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The history of Wind Turbines
Man has been trying to harness the power of the wind since he started living in towns and cities and became civilised. As long ago as 5000 BC wind was already being used to power ships along the Nile and a few thousand years later the Emperor of Babylon was attempting to run his palace irrigation system with it. By 600 BC the innovative Persians were employing wind power to drive rudimentary devices to pump water and grind down valuable grain.
The First Windmills
The first panemone windmills to be discovered by archaeologists date back to 500 AD and were sales arranged around a central, vertical column. They were often used more as decorative features, particularly in China and Asia, rather than as renewable power sources but by the 12th Century Europeans were beginning to build and develop mills for working grain and moving water. One of the earliest mills in the UK is found at Weedley in Yorkshire and can be dated back to 1185. The Dutch are, of course, synonymous with windmills and by the 14th Century they were using it for large projects such as draining the Rhine delta, a testimony to man’s growing ingenuity and desire to manipulate the world around him. For the next few hundred years, windmills proliferated, many being used for farming purposes or drawing water from places like artesian wells. It wasn’t until the end of the 19th Century that scientists and inventors began to look at wind power as a possible source for electricity and the impetus for that was much closer to home, in Scotland. {pincode}
The First Renewable Wind Turbine
Professor James Blyth was a Scottish engineer who worked at Anderson’s College in the heart of Glasgow in 1887. Using accumulators developed by Frenchman Camille Faure, Blyth set up a number of wind sales in his back garden to power the lights in his cottage. At the time, after the initial success, he offered to power the surround houses but was turned down as his neighbours thought it was the Devil’s work. Blyth went on to supply the power for a local asylum but the idea of a wind turbine for electricity production did not catch on at the time. At the same time, the Americans were developing things that were bigger – a turbine with a 50ft wingspan that turned slowly but was enough to power the lights in the inventor’s laboratory. A few years later, it fell into disuse, superseded by large power stations that could provide the electricity more cheaply.
Denmark and the Wind Turbine
Denmark owed much of the development of wind turbines for electricity production to Poul la Cour, a scientist who showed more vision than his American and English counterparts by transforming his initial invention into the prototype of a power station driven by the power of wind. By the turn of the century in Denmark there were over 2,000 windmills producing over 30 MW of power. This development continued well into the 20th Century whilst others were cultivating a growing dependence upon fossil fuels for their energy needs.
