This machine was at first made to force the water no higher than Gracechurch street. The first engineer obtained from the city a lease for 500 years, at the annual rent of 10s. for the use of the Thames, and one arch, with a place for fixing his mill upon. The citizens soon experienced the benefit of this invention, and granted him a like lease, two years after, for another arch: by which means he grew very wealthy; and it continued in his family, under various improvements, till the year 1701; when the property was sold to one Richard Soams, a citizen and goldsmith. Morice having first, at the purchaser’s request, obtained another lease of the fourth arch, for the further improvement of the said works, after selling the whole property thereof for 36,000l. Mr. Soams, to prevent all disputes with the citizens, then applied to the city for a confirmation of his bargain with Mr. Morice, and obtained a fresh lease from them for the term unexpired of that gentleman’s lease, at the yearly rent of 20s. and 300l. fine. After which he divided the whole property into three hundred shares, at 500l. each share, and made it a Company. The wheels placed under the arches are moved by the common stream of the tidewater of the river Thames. The axle-tree of the water wheel is nineteen feet long, and three feet diameter; in which are four sets of arms, eight in each place, whereon are fixed four rings on sets of felloes, twenty feet in diameter, and twenty-six floats, fourteen inches long, and eighteen inches deep. The wheel lies, with its two gudgeons or center pins, upon two brasses, fixed on two great levers, whose _fulcrum_ or top, is an arched piece of timber, the levers being made circular on their lower sides to an arch, and kept in their places by two arching studs, fixed with a sock through two mortises in the lever. By these levers the wheel is thus made to rise and fall with the tide: the levers are sixteen feet long, that is, from the fulcrum to the gudgeon of the water wheel six feet, and thence to the arch ten feet. To the bottom of this arch is fixed a strong triple chain, made like a watch chain, but the links are arched to a circle of one foot diameter, having notches or teeth to take hold of the leaves of a pinion of cast iron, ten inches diameter, with eight teeth in it, moving on an axis. The other loose end of this chain has a large weight hanging at it, to help to counterpoise the wheel, and to preserve the chain from sliding on the pinion. On the same axis is fixed a cog-wheel, six feet in diameter, with forty-eight cogs; to this is applied a trundle or pinion of six rounds or teeth; and upon the same axis is fixed another cog-wheel of fifty-one cogs, into which a trundle of six rounds works, on whose axis is a winch or windlass, by which one man with the two windlasses raises or lets down the wheel, as there is occasion.