Whilst fishing on the Dee at Dentdale in the 1840s, William Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong saw a waterwheel in action, supplying power to a marble quarry.
In 1582 Dutchman Peter Morice leased the northernmost arch of London Bridge and, inside the arch, constructed a waterwheel that pumped water from the Thames to various places in London.
Mill ponds, weirs, sluice gates and an aqueduct are also part of the museum as well as a 19th-century working waterwheel, fulling stocks and other machinery associated with the finishing of woollen cloth, an original Arkwright water frame, and a Hargreaves Spinning Jenny.
In 1582, Dutchman Peter Morice (died 1588) developed one of the first pumped water supply systems for the City of London, powered by undershot waterwheels housed in the northernmost arches of London Bridge spanning the River Thames.
The first formal engine was installed in 1833 at a mine at Clausthal, Lower Saxony, where inspector Wilhelm Albert and manager Georg Dörell (1793–1854) fastened foot platforms and hand-holds to adjacent, reciprocating pump rods, using a waterwheel-driven pump put out of use when a new drainage adit was made at a lower level.
The Poncelet wheel is a type of waterwheel invented by Jean-Victor Poncelet while working at the École d'Application in Metz.
Today the mill houses the most powerful working waterwheel in Europe, an iron wheel moved from Glasshouses Mill at Pateley Bridge designed by Sir William Fairbairn who had been Hewes' apprentice.
In this woodcut image, there is the scene of three martinets and a waterwheel working wood and leather bellows of the Osmund bloomery furnace.
Rush’s life-sized figure of George Washington (1815), and his Allegorical Figure of The Waterworks (1825) — a reclining female figure manipulating a waterwheel — are visible in the background.