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3D animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwU6m9tjM2A&t=74s
Whoah. That's an excellent video, and it shows how this was far more complicated than the simplified diagram in Wikipedia: the device was over 300 meters long!
Indeed, the diagram (and the wiki text too?) don't make it clear how many towers were involved, so it looks a more complicated solution that would be needed.
The power transmission to the spoons remind me of the rod line powered jack pumps in early oil fields. You can still find 100 year old wells with that kind of power distribution but they are rare

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfTfmGIVl4c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-k_Ip8RgIA

https://www.petroleumhistory.org/OilHistory/pages/Central%20...

I know it's not related, but the location is similar and the details of how the machine is driven reminds me of that hilarious scene in Don Quijote where they can't figure out what's making that noise by the waterfall, and Sancho is just scared to death of whatever horrible thing it could be.

It turns out to be fulling [0] mill hammers, driven by a water wheel. Always cracks me up.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulling

Is there any known reason why they didn't go for these scoops on a chain traveling along the side of the hill, like a funicular? [0] They already had a rather tall lift!

Maybe that much water in buckets would be too heavy for the water wheel to drag up alongside the hill? One benefit of the spoons is they only lift the total volume of one of the spoons at a time, since each tower has a store of water it's holding but not moving yet.

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%9E%D0%B4%D0%B5%D...

> Maybe that much water in buckets would be too heavy for the water wheel to drag up alongside the hill? One benefit of the spoons is they only lift the total volume of one of the spoons at a time, since each tower has a store of water it's holding but not moving yet.

I think that is the primary reason. Looking at the animation linked in another comment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwU6m9tjM2A&t=74s), it becomes clear just how many of these chains would've been necessary. Not only would a single water wheel have to be able to lift probably thousands of liters of water without any counterweight - you also need some continuous power transmission mechanism which can withstand the enormous forces to achieve that. Also, you would need some kind of safety catch to prevent catastrophic back-flow of all the kinetic energy stored in the system in case the water wheel is suddenly out of the water.

On the other hand, the oscillating spoons probably wouldn't work when too many of them are submerged in water, and their delicate wooden mechanism probably also wouldn't survive a flood or driftwood. Which is why they used a simple robust iron chain for getting the water to a flood-safe level.

It's really quite ingenious.

Related, the Machine de Marly which supplied the fountains of Chateau de Versailles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_de_Marly
So, if we squint, we see a single overworked engineer who couldn't get enough funding to keep his project going, and the project falling into disrepair, with knowledge lost after he is gone...

Now what does this remind me of...

(Yes, yes, he did get funding enough to actually build it, unlike many, and certainly had a lot of people working on implementing it... and yet, the analogy with an OSS maintainer seems a little too close)

I thought at first you were referring to Charles Babbage!
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