INCREMENTAL TECHNOLOGICAL IMPROVEMENT—WATER MILLS AND WIND MILLS.

INCREMENTAL TECHNOLOGICAL IMPROVEMENTS—WATER MILLS AND WIND MILLS. Usher also presented the development of the water mill and the wind mill over many centuries as the product of the efforts of generations of craftsmen, rather than a single event. Gordon’s review points out what craftsmen were able to accomplish without science: “When Euler, MacLaurin and Coriolis undertook mathematical and experimental studies of the optimal angle and shape of windmill sails in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, they found that Dutch craftsmen had solved the problem as a practical matter by the seventeenth century.”