I’m thinking of things like waterwheels, windmills, millstones, etc- these systems would presumably have a lot of force running through them, such that stopping them for maintenance or replacement would seem difficult to do and maybe even damage the system. So what kind of mechanisms back in the day did people put in place to stop energy from moving through the machine at a given point? How do you successfully get two gears that are actively engaged to be safely uncoupled, for lack of a better word?
In: Engineering
The safest measure is simply stopping the power source. For example watermills were often running in a “mill race” a sidechannel of a waterway that you could simply block off to turn the mill off, or windmills could simply be turned out of the wind (early designs basically had the entire mill house on a turntable with a long lever that a horse could pull into the desired direction)
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