For over 2000 years people have used water-driven machinery. The oldest record of a water mill dates from about 350BCE, in the Persian Empire. Water mills were widely used in medieval times. For example, the Spanish city of Cordoba had a water mill before the Islamic conquest in 711AD, and a later structure (1) was in use from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.
Water was first used to drive electrical generators in the late nineteenth century, and in 1878 Cragside in Northumberland became the first house to be lit by hydroelectricity (2).
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