Screw turbine connected to a generator through a gearbox. The Archimedean screw is an ancient invention, attributed to Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC.), and commonly used to raise water from a watercourse for irrigation purposes. In 1819 the French engineer Claude Louis Marie Henri Navier (1785–1836) suggested using the Archimedean screw as a type of water wheel. In 1916 William Moerscher applied for a U.S. patent on the hydrodynamic screw turbine. The Archimedean screw turbine is applied on rivers with a relatively low head (from 1 m to 10 m) and on low flows (0.01 m³/s up to around 10 m³/s on
Archimedes The foremost document containing the work of Archimedes is the Archimedes Palimpsest. In 1906, the Danish professor Johan Ludvig Heiberg visited Constantinople and examined a 174-page goatskin parchment of prayers written in the 13th century AD. He discovered that it was a palimpsest, a document with text that had been written over an erased older work. Palimpsests were created by scraping the ink from existing works and reusing them, which was a common practice in the Middle Ages as vellum was expensive. The older works in the palimpsest were identified by scholars as 10th century AD copies of previously unknown