. (See fig. 5, where whole stalks were being fed under an edge runner in Hispaniola.) 91John W. Hall, "The Making and Rolling oflro_n," Transactions of the Newcomen Society 8 ( 1928): 40-55, see 45. E~e is most likely hy othesis oroccan i~- running the 92 dustQr.,.which Berthier dates at ear y th century. If the eqmpment See Parry (n. 88 above) and associated text. 93Rudolf P. Hommel, China at Work (New York, 1937), p. 162. was vertical roller mills (horizontal mills were unlikely given the ar 94The. "three high" metal rolling mill could, however, have been derived from the 90 chaeological data) then we have to explain the long delay (to ca. three-roller sugarcane mill. The three-rolleuugucane m~~ •.lnx.~l;l~'"' 1600) in transmission to other Atlantic colonies and to the Caribbean, and the first "three high" metal rolling machine (a slitting mill) was illustrated in~' Felibien, DaPzinsipp dr ('~y;hi~"-~ais..l67ID,!..,46, in 2d ed. (Paris, 1690), pl. 44 which were in frequent contact. We do not regard Morocco as a pos 10 sible center of innovation for roller milling. (pnority from Smith [n. 9 above]). 95 Hocking (n. II above), p. 61. Hocking quotes Leonardo: "Therefore have several plates of metal made of the same size and thickness all drawn through the same gauge 90Berthier (n. 27 above), pp. 143-45. so as to come out in strips." This could equally have been a draw bench. 520 John Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 521 We have to wait until the mid-16th century before Leonardo's coin age technology appears in explicit form. It is found in a new coinage process using German technology set up in the Palais du Louvre in 1~t the request of Henry II. The machine was constructed in Augsburg by a jeweler, Max Schwab, who had developed the tech- 1 98 niques earlier. At this time, the Welser Ja.mi~~tl': jpte~;oati.PJlal r financiers in Augsburg and major factors in the Sl;!&_~d~tlle·., SoutO:tianuc and Caribbean. The Welsers had grown sugar them selves m Madeira, and in 1513 set up a rriill in the Canaries.99 As this is about the time postulated for the in~xrui.~.,of...th~.t~.,k,r~. horizontaltn111, tne Wetsersol AJI,g:>~g._y,lQ...l:la~<;..q~,.,;;t..S;:,hicJe for transmlttm the ide · a . Alternatively, Verlinden has describe the demand for European engineers in the sugar col onies, particularly Italians, who could have made the transfer. 100 The Augsburg coinage machinery was installed at Segovia, Spain, in 1583. Alex Keller comments that it was so successful that "it found its way into the chronicles, whose authors insisted that the machine worked on the principles laid down by Aristotle in his 'Mechanical Questions,' although they did not ask why neither Aristotle, nor any o"ther scholar had troubled to derive this machine from his principles l5efore." 101 Further evidence is necessary before an Aristotelian influ ence could be entertained. We give a low rating to the hypothesis of an origin from metal rolling as a direct transmission of machinery because the chronology indicates that metal rolling was perfected only in the mid-16th century. Nevertheless, the transmission of the generic technology of primitive metal rolling and cotton ginning is quite feasible. 5. Origin in Asia A number of scholars from the 17th century onward have proposed FIG. 6.-An i:.tngeared, two-cylinder, metal rolling mill from the 1530 Voarchadumia 102 of Giovanni Agostino Pantheo. (Courtesy of the Newcomen Society.) • an Asian origin of the roller mill. They suggest an introduction to the New World by the Spanish and/or Portuguese soon after contact In his Handbuch zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik, between Europe and Asia early in the 16th century. The mill appears Ludwig Darmstaedter lists a vague report on iron rolling by Eobanus in the New World as a two-roller, horizontal, hydraulically powered Hessus in Germany in 1532.96 This should be accepted with reser version, but since there is no evidence that hydraulic power was used vation, as John Hall has pointed out that waterwheels generally did not have enough power, and roller speeds were too low, to roll iron 98Hocking (n. 11 above), p. 68. before it got cold.97 At this stage rolling was probably confined to soft 99Verlinden (n. 12 above), pp. 22-23; Ortiz (n. 80 above), p. 259; Fernandez-Armesto metals. (n. 77 above), p. 80. IOOVerlinden, p. 156. 101Alex Keller, "Observations on the Diffusion of German Metallurgical Machinery 96Ludwig Darmstaedter, Handbuch zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik in the Middle Years of the Sixteenth Century," in Papers, ICOHTEC Symposium Freiberg (Berlin, 1908), p. 79. The iron was rolled "by the weight of turning wheels." 1978 (Freiberg, 1978), pp. 145-52. 97Hall (n. 91 above), p. 43. I02See n. 48 above. 522 john Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 523 for roller milling in India, it was the concept that was transmitted and ton~fsu~arcane fere gmcesse.d b~ver.ti~i~SJ,[}d not a machine design-if India is indeed the point of origin. There and Asfa m the 17tC, 18th, and 19th centuries. were several avenues for a transmission from India via the Portuguese fh.~atil1\5WI!lthe vertical sug!trcane roller mill ~re. SU'cheta frol1l..l_498 2n. ~aGama captured the chief captain of Sabayo, Mazumdar has claimed that the first evidence for a vertical two-roller the Arifi ruler of oa, a man subsequently baptized as "Gaspar da mill appears in an unpublished Jain manuscript, the Maha-Pufana, Gama;' and brought him back to Portugal from India. 103 This gentle copied at Palam, near Delhi, in 1540. But as enlarged and shown in man was a Jew who was well acquainted with the Indian situation. figure 3, it is obvious that tffe macnme IS an ani*l<~;~~tU~.tJi.1l.9~e,ws;...... , ~"· Donald Lach has summarized the additional extensive contacts that gte kolhu, not a ~oilermill; I~ is typical o.!,!e I!~!~L.I.ttdj~!!J£l~.1;!~,c... the Portuguese rapidly built up in India. Goa became the center of wllrcn iiJCI!!a Ifi-g# cyima'ei'-hke pestle seated almost vertically m a Portuguese power a few years after its conCflest iff"i510 and was in stone mortar with a large driving beam attached to the top of the permanent contact with the two m~r si'i'garcane ~owing-areas, Gu pestle. The beam is weighted with stones, an arrangement that pulls Jarat and Bengal_witilln five years. 1 Charles Verlil:enlias a,Iso listed the pestle on to the wall of the mortar, grinding pieces of cane dropped a number of people, including Gian Francesco Affaitati, Luca Salvago, into the mortar. 106 The first actual evidence of a vertical roller mill Giovanni da Empoli, and Lunardo Nardi, who were involved with the in India appears in John Francis Gemelli Careri, who visited Goa in sugar industry in Madeira and served in In ia during the first decade 1695 and saw "the Sugar Canes Press'd between two great wooden ( of the 16th cemdl e 441#1e was amp e oppo ec n cal Roulers, turn'd about by Oxen." Later a vertical roller mill with elon / transfer from India to the Atlantic colonies in the first twenty years gated worm gears spread over central and south India, and by the of the 16th century. ~o"" 19th century this mill had further spread to Mozambique in the West 107 f') In summarY. I evidence points to an origin of the and to Sumatra in the East. It appf.Qrs that. r.bb...hWl~UQL~!h!~~ . . ~ roller mill was an intr · n from China or the New World, where n 1 , which n the vertical mill had appeared almost simultaneously a out lhe year -:~-"L 108 . uuu; and in th ~~.. ~ ~~ 1600. As the two areas were in close contact through visitors, trade, 5 .. or Hispaniola, where a hydraulically driven, two-roller horizontal mHf antl Christian missions, simultaneous invention is most unlikely. ~ga@[email protected] specific evidence is required to prove a technolog Jos~ Needham and ""DRlMbite., j'W, a&:e•.nu:lst ,Pt!LS,Il~~~~~SJ~.!...~.. ical transfer within the short period of time available. verti a · is · hi . ..~~..!P~.fh!!1t;rj:'.in contrast to horizontal drives in the Mediterranean area. 109 It would The Vertical Roller Sugarcane Mill be.natural for the Chinese to fabricate the cylinders in a sugarcane The next significant development was the replacement of the two- ~ roller horizontal ingenio and the edge runner trapiche with the two- \ .... and three-roller vertical mills. The vertical mill has si\nificant advan ~ta , o · o I in premo~teeftli618g9.IM, as ca~e l seen in figure -z, t e 1 e of the rollers can be elongated and driven directly, res tmg in lower power require I ments. Seco , the vertical alignment allows the juice to flow away from t e as it is expressed, givmg potentially gtbtt@i sugar \ recovery. With honzon a pie equipment, the juice tends to be reabsorbed in the bagasse as it exits from the rollers. The vertical roller mill was undoubtedly a very s~cantiQ¥entio.Qi millions of .__,....wa - . 103 Arnold Wiznitzer,jews in Colonial Brazil (New York, 1960), pp. 3-4. 104 Donald Ji 'll?kt..[ndia in the Eyes of Europe· The SirWm.LhCentury (Chicago and London, 1968), pp. 387, 3!1¥, 412. 105Verlinden (n. 12 above), pp. 110-12. 524 john Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 525 / I t rtlft-"is likely that the roller mill was not an immediate success as in the West, since the Chinese had employed a more efficient process for extracting sugar from sugarcane s~ fi~l~~!~t~!ifilit least. The Tang Shuang Pu (n. 27 above), 4a; the Nongsang ):Yao (n.? a 7,( J ,4JQ l503 Xinghua Fu:z.hi (Gazetteer for Xinghua prefecture), 12: lla-llb, and the 1530 Huian Xian:z.hi (Gazetteer of Huian County), 5:20a-20b all document the fact that the Chinese had b~enbreaking ut "" _ ,~ Qi-ds~ wmcaeftf!Clmg JUice by diffusion wish :i?i!ing wlro!i". 'M'!u~ t, gwing about 85 percent extraction, versus about ~ercentfor roller milling on data from India (n. 26 above). The technique was so viable that a portable method survived until the 18th century (Charles Gustavus Eck eber , A .. Account h · e Husband in a ~ndium,A Voyag11to Chma and / Indies, trans. ohn Reinho o s er, o s. [London •..!JZ.U, 2:255~317). It consisted of~ Ji.!J£~) for breakinJUhe cane, with subsequent boiling ~ter.The amount of energy required (woodt~ serious drawback for the FIG. ?.-Chinese double-roll sugarcane mill as illustrated in the originall637 edition of the Tiangong Kaiwu. (Courtesy of the Seikado Bunko, Tokyo.) dfif~usionmethodTh. Wde h:d~oth~sizethat r~Ji~·~ g; ,JI!J!IW:!"[!ili')£6# rhs~ __ us!On procS§ll. ~-e ~· mg •le those of the...Chip.es.¥,graiQ. mill ~mo,l.'!:!J~r~in cogs, and the atypical Indian mills around Goa are described by Watt as having oblique was fed down a hole in the stone and ground on the base. Cog gears cogs. There is a photograph of a Chinese mill with oblique cogs in operation in the set into the sides of the cylinders were used to activate two or more 19th-century Philippines, exactly like the Tiangong Kaiwu illustration, in Demy P. Sonza, mos. Two mos geared tightly together were effectively a vertical sug Sugar Is Sweet: The Story of Nicholn.s Loney (Manila, 1977), opposite p. 28. In addition, arcane mill (fig. 8). A unique Chinese develo ment t i J..was.trans...... helical gearing was not traditional Chinese engineering in medieval and m.;de~ntimes. ported to Java, Malaysia, 1ppmes, Taiwan, Japan, and Hawaii. 113 Lynn White,jr .• records that "helical gearing early reached India but did not cross the Himalayas. No helical device has been found in ,East Asia until so-called Archi.Jedes screws appear in Japanese mines in the seventeenth century, presumably introduced 113For Java, Georgius Everhardus Rumphius (Rumpf), Herbarium Amboinense, 5 vols. by Portuguese or Spanish engineers." (Ly~" · ; Ji., '!tl""""'"'ogical Development (Amsterdam and The Hague, 1747), 5:188; for Malaysia, Tan Kim Hong, "Chinese in the Transition from Antiquity to the Middle,Ages," in Technllll>gM, is e Societa Sugar Planting and Social Mobility in Nineteenth Century Province Wellesley," journal - nel Mondo Romano, Atti tkl Convegno di C01TUJ,27-29 Settembre 1979 [Como, 1979], pp. 235~ of the Malaysian Historical Society, no. 24 (1981), pp. 24~38,seep. 25; for the Philippines, 51, see 238.) In the West, helical gears are thought to be an 18th-century European George M. Rolph, Something about Sugar (San Francisco, 1917), see pl. opposite p. 195; invention (Needham [n. 1 above], p. 89). for Taiwan, W. Wykeham Myers, "Report by W. W. Myers on the Cultivation and 112Although first recorded in 163Z.Ae vertic:!!,.mill must have been invented far Manufacture of Raw Sugar in South Formosa and on Foreign Relations with the Trade e ier . 90, !is n was recorded in an inland erovince, was expgrted to tife Therein," an appendix to British Foreign Office Annual Series No. 875, Diplomatic and R 1lk Islands ea the 17th century (n. 138 beiow), and when depicted in the Consular Reports on Trade and Finance China, Year 1890, Rpt. C. 6205-106, pp. 13~25, Tiangong Kaiwu it had a spec1a 1zed Chinese feeding arrangement, the duck's bill (n. see p. 17; for Ryukyu Islands, Tei Heitetsu, Kyuyo (The Ryukyu Islands, 1745; repr. // 143 below), which must have taken some time to develop. Ritter (n. 27 above), p. 356, Tokyo, 1974), p. 212, no. 273; for Japan, illustration in Hiraga Gennai, Butsurui Hin g;~J!FE-UliiJ shitsu (The classification and identification of things) (Osaka, 1763), Sekiseikan ed., 6: ' ,.,/ sai.Q. that the su!@rcane a• fin! u;s;grds;d in the~ Gangmu (The great pharmacogoeia) of 1596 ~Li Shizhen. We have not been ahi- I~g_;:s ·- .. --l------19b-20a; for Hawaii, Baxa and Bruhns (n. 73 above), p. 258. In a later version of this wc_.. _ II 44 mill in Java a;,d Japan, the gears were separately attached to the top of the stones (for <;' ~'?} J " 526 John Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 527 (ca. 1600) for Coelho to have plausibly asserted that he was the inventor. 117 With this information we will now return to Indm, where we saw that Careri probably recorded a two-roller vertical mill in 1695 near Goa. Watt's 19th-century survey of the Indian sugar industry showed that in the Bombay presidency, especially south near Goa, the vertical mills were atypical, with rollers of 12 to 20 inches in diameter rather than the usual 8 in India. 118 In addition, some had cog gears that were described a§,..Q.iiligus;&ggs..as in the Tiangong Kaiwu illustration, rather than the ~ated_Form ~,t~19The sugarcane mills along the coast near Goa show a definite inese influence, with larger diameter mills with oblique cog gears. As the Watt survey found a small number of three-roller mills-extensions of the typical Indian two-roller mills-in 19th-century India, it A possible ~~a~there w'!:~-.. FIG. 8.-Chinese mo-style vertical two-roller sugarcane mill linked with cog gears, an ancient form of the three-roller mill in China tHat was tran~d early 20th century, Amoy. (P. W. Pitcher, In and about Amoy [Shanghai and Foochow, to,J.,ndm,"6r alternauvely that i't was a l~caide;eloem~:-'t il\.Ig_dia. The 1909], between pp. 48 and 49.) generic technology of activatmg madimery components with inter .,__ locking gearing was well known in China, where up to eight inter )'~ ~~thrii?llS~r;ical~i!!ba§g;i b;:; : z:M:wci;J. Btft--., locked grain mills (mo) were illustrated in the 14th century. 120 it is first type : vert1Cf mill recorded in the New World, and N .._ Nevertheless, the three-roller vertical mill was never recorded in dated 1613 denositerl in the Ajuda ,.:> China an ava, probably because its advantages ave oet!~· and intro- estimate . On face value, there is a great increase in efficiency in the three-roller version, as the cane can be fed in through rollers 1 and the same story as the Ajuda manuscript in his 1627 117 Historia do Brasil. The three-roller vertical mill was introduce Ql~ Barros de Castro (n. 7 above), pp. 70Cf-70 !;'has advanced a hlJi!ot~isreconciling t!!J;.twg ~;gpAi£+ingQ[igws. He .l.ug&,ests that the Spanish ,pr~~.LaJilj~ Peru by a ~Spanish·pi-lest in t time Dio o . gl.: . 115 technolo and ave the concept of the vertical mill petiuon to the Crown, claimed to be the inventor of the three-roller arrosde astro's aut onty on mining technology (Peter Bak~!l,MinfiA-9i.J./l.Ji..!!:.ed mill in Brazil. 116 Whatever the truth of these conflicting claims, it is Mountain: Indian Labor. in Potosi, 1545-1650 [Albuquerque, N.M., 1984], p. 20 and fig. obvious that the three-roller mill must have been a recent invention ~), indicates beyond doubt that the mi,uing irt&!Zlios were w;ue[.:A!;!.y~WfLi.n.l!;mill§ ~f.l!..flifferentgeneric techn~LQJIT.There is no reason to£!;li~J;l,m~mini'}~'l!achinery..-" 'd present any useful ideas for the constructi n of a verti ai..~:QI!!;tsy,g;arc~ ' ake the alternative suggestion that if Coelho had anything to do with the mill, he inyenteg a..s.b'I.ii-i4k,l1ew~ ve;:'tical ;roller mill that had been jme~>rted•• Dodlil~f!Jm&~'&:V'f~'fr·The Story a Primary Industry Java, H. H. 1 of [Durban, from China via Peru and the Spanish priest. It is logical that a two":'f'OlTei"'l'mTtpreceded· 1940], fig. p. t'tor Japan, K. Ota, "Manufacture of Sugar in Japan," Transactions of the a three-rofier versi-;;;;:-and two-roller mills persisted into the 20th century in Spanish'·. Asiatic Society of japan 8 [1880]: 465). Christian Daniels has seen such gearing on a mill Amejj&a !Carl Ortlri.P S3,uer, The Early Spanish Main [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966], in Japan in the possession of Mr. Okada Hidehiko, a manufacturer of traditional sugar products in Kamiitacho, Itanogun, Tokushima prefecture. p. 210, n. 21). 114Mauro (n. 4 above), pl. 3. 118Song Yingsing (n. 108 above), p. 126; Watt (n. 26 above), pp. 196, 237, 278. The larger diameter of the Chinese rollers increased the roller circumference by three times. •is~incen~e.(n. 4 ~bove),p. 333. J. 'f· '-'!fW'WiiT£2' a_P?' Peruvtan ongm and m a footnote (p. 3i4!!'1'1 · For one revolution this gave a surface speed of the rollers three times greater, and >j hence an increased rate of the same order of magnitude. if! may not be Peri.L.h¥t China." 116 119 Archivo Grnera4Zi§,#illffi:as, Secretarias Provincioles 1473, ff. 38-39v. We are grateful Watt, ibid., p. 222. 120 to Professor Ikuta Shigeru of Dait/1 Bunka University, Tokyo, for translating this See the illustration of a geared, animal-driven, grain-milling plant (lian mo) with document. eight mills from the Nong Shu (1313) in Needham (n. I above), p. 196. This is a very ancient machine invented in the 3d century A.D. in China (Needham, p. 195). 528 John Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 529 2 and immediately returned through rollers 2 and 3. This advantage equipped witb..JwWu:cdones £\:QJil~~J;.i<~t jn Rome, which con has to be weighed against vastly increased friction with- primitive, ill tained all the relevant agricultural and manage~ledgeavail fitting wooden gears, which resulted in greater animal power require able to the Jesuit order. (The first of these, issued .b:)l:.,th..,.So,~s ments to operate the mills. Moreover, there are indications of in General in Rome, Father Claudio Ac uaviva, at the end of t 16th creased breakdowns resulting from greater complexity. In fact, if centur, has unfortunate een ost. • e Jesuit,pl two-roller mills rather than three because these were the best man systems, but there was ample opportumty for any of the Chnsttan _,3•~ agerial solution in their situation. At our present stage of knowledge orders to have sent the vertical milling concept from Asia to Peru and we cannot rule out a transmission of a three-roller.concept originating Mexico. The Christian missions entered Asia via~~-<~·shortly in China, and more research is necessary to clarify conflicting claims after its occupation by the Portuguese in 1510; the Je~llJ.!.W.V~lht. for Peru and Brazil. las!..tQ..!rrive, in 1542. Soon afterward they established a college and In summary, the ~m~ on ver~lmillin~ is that the became Invt5ived m advising farmers and in some areas buying farms, } sugarcane mill was~ini-JWo-rolleijh df41i!Jr which were operated to provide work for converts. { In~t where gears_ were added and a vertical mo __ ~·J~.. - There is a vol,ymjnous collection of published and unpublished Chf 11 ' rif2Uihng a opred. Toward the end of the 16th century, tlf y II iii!"' letters from 16th-century Inafa tfiat prov"i<'n!d information for the 126 (..milling co~as tripst't;qed~heNew World, .w.hcre two-; Jesuit secretariat in Rome. Goa was the headquarters of Jesuit mis ,three-I~Thml? were developed within a short time of each ome¥: sionary activity in Asia including China and Japan. From 1555 on The two-roller form was probably transferred from China to India ward, "the great ship from Amacon" sailed yearly from Goa to Macao Lin the 17th century. and Nagasaki, providing a ready vehicle for technological transfer by As agents of transfer, the Christian missionaries are prime con clergy or laity. 127 There was even greater opportunity for a transfer tenders, for they were actively engage& ill tile sugarcaff@ milling busi from China to Peru and Mexico · the Christian missions. For ex ness in India and China, and in the New W may indicate ("le texte reste obscur") that in 1602 the Dominicans replaced the edge ~ Haciendas, ed. Fran<;ois blevalier (Mexico, 1950); ~lOll"ahl9.MJ!.csqb "!J.l,W~~~~..~- runners ("Ia meule de pierre du moulin") they were using in their Mexican ingenios by para elManeJO de las Haciendas Jesuitas del Peru (ss. XVII-XVIII)," Nueva Coronica en mills.. which m ve been roller mills; for Jesuits, Chevalier (above), p. 24- 2, fascicle 2 (1966). ~lmer, Lords <;{ . , e a esuit t Coastal Peru, 1600- Jl I25For Peru, Martin (n. 122 above), p. 10; for Mexico, Chevalier (n. 122 above), p. 1767 y, N.Y..1§§6), pp. 2 - 240. • 123For Peru, Cushner, p. 66; for the Caribbean, Lowell Ra§atz The OIJI P~7:1 t26I. C. H. Avelin.g:..,Ihe__lesuifti1qndon, I98!l....2,;_l64; Lach (n. 104 above), p. 432. System in the British West Indies (London, 1953), p. 58; for Brazil, §tuart B. Schwartz, Lach, pp. 427-67, gives detail on 16th-century Jesuit communications and newsletters. "~lantationsof St. Benedict: The Sugar Mills of Colonial Brazil," The 127C. R. Boxer, The Great Ship from Amacon: Annals of Macao and the Old japan Trade, ~·~ ~ne r:1 Americas 39 (1982): l-22, see 17. 1555-1640 (Lisbon, 1959). ';j ~ 530 John Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 531 Hollow qsl~JH'.9~~lindef'~.d...J,M;,.ed',j,,"}"(<'~-j>'>:ifir·~· to the Ensish colonies no.Ji~ when an English merchant, Andrew rgall, sent a set to Barbardos. 135 In the late 18th century i: Qai9,uet!!fl~P.P?2!!2Iie1<1(tllW!!)>romo,t~g].l'a!~]iU.£f~use,,., {, a ! which guided bagasse out o t e rst set of rollers to return thro~, ! the second set, thereby reducing the labor force required by one attendant. Dutrone Ia Couture also adopted a shallow vertical fluting on the rollers that allowed the expressed juice to flow away from the bagasse more read~ The two-roller vertical mill was once thought to have been intro duced from Fujian, China, into the Amami Islands (directly south of the island of Kyushu, Japan) by Sunao Kawachi in 1610, but this is no longer regarded as valid. 137 According to the Kyuyo (The Ryukyu Islands, 1745) it was brought to the Ryukyu kingdom by Gima Shinjo who dispatched people to learn sugarmaking in Fuzhou (China) in 1623. 138 The same source records that the three-roller vertical mill was created in the Ryukyu Islands in 1671 by a local man, Makiya Sanekiyo. 139 In 1717, Tabata Sabuni (1678-1764), an official respon sible for supervising sugar production on Oshima (the largest island in the Amami group) began using a waterwheel to power a three roller horizontal mill. 14o The three-roller mill probably came to Japan with the sugarcane Brazil" was used by the British and French that Shogun Yoshimune ordered Satsuma Han to send from the Ryu o omes in the Caribbean in the mid-17th kyu Islands in 1727, though it is not recorded until the Butsurui Hin century. 132 Shortly after this a number of imGrovements were made. shitsu of 1763 written by Hiraga Gennai. The space between the rollers Th.e spa e rollers was iiia&?adj4tJ&kfi&;gjl£$:o cope was later made adjustable in the Japanese mill. 141 In 1811 Kashiwa with sugarcanes o varyt ess and diameter. 133 There was a treij\ to smaller metal bearinQS' jq.particular the bottom bearings of the ronM,wmdFW&M IPtdbncated readily and required less power. 134 t 135H. R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry from c. 450 B.C. to A.D. 1775 (London, 1957), p. 267. I36Jacques Fran~oisDutrllne Ia Couture Precis sur le Canne et sur les Mo ens d'en Extraire y 128Donald F. Lach, China in the Eyes of Europe in the Sixteenth Century (Chicago atfd le Sel Essentiel (Paris, 1790 p. 104, through arrett n. a ove), p. · ·-· London, 1968), pp. 746, 749, 778, 806. 137 As the evi ence for this claim was based on an oral tradition that was not put into 129 Ibid., p. 796, for Melchior Nunes Barreto, and pp. 794-815 for Jesuit writings writing until 1877, scholars have expresed doubt about its veracity. For example, see and Matteo Ricci. Ueno Masuzll, Satsuma Hakubutsugaku (A history of natural history in Satsuma) (Tokyo; 130 Pierre Chz::nu. "L~altgnd.~...M aniUe.;:.4m!!!f!"'• Economies, Societies, Civilisations 6 1982), p. 63. 0 (1951): 447-6 . - 138For Oshima, Nakahara Yoshitada, Nakahara Yoshitada Zenshu (Collected works of 131Lach (n. 128 above), pp. 742, 747, and 806-7. Nakahara Yoshitada) (Naha, 1977), vol. I, pp. 277-78; for Ryukyu Islands, Tei (n. 113 132Richard Ligon, A Tnu! and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), above). p. 85; Labat (n. 48 above), 1:228. 139Tei, p. 232, no. 450. 133This development took place some time prior to 1696. Father Labat, in Guadeloupe 140Masuz6 (n. 137 above), pp. 64-66. An illustration of this waterpowered mill ap in 1696, illustrated the wedges necessary to control the space between the rollers (1: pears in the Nanto Zatsuwa Hoi Hen, by Nagoya Sagenta, who was exiled to Oshima 258, pl.). These wedges are absent in a detailed engraving of a mill in Cesar de Ro from 1850 to 1855. See Nihon Shomin Seikatsu Shiryo Shiisei (A collection of historical chefort, Histoire Naturelle et Morale des iles Antilles de l'Amirique (Paris, 1665); and see materials concerning the life of the common people in Japan) (Tokyo, 1972), vol. 20, reproduction in Baxa and Bruhns (n. 73 above), p. 35. p. 537. t54De Rochefort. 141Hiraga (n. 113 above); Ota (n. 113 above), p. 465. f 532 john Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 533 ~ Yuto built a mill with iron rollers about the same time as these were tion. About 1520 a hydraulic;,alll:..Q~i~d.!n_ill...Q£Jhistree aepeared f. being introduced generally in the Caribbean.142 In the 18th century ilL Hispaniola, and 1t IS judged to be an independent invention ir'oin ~ ~ a cane-feeding device unique to the Sino-Japanese area became prom the cotton gin 'in this area. The development of metal rolling mills in inent in Japan. In 1763, Hiraga Gennai described the device, termed Europe at the same time, from a cotton gin model, may have provided a duck's bill, that was in effect a pressure feeder. 143 After the first some stimulation. Gears derived from water-lifting devices were added crushing the bagasse was loaded into a conical funnel; pieces sticking to the north Indian form by about 1550, and an animal-driven two out of the bottom of the funnel were inserted between the rollers to rolleJ horizontal mill gr,adu.all~t:~editQJJ.Ul.Q..rth India_lYm.t2-:- initiate the second crushing. The body of the bagasse was pulled and Egypt. It continued popular because the same village carpenters could compressed through the narrow end of the cone, thus acting like a -"COri'Struct and repair both the milling and water-lifting machinery and modem pressure feeder. 144This dates back at least to the 1637 Chinese knew only one form of gearing. work, Tiangong Kaiwu, where it is illustrated schematically (fig. 7). The CO!!£el2tof a verti<;~ltlYJJ:.mller mill ~r~ein Chi~~.~~!:.'". However, the first description of this device in China appears in the end ,of the 16th century after tjl~OlU!~QI;i.z,ol!talmill. journal of Henry Ellis (1818).145 It had the aavantages of being far easier and simpler to drive by In our previous discussion on the virtues of vertically aligned mills animals, with juice flowing freely from the rollers and not being ab we listed simplicity of gearing as one of their major advantages. To sorbed in the bagasse. The Chinese developed a unique two-roller ward the end of the 18th century bevel gears (which had appeared vertical design using cog gears on wide stone rollers, that was trans as early as Leonardo) were rediscovered and applied to horizontal ferred to Java, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Ryukyu Islands, mills in a very efficient manner.146(See fig. 2e.) Their use was advanced Japan, and Hawaii. The Chinese form was introduced to India via on the grounds that the rollers could be fed broadly from a gravity Goa, where Indian engineers added elongated worm gears. This form chute over a greater width of roller. This resulted in more even wear dominated in central and south India and dispersed to Mozambique and in greater safety, as hands did not come near the rollers.147The in the West and as far as Sumatra in the East. new horizontal mills became popular in the Caribbean during the The three-roller vertical mill a eared in Peru ~!l.cl-~~i.£.Q_<;~.i;>.Q.\JJ._ 19th century. A subsidiary reason for the advent of horizontal mills 1600, w1 nett er pnor ev1 ence elsewhere nor evidence of an in is that they can be driven more readily by steam engines. The first digenous two-roller mill that could have been developed further lo successful steam-driven sugarcane mill commenced crushing at Sey cally. The two-roller ve.tli~ill.was eroba~~!?.~.c::nU'1. babo, Cuba, on January 11, 1797.148We end our review at this point, the New World, as it was recorded later. There must have been very the advent of steam. 'Iiiife time Setwee;;t'he developm~th,eJ4.'"~ht~-r~J2f!flj,; Wide rollers and cog gears indicate a possible Chinese introduction Conclusion of the two-roller version.: but.., ~ithan estimate~stdatif,l~ of abg~t- es&,ve ( The sugarcane r~illevolved from the cotton ~inin India 1590 in China, this d much time for a transfer to Peru 1 around ~~n a manualiy dnven, two-roller honiOn£ configtira-· b~ . When we tum to the ;ctual development of the three-roller deSign~re 1s con ICting evidence. wo scenarios have been ad 142Hiraga, 6: 17a-b; Higuchi Hiroshi, Nihon T6gy{Jshi (A history of the japanese sugar vanced for a 1 , n sian origin cannot be com industry) (Tokyo, 1956), p. 75; for the mill constructed by Kashiwa Yuto, see Matsushita pletely dismissed since three-roller vertical mills were recorded as Shin.,, Kinsei Amami no Shihai to Shakai (Political control and the society of the Amami Islands in the early modern period) (Tokyo, 1983), p. 142. indigenous, though not widely used, machinery in India, and the 145Hiraga (n. 113 above), 6: 18a. generic technology was available in China. Althou~eare n~tsure 144Pressure feeding is a 20th-century invention (George P. Meade and James C. P. where the three-roller mill originated, there is little doubt that it was Chen, Cane Sugar Handbook [New York, 1977], p. 70). 145 l£>ug6t wHf!l~ lttt!t t §!!it'& fti#X@. := -- f:: Henry Ellis, Journal of the Proceedings of the Late Embassy to China (Philadelphia, Christian missionaries, especially the Jesuits, have been implicated 1818), p. 281. ·146See Leonardo (n. 67 above). in technological transfers from Asia. There was constant movement 147Fraginals (n. 13 above), p. 10 I. of personnel from Goa to Macao and from Macao to the New World 14Bibid., p. 102. via the Manila Galleon. The Jesuits were involved in improving peas- 534 John Daniels and Christian Daniels The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill 535 ant agriculture in India, influencing technology in China and in the do not support Ashtor's thesis, based on von Lippmann and Deerr, New World. They needed all the latest knowledge they could muster that Western Europe had a roller mill and hence superior technology for running their expanding sugarcane plantations. Th~jU ' at this time. The evidence concerning crushing of sugarcane indicates [email protected]:&eQ.~ftsts:iat-ft~i£ttHhw,,gb2 seqrtafi@t ::i! a surprising uniformity of technology from China through the Levant Rom~ and there was a proved desire for innovation in Peru an to Spain. m4:tco, as shown by their use of the plow 150 years before the rest of the New World. The highly effective information services, com bined with the zeal of the missionaries in the field, made it inevitable that technology would disperse quickly-and makes it difficult to lo cate priorities of inventions. We have shown that tho~·~~·~~~~·~~~~~··~aJ•he (: nvention of the three-roller vertical mill by Pietro Speciale in Sicily \ n 1449 ~nPottenA Similarly, the Near East origin advanced by · Haudricourt an3 Daumas and independently by Forbes cannot be accepted. The simple metal rolling mill and coinage minting machines, both two-roller horizontal configurations, evolved from the cotton gin in Europe in the second decade of the 16th century, the European gin probably being derived from Asia. As the two-roller horizontal sugarcane mill was present in Hispaniola by about 1520, there could have been exchange of ideas. This is also possible with the "three high" metal rolling machine, as the three-roller vertical sugarcane mill had a priority of over fifty years. The.~ie..was...asteadY.ds'f~ ~ J ovations in three-rOller milling l ~irY.Tfilsis significant for several reasons. First, toe cO'ficept~· Verlinden and others that plantation America inherited a mature tech nology from the Mediterranean cam:ot be sustained. The most sig nificant advances took place in the New World, and the considerable increase in output per worker that has been documented by Barrett ' in Mexico must to a large extent have been due to better technology. Second, the continuous effOrt to improve sugar-milling techniques does not support the theory that the practice of slavery inhibited technological innovation. The invention of the three-roller mill with subsequent improvements made it far easier and safer for slaves to crush sugarcane. When this was combined with the Jamaica train furnace that contained heat by cementing boiling pans in masonry, it is evident that working conditions improved considerably with time and technology in sugarcane factories. Third, we have shown that the Mediterranean technology, consisting of the edge runner and static press, extended from Spain to China in medieval times. These data