Water turbine

In 1826 the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale organised a prize for the ‘full-scale application of water turbines in factories and workshops’. This specification is attributed to Claude Burdin, a teacher at the École des Mines in Saint-Étienne, one of whose most brilliant students, Benoît Fourneyron, won the prize in 1833. This ‘universal and continuous pressure wheel’ was more efficient than those preceding it and could work underwater and at any fall height. Fourneyron added a valve to regulate the flow in the turbine. The water enters the central distributor at the top, then flows tangentially from the interior to the exterior in the rotor. The Fourneyron turbine had numerous applications in France and abroad. This version is a scale model of one of the ten turbines produced for the flour mills at Saint-Maur, whose forty grindstones were in operation from 1838 to 1863.