The amazing ECO-friendly ram pump

For a real sense of history, nothing beats the immediacy of a primary source. I‚m sitting in the MD‚s office of the West Country engineering company Green & Carter Ltd simply mesmerised by a patent document of 1820. It‚s the name on the patent that‚s such a jolt to the system: Françoise Montgolfier, son of Joseph Montgolfier (famous as the inventor of the hot air balloon). Not that the patent has anything to do with the 70m-tall Chinese lantern employed by Joseph to send the first man skyward in 1783. It‚s for something completely different: an improved version of his ram pump, invented around 1797. Outside the confines of a patent office, the ram pump is the closest you‚ll ever get to a perpetual motion machine, capable of raising water to a height of 100m for years on end, fuelled solely by the power of a flowing water source.