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Machine de Marly

1684 establishments in FranceFormer buildings and structures in FranceInfrastructure completed in 1684Landscape design historyPalace of Versailles
Water supply pumping stations
Pierre denis martin view of the marly machine and the aqueduct at louveciennes 1722
Pierre denis martin view of the marly machine and the aqueduct at louveciennes 1722

The Machine de Marly, also known as the Marly Machine or the Machine of Marly, was a large hydraulic system in Yvelines, France, built in 1684 to pump water from the river Seine and deliver it to the Palace of Versailles.King Louis XIV needed a large water supply for his fountains at Versailles. Before the Marly Machine was built, the amount of water delivered to Versailles already exceeded that used by the city of Paris, but this was insufficient, and fountain-rationing was necessary. Ironically most of the water pumped by the Marly Machine ended up being used to develop a new garden at the Château de Marly. However, even if all the water pumped at Marly (an average of 3,200 cubic metres or 703,902 imperial gallons or 845,351 US gallons per day) had been supplied to Versailles, it still would not have been enough: the fountains running à l'ordinaire (that is, at half pressure) required at least four times as much.The Machine de Marly, based on a prototype at the Château de Modave, consisted of fourteen gigantic water wheels, each roughly 11.5 metres or 38 feet in diameter, that powered more than 250 pumps to bring water 162 metres (177 yd) up a hillside from the Seine River to the Louveciennes Aqueduct. Louis XIV had countless schemes and inventions that were supposed to bring water to his fountains. The Machine de Marly was by far his most extensive and costly plan. After three years of construction and a cost of approximately 5,500,000 livres, the massive contraption, considered the most complex of the 17th century, was completed. "The chief engineer for the project was Arnold de Ville and the 'contractor' was Rennequin Sualem (after whom the quai by the machine is now named)." Both men had experience in pumping water from coal mines in the region of Liège (in modern Belgium).The machine suffered from frequent breakdowns, required a permanent staff of sixty to maintain and often required costly repairs. It functioned for 133 years. Destroyed in 1817, it was replaced by a "machine temporaire" during 10 years and then a steam engine entered in service from 1827 to 1859. From 1859 to 1963, the pumping at Marly was assumed by another hydraulic machine conceived by the engineer Xavier Dufrayer. Dufrayer's machine was scrapped in 1968 and replaced by electromechanical pumps.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Machine de Marly (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Machine de Marly
Quai Rennequin-Sualem, Versailles

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Latitude Longitude
N 48.871111111111 ° E 2.1247222222222 °
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Quai Rennequin-Sualem 14
78380 Versailles
Ile-de-France, France
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Pierre denis martin view of the marly machine and the aqueduct at louveciennes 1722
Pierre denis martin view of the marly machine and the aqueduct at louveciennes 1722
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Bougival
Bougival

Bougival (French pronunciation: [buʒival] (listen)) is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France. It is located 15.3 km (9.5 mi) from the center of Paris, in its western suburbs. As the site where many of the Impressionists (including Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, and Auguste Renoir) painted country scenes along the Seine, the village today hosts a series of six historical placards, known as the "Impressionists Walk," at locations from which the noted painters depicted the scenes of Bougival.Bougival is also noted as the site of the Machine de Marly, a sprawling, complicated hydraulic pumping device that began supplying the massive quantity of water required by the fountains at Palace of Versailles in the late 17th century. Considered one of the foremost engineering accomplishments of its era, the cacophonous, breakdown-prone apparatus comprised fourteen waterwheels (approximately 38 feet in diameter) driven by the current of the Seine — in turn powering more than 250 pumps, delivering water up a 500-foot vertical rise through a series of pumping stations, holding tanks, reservoirs, pipes and mechanical linkages. In use until 1817, the machine was subsequently updated, replaced with another pumping building in 1858 and finally replaced by an electrical generator in 1963. The building itself remained until 1968. Remnants are visible today at the riverbank.In Bougival, Georges Bizet composed the opera Carmen at his home at Rue Ivan Tourguenievf on the Seine and noted Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev built a dacha, Les Frênes. A local monument commemorates the Montgolfier brothers, pioneers of flight, and the commune hosts the annual Festival of Bougival et des Coteaux de Seine.