A gristmill grinds cereal grain into flour and middlings. The term can refer to the building that holds it; the Greek geographer Strabo reports in his Geography a water-powered grain-mill to have existed near the palace of king Mithradates VI Eupator at Cabira, Asia Minor, before 71 BC. The early mills had horizontal paddle wheels, an arrangement which became known as the "Norse wheel", as many were found in Scandinavia; the paddle wheel was attached to a shaft which was, in turn, attached to the centre of the millstone called the "runner stone". The turning force produced by the water on the paddles was transferred directly to the runner stone, causing it to grind against a stationary "bed", a stone of a similar size and shape; this simple arrangement required no gears, but had the disadvantage that the speed of rotation of the stone was dependent on the volume and flow of water available and was, only suitable for use in mountainous regions with fast-flowing streams. This dependence on the volume and speed of flow of the water meant that the speed of rotation of the stone was variable and the optimum grinding speed could not always be maintained.

Vertical wheels were in use in the Roman Empire by the end of the first century BC, these were described by Vitruvius. The peak of Roman technology is the Barbegal aqueduct and mill where water with a 19-metre fall drove sixteen water wheels, giving a grinding capacity estimated at 28 tons per day. Water mills seem to have remained in use during the post-Roman period. There was an expansion of grist-milling in the Byzantine Empire and Sassanid Persia from the 3rd century AD onwards, the widespread expansion of large-scale factory milling installations across the Islamic world from the 8th century onwards. Geared gristmills were built in the medieval Near East and North Africa, which were used for grinding grain and other seeds to produce meals. Gristmills in the Islamic world were powered by both wind; the first wind-powered gristmills were built in the 9th and 10th centuries in what are now Afghanistan and Iran. The Egyptian town of Bilbays had a grain-processing factory that produced an estimated 300 tons of flour and grain per day.

From the late 10th century onwards, there was an expansion of grist-milling in Northern Europe. In England, the Domesday survey of 1086 gives a precise count of England's water-powered flour mills: there were 5,624, or about one for every 300 inhabitants, this was typical throughout western and southern Europe. From this time onward, water wheels began to be used for purposes other than grist milling. In England, the number of mills in operation followed population growth, peaked at around 17,000 by 1300. Limited extant examples of gristmills can be found in Europe from the High Middle Ages. An extant well-preserved waterwheel and gristmill on the Ebro River in Spain is associated with the Real Monasterio de Nuestra Senora de Rueda, built by the Cistercian monks in 1202; the Cistercians were known for their use of this technology in Western Europe in the period 1100 to 1350. Although the terms "gristmill" or "corn mill" can refer to any mill that grinds grain, the terms were used for a local mill where farmers brought their own grain and received back ground meal or flour, minus a percentage called the "miller's toll."

Early mills were always built and supported by farming communities and the miller received the "miller's toll" in lieu of wages. Most towns and villages had their own mill so that local farmers could transport their grain there to be milled; these communities were dependent on their local mill. Classical mill designs are water-powered, though some are powered by the wind or by livestock. In a watermill a sluice gate is opened to allow water to flow onto, or under, a water wheel to make it turn. In most watermills the water wheel was mounted vertically, i.e. edge-on, in the water, but in some cases horizontally. Designs incorporated horizontal steel or cast iron turbines and these were sometimes refitted into the old wheel mills. In most wheel-driven mills, a large gear-wheel called the pit wheel is mounted on the same axle as the water wheel and this drives a smaller gear-wheel, the wallower, on a main driveshaft running vertically from the bottom to the top of the building; this system of gearing ensures that the main shaft turns faster than the water wheel, which rotates at around 10 rpm.

The millstones themselves turn at around 120 rpm. They are laid one on top of the other; the bottom stone, called the bed, is fixed to the floor, while the top stone, the runner, is mounted on a separate spindle, driven by the main shaft. A wheel called the stone nut connects the runner's spindle to the main shaft, this can be moved out of the way to disconnect the stone and stop it turning, leaving the main shaft turning to drive other machinery; this might include driving a mechanical sieve to refine the flour, or turning a wooden drum to wind up a chain used to hoist sacks of grain to the top of the mill house. The distance between the stones can be varied to produce the grade of flour required; the grain is lifted in sacks onto the sack floor at the top of the mill on the hoist. The sacks are emptied into bins, where the grain falls down through a hopper to the millstones on the stone floor below; the flow of grain is regulated by shaking it in a sloping trough from which it falls into a hole in the center of the runner stone.

The milled grain is collected as it emerges through the grooves in the ru

The Brave Engineer is a 1950 Walt Disney-produced short subject cartoon, based on the exploits of legendary railroad engineer John Luther "Casey" Jones. It is narrated by comic Jerry Colonna and is a madcap fanciful re-telling of the story related in the Wallace Saunders ballad made famous by Eddie Newton and T. Lawrence Seibert; this short was released fifty years after Jones' death and appeared on the 2001 direct-to-video Disney's American Legends. The film opens with an overhead shot of a sprawling railroad yard in the morning, where all the trains are "fast asleep"; the shot begins to focus on a single train with Johnny, an American Standard 4-4-0, where Casey is revealed to be sleeping in his engine's cab. He awakens and realizes that he is behind schedule and ends up hurriedly readying the engine to depart. Mail is loaded aboard the mail car on the train and with a toot on the whistle, Casey sets off at a high speed through the maze of switches and sidings, nearly T-boning two other trains in the process before making it safely out of the yard with the Narrator shouting loudly.

At first the trip is uneventful. Further on, the weather becomes nasty, flooding the tracks and all but swamping the entire train. Eight hours late, but nonetheless undaunted, Casey climbs up onto the cab roof and uses his coal shovel as a paddle. Before long, when the flood has cleared, Casey is on his way again. No sooner has the train been back up to full speed than Casey is forced to bring it screeching to a halt: a large brown cow is standing in the middle of the tracks grazing. After much shouting and whistle blowing on Casey's part, the cow clears and the train speeds onward as Casey starts shoveling the coal into the furnace, yet another problem presents itself: a stereotypical villain with a black handlebar mustache has tied a lady to the tracks in front of Casey's train where Casey screams in terror. Unwilling to waste any more time stopping, Casey rushes forward, stands on Johnny's cowcatcher, scoops up the terrified woman just seconds in the moment in which the train is about to run her over.

Casey is in such a hurry now, that he doesn't have time to stop to let her off, depositing her in the arms of a pleasantly surprised stationmaster as he rushes past the next platform at full speed. Nightfall has come and Casey's engine is found steaming full-bore through a narrow, snow-covered mountain pass; as the train passes over a high trestle spanning a gorge however while Casey is stoking the boiler and blowing into the firebox to make the train go faster, another stereotypical villain nearly brings things to an explosive end. Once again undaunted, Casey's engine struggles and puffing, up the side of the gorge and continues on his way. A short while a group of armed gangsters on horseback watch the train from up on a hillside in a desert and charge down toward the train; the gang is soon in the cab, brandishing their guns and knives menacingly at Casey, while shoveling coal into the furnace, is oblivious to their presence. It is in the next moment that he accidentally picks up one of the bandits standing on his shovel-full of coal that he notices the uninvited company for shoveling one into the engine's furnace.

Casey is annoyed by this new distraction than anything else, begins to fight the train bandits, hitting them with his shovel, while continuing to stoke the boiler with coal from the coal tender. After throwing the last of the would-be thieves away from the train and his train continue onward when Casey checks his watch and realizes that he is put way behind schedule with the thugs. Determined to make up for lost time whatever the cost, he opens the throttle so wide that he rips the handle from its mount and throws it away; the night time changes to day as the train speeds, the scenery outside becomes a blur as the train travels faster and faster. When running out of coal, Casey throws in his shovel and rocking chair, soon a myriad of structural problems arise which Casey addresses with frenzied skill and speed and bravely gives Johnny some running while the train is roaring down a hill. While otherwise occupied, Casey doesn't notice that another train, a slow freight train, double-headed by Zeb and Zeek, a pair of 4-8-0 tender engines, is coming toward him on the same track in the opposite direction.

Casey is blind to anything but his repairs and is too busy fixing the dome to take notice, as the other train approaches him, Casey's engine's dome falls off and is fitted back by the brave engineer. The other engineer, an elder one, with a corn-cob pipe in his mouth on spying Casey's train, in fear of Casey's blind and furious approach, screams in fear, blows Zeb's whistle to alert the others that Casey's train is heading toward them like a bullet in shock; the brake-man, upon seeing the double-headed slow freight train, climbs out of the caboose, runs up over the mail car, toward Johnny to warn Casey about the oncoming train, but Casey can't hear him. As the other train approaches, the brake-man blows the whistle, but Casey scoffs'So what?' As the conductor says'So long,' he jumps off the train, in the far away next shot, a view from Casey's train, he is back on the train and is shown still standing there on Johnny's roof. The workers of the double header, who are approaching on their other train, all gasp in terror, abandon their train as well by jumping out of Zeb and Zeek's cabs, run for cover, just as Casey now notices, he yelps in surprise before the two trains begin to collide with a violent chain reaction of large explosions in a cloud of black smoke.

Afterwards, we are taken to a station the one Casey is meant to termi

Ramiro Ledesma Ramos was a Spanish philosopher, writer and journalist, known as one of the pioneers in the introduction of Fascism in Spain. Born in Alfaraz de Sayago, he was raised in Torrefrades. After studying Arts and Sciences at the Central University of Madrid, where he was a disciple of José Ortega y Gasset, contributing to La Gaceta Literaria and Revista de Occidente, Ledesma Ramos began studying the works of Martin Heidegger, he wrote a novel for the youth, entitled El sello de la muerte. Attracted to both Benito Mussolini's Corporatism, the developing Nazi movement of Adolf Hitler in Germany, he was troubled by his middle class roots, which he saw as an obstacle in reaching out to the revolutionary milieu of Spanish politics in the 1920s. In 1931, Ledesma Ramos began publishing the periodical La Conquista del Estado, named in tribute to Curzio Malaparte's Italian Fascist magazine La Conquista dello Stato—one of the first publications of the Spanish National-Syndicalism, it attempted to bridge the gap between nationalism and the anarcho-syndicalist of the dominant trade union, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, by revising Syndicalism altogether.

His admiration for National Socialism brought him to imitate Adolf Hitler's hairstyle. In the first issue of the La Conquista del Estado, Ledesma published a syncretic program, which advertised statism, a political role for the universities, a syndicalist structure for the national economy; the paper was only published throughout the year, although a subject of debate in a CNT reunion, it never had the intended impact. He subsequently led his group into an October 1931 merger with Onésimo Redondo's Junta Castellana de Actuación Hispánica, creating the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista, its magazine JONS, it became the Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista, after it fused with José Antonio Primo de Rivera's group in 1934. The group remained stable, despite the fact that Ledesma left over disagreements with Primo de Rivera; the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War caught Ledesma in Republican Madrid, far from the forces of Francisco Franco. Imprisoned by the Popular Front government because of suspected espionage throughout the summer and early autumn of 1936, he was executed by the Republican militia.

One of the key figures of Francoist propaganda, Ramiro Ledesma was nonetheless viewed with suspicion by the influential Roman Catholic Church—which had threatened to censor his works through the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. "The red shirt of Garibaldi fits Ramiro Ledesma and his comrades better than the black shirt of Mussolini." Discurso a las juventudes de España ¿Fascismo en España? La Conquista del Estado Escritos c. José Antonio Primo de Rivera Onésimo Redondo Spanish language biography