page fifty-four

The Mill

Yesterday's room went up into the wind and could only go where it was taken. This one stands still and makes the wind work. A windmill on a rise above a village, one pair of stones, and a floor full of other people's sacks: wheat for the baker, barley for the pigs, oats for the carrier's horses. Today's number writes the wind for the whole day, gusts, lulls, squalls and all. Keep the sails at the speed the stones like, keep the meal the way each customer asked for it, and do not let her run away, burn, or be caught with the wind behind her.

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The mill
Time—
Wind—
Sails face—
Sails—
Stones—
Feed—
Stone gap—
The meal—
Wanted—
Sacks ground—
The mill
The sails
The stones
The day so far

Grey is the wind in miles an hour and green is the sails in turns a minute, both on the left scale; the red dashes are where the sails begin to suffer. Gold is the meal on the right scale, from 0 (beans split in half) to 100 (flour like dust), and the pale band is what the sack in the hopper should come out at. Faster stones grind finer, a closer gap grinds finer, and a heavier feed grinds coarser.

Day
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Before the day starts, the arrow keys walk to other days. Every day is a different year, mill, wind and floor of sacks.

What is real here and what is not

The machinery, the sails, the brake, the fantail and the governor are real. The villages, the customers and the wind are the day's number.

  1. 01

    Common and patent sails

    For most of the eighteenth century a sail was a wooden lattice with canvas spread over it. The miller reefed it by hand, rolling the cloth in to settings with names like first reef, sword point and dagger point, and he could only do it with the mill stopped and each sail brought round to the bottom in turn. Andrew Meikle's spring sails of 1772 replaced the canvas with hinged shutters, and William Cubitt's patent sails of 1807 let the miller open and close every shutter at once from the ground, with weights that let them spill a gust.

  2. 02

    Facing the wind

    A post mill's whole body turns on a single great post, and the miller pushed it round with the tailpole. A tower mill turns only its cap. Edmund Lee's fantail of 1745, a small wheel set at right angles to the sails, turns the cap by itself whenever the wind comes round. A mill caught with the wind behind its sails was tail-winded: the sails were driven backwards, and caps were lifted off and post mills blown over.

  3. 03

    Stones, feed and tentering

    Grain runs from the hopper down a shaking shoe into the eye of the upper stone, the runner, and comes out as meal at the edge. Lowering the runner towards the bed stone (tentering) grinds finer, a faster stone grinds finer and hotter, and stones run empty heat up and can strike sparks into the dust. A bell rang when the hopper ran low. From the 1780s a centrifugal governor could tenter the stones as the speed changed, and the brake, a band of wooden blocks on a wooden wheel, was a well-known cause of mill fires.

  4. 04

    What the page simplifies

    The sails drive with a torque that falls off to nothing at a fixed runaway speed, the stones and gearing take a load that grows with speed and with the grain going through, and the fineness of the meal is a single number from 0 to 100 that the page invents. There is one pair of stones, the hoist and the hopper take no minding beyond the time they cost, and nobody dresses the stones or sieves the flour. The villages and customers are made up, and a sack is a coomb of four bushels.

Fifty-four rooms, and one number doing all the work. Today it writes the wind from dawn to dusk and fills a mill floor with sacks.