energy

Ever since man first used a waterwheel to break grain around two thousand years ago, water has been used as a source of clean, efficient and reliable energy. As early as the 1770s – and well before our Victorian forefathers had hydroelectricity figured out – water was powering spinning wheels in Lancashire cotton mills and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. It was the Victorian industrialist and inventor William Armstrong who first managed to generate electricity from falling water in 1878. Within just twenty years of his ground-breaking discovery hydropower had ‘boomed’ and there were hundreds of hydroelectricity plants in…