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When we ask about the earliest water-wheel in Chinese history we come upon the paradox that it was not used for turning simple cereal grindstones, but for the more complicated job of blowing metallurgical bellows. This must mean that there was a tradition of millwrights going back some considerable time before even though we cannot trace it in literary references. The essential text, the Hou Han Shu, tells us:
In AD 31, the seventh year of the Chien-Wu reign-period, Tu Shih was posted to be Prefect of Nanyang. He was a generous man and his politics were peaceful; he destroyed evil-doers and established the dignity of his office. Good at planning, he loved the common people and wished to save their labour. He invented a water-power reciprocator, or blowing-engine (shui phai), for the casting of agricultural implements."
The author concludes: "If Newcomen's work is taken as the turning point, the hidden pre-natal history of the reciprocating steam-engine played a remarkably large part in its 'post-natal' history. For in order to go beyond the single-stroke stage and the non-rotary stage, currents of design were required which went back many centuries before Newcomen and Watt. No single man was 'father of the steam-engine'; no single civilization either - yet no-one comes nearer to deserving the title than Thomas Newcomen".