Many thousands of years ago, one of the most important modes of transportation was powered by clean-green eco-energy. Of course, we’re talking about ships that used sails to harness the wind and they traveled the globe.
But if we’re considering mechanical wind energy, the first known example of such technology is a “wind organ” built by Heron of Alexandria. That was almost 2,000 years ago. The Greco-Egyptian genius created a mechanical drive turned by a windmill that powered a musical pipe organ.
Skip forward 900 to 1,000 years from Heron and we find mechanical windmills in use in many areas of the world. The 5th to 9th Century Persians in Iran and Afghanistan built windmills that could turn stone grinders to mill wheat, corn and other grains. These devices also pumped water. Around this same period, the people in China and Sicily were using windmills to drive a system to extract salt from seawater.
By the year 1180 A.D, it became almost common in many locations around Europe to find windmills grinding flour. Holland is the country most associated with windmills, but many other locations used them as well.
If we’re talking about the first windmill to generate electricity, that honor goes to Scotland. Professor James Blyth of Anderson College in Glasgow created a cloth-vaned windmill that turned a copper-coil generator. It could store energy in an early form of lead-acid battery called an “accumulator.” Blyth used an accumulator designed by French chemical engineer Camille Alphonse Faure. Blyth’s early electricity-generating windmill worked so well he was able to share power with neighbors.
The first windmill to power an American home with electricity was a huge structure built in 1888 by inventor Charles Brush. He powered his mansion in Ohio with the device. This amazing windmill stood just over 85 feet tall and featured a turbine composed of a 56-foot-wide wheel. The latter consisted of 144 blades that had a surface area of 1,800 square feet.
From 1888 through 1903, electricity-generating windmills continued to improve in efficiency while shrinking in size. Danish windmill specialist Poul la Cour discovered that windmills with fewer blades that spin faster are more efficient than those with many blades that turn slowly.
The Danes were noted for their leadership in wind technology. In 1900, 2,500 windmills with a combined power capacity of 30 megawatts were in use across Denmark.
Unfortunately, enthusiasm for wind-generated electricity all but vanished in the early 1900s when petroleum and coal were adopted as the primary and cheapest (at the time) source of electrical power.