i7i 



THIRTY YEARS OF MILLING. 



Milling history is so far simple that it is divided into two 

 parts only. The first part begins, perhaps, B.C. 5000, and 

 extends to A.D. 1873 ; the second part has less than 

 thirty completed years behind it. To-day the majority of 

 Englishmen still think naturally of flour as being ground be- 

 tween millstones, though it was as long ago as 1873 that Oscar 

 Oexle demonstrated in London and Glasgow- that the roller 

 mill was at all events an excellent working method. 



Thirty years ago milling was the occupation of some 15,000 

 mills in the United Kingdom — the great majority of them 

 very small; in capacity for output that is to say, for they 

 were often spacious enough in actual size. The average 

 quantity of flour ground weekly in the mills of 1873 must have 

 been singularly small, as judged by the present standard, when 

 300 sacks a week is considered a rate of production below which 

 no mill would be deemed otherwise than small. But 3,000 

 mills, each producing 37,500 cwt. per annum of fifty " running" 

 weeks, would have more than sufficed for our wants in 1873. 

 The smallest mills were the windmills. These are now but an 

 insignificant feature either in the landscape or in trade. The 

 number of windmills which have become extinct since 1873 is 

 probably not less than 5,000. They were economical, the 

 motive power being supplied by nature in a cheap form, that 

 is to say, with very little cost cither of sails to catch the wind, 

 or of machinery to bring the captured force to bear on the 

 millstones. But they were capricious ; no miller dependent on 

 wind-power could guarantee delivery to date. He could take 

 no work where time was of the essence of the contract. 



The watermill was and is in a different position. The flow 

 of water can be regulated for the most part quite satisfactorily 

 though difficulties arise from high floods on the one hand, and 



