Rennequin Sualem (1645 − 1708) was a Walloon carpenter and engineer born on 29 January 1645 in Jemeppe-sur-Meuse, in what now is Wallonia,

Belgium Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...

. His given name sometimes appears as 'Renkin'.

Achievements

In 1667−68 the lieutenant-governor of the castle of Huy ordered the building of an hydraulic machine to pump up the water of the Hoyoux river to his castle in Modave, higher. Rennequin Sualem was commissioned to build the mechanism. In 1678 the French king

Louis XIV LouisXIV (Louis-Dieudonné; 5 September 16381 September 1715), also known as Louis the Great () or the Sun King (), was King of France from 1643 until his death in 1715. His verified reign of 72 years and 110 days is the List of longest-reign ...

called for a competition to construct an effective pump system to bring water from the nearby

Seine The Seine ( , ) is a river in northern France. Its drainage basin is in the Paris Basin (a geological relative lowland) covering most of northern France. It rises at Source-Seine, northwest of Dijon in northeastern France in the Langres plat ...

river to his chateaux at

Versailles The Palace of Versailles ( ; ) is a former royal residence commissioned by King Louis XIV located in Versailles, Yvelines, Versailles, about west of Paris, in the Yvelines, Yvelines Department of Île-de-France, Île-de-France region in Franc ...

and Marly in order to supply the fountains there, and Sualem resolved to present his model, a scaled-up version of his pump system at Hoyoux. The presentations by the other inventors were so unconvincing that the king had decided to discontinue the competition and was about to leave the room, but Sualem managed to persuade him to stay to hear his plan. When he presented his imposing wooden model he impressed the king with his detailed description of its operation, and convinced that Sualem understood the problem to be tackled, Louis XIV commissioned him to immediately begin construction. The resulting huge Machine de Marly, engineered by Arnold de Ville, lifted the waters from the Seine to the Versailles palace, in this case higher. The machine included 14 paddlewheels to power over 200 pumps that forced water up a network of pipes to an aqueduct. It took 30 years to complete in 1684 and remained in use until 1817 before subsequent modification.Profil de la Machine de Marly (An annotated image of the Marly machine)
/ref> Rennequin also built a pump for a

coal mine Coal mining is the process of resource extraction, extracting coal from the ground or from a mine. Coal is valued for its Energy value of coal, energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to Electricity generation, generate electr ...

at Decize. He died in

Bougival Bougival () is a suburban commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France region in Northern France. It is located west from the centre of Paris, on the left bank of the River Seine, on the departmental border with Hauts-de-Seine. In ...

, France in 1708, at the Marly machine.

Homage

*Quai Rennequin Sualem in Bougival *Rue Renkin in Brussels *Rue Rennequin in Paris *Rue Rennequin Sualem in Liège *Haute École Rennequin Sualem in Liège

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sualem, Rennequin Hydraulic engineers 17th-century engineers from the Holy Roman Empire Walloon people 1645 births 1708 deaths