Friday 16 April 2010

Wiseman

OK, going from a grand response of two (one here, one on Instructables), I am going to start mixing projects into the blog.

There is a garden contest on the horizon at Instructables.

Personally, I don't "garden". I cut stuff down when it gets in the way, but I don't garden. If stuff survives, then it was obviously fit to survive. If it doesn't, then its remains can fertilise the survivors. Darwinian isn't in it.

So, I can't really enter with growing things, or how to grow things (though I sort of did in a past contest). I have decided to built a garden ornament.

Norfolk Chronicle, November 22nd 1783:
On Tuesday last a grant passed the great Seal to Mr Benjamin WISEMAN, of Diss, in this county, for his new-invented sails for windmills, with horizontal levers, vesting in him the sole and exclusive rights, by patent, of making and vending the same.

I like windmills. Any sort - corn mills, power turbines, decorative pinwheels - so why not make a windmill for the garden?

Purely decorative, entirely impractical.

Benjamin Wiseman's windmill is the perfect candidate - a vertical axis windmill, over two centuries before they became practical, with actual sails, like a boat. That's all I know as fact, so there's plenty of scope for creativity. Nobody can call me out on it being wrong, either, since no images seem to exist on the internet, and the (expired) patent is (apparently) all but illegible.

As they say; watch this space.