A modern windmill (or wind turbine, to be exact) is not so much a construction that invites affection or radiates pastoral comfort. Rather, it is something built from an urgent need: the need for a better means of generating electricity, an invention made to distance society from the pollution that leads us to oblivion.
It is a device that triggers a certain degree of apprehension in the public mind, being a stern reminder that we all better get our shit together, or else. If Cervantes was right and 17th-century Spaniards thought of such windmills as icons of threat, then some of us feel the same today, except that the stakes – our very existence – are considerably higher.
It is more than surprising that the wind-powered electricity generator took so long to be invented.
It was 1887, more than 50 years after English physicist Michael Faraday invented the electrical generator, when a Scot named James Blyth used the kinetic energy of moving air (the wind blowing around his holiday home in northeastern Scotland) to generate electrical power for himself. His homemade machine managed to produce enough electricity to keep its 10 incandescent light bulbs lit and power a small lathe, without any running costs. The wind in Marykirk, Aberdeenshire, like the wind anywhere else in the world, was, apparently at least, a precious gift from nature, given away for nothing.
The context of this small fragment of history has an inescapable irony. In James Blyth's time, the Industrial Revolution was about 90 years old and in full swing. The novel idea of generating electricity, which was accepted to greatly improve the various processes of industry, and generating it through the use of steam-powered turbines, found particular support in Scotland at the time, for a very good reason: Scotland was full of coal. The best way to generate steam was to boil water by burning coal.
For the wealthy owners of Scottish coal mines, the idea of electricity being generated from something free (like wind) was an assault on the noble principles of capitalism and, furthermore, a grave impertinence.
From the beginning, the fossil fuel lobby resisted wind energy. His first target was Professor James Blyth.
He taught engineering at a local university in Glasgow and knew what to do to turn his fascination with the potential of wind energy into a reality: he built in the front garden of his small cottage on the main street a rickety wooden tower, more than 30 feet high, that towered over its roof. To this he attached four 13-foot-tall canvas sails that he suspended from steel arms.
As the wind blew, the sails turned, as in a flour mill, turning a heavy metal shaft which, through a series of gears, then turned a vertical shaft; At its base, through even more gears, the rotation was again converted into the movement of a second horizontal rod that turned a huge iron flywheel. This, in turn, was linked by a resistant rope to the so-called Burgin dynamo, a state-of-the-art direct current electrical generator with coils of copper wire that rotated between the wings of a powerful magnet, and which produced in a pair of strong copper wires that constant current of electrons that we now know as electricity.
Blyth was a clever guy. As excited as he was to now have a power source for his little cabin, he didn't immediately connect the wires leading to his light bulbs or the power tools in his workshop. Doing so would have limited its nighttime illumination to those times when the wind was blowing outside and the canvas sails were spinning. He solved this problem by connecting his dynamo to a group of imported and newly invented French devices. accumulatorsthe precursors of modern rechargeable batteries. This arrangement meant that he could draw on his electrical power whenever he needed it.
Furthermore, his windmill and dynamo worked so well, the North Sea winds were so strong and his domestic needs so modest, that he found himself in the happy position of having electricity to spare and being able to offer it to his neighbors. But – and here the meddling of the fossil fuel industry has to be suspicious – someone had spread the word that the electricity thus produced was the devil's work. He offered to wire, connect and illuminate all the streetlights throughout the center of Marykirk village, but the town fathers, under pressure from an unspecified quarter, rejected his offer, and the road remained dark throughout the quarter century during which Blyth's little house was lighted and cozy.
He then built a much larger version of his home wind generator for the only organization that would accept his generosity: the Montrose Lunatic Asylum. Being mounted on a vertical axis, it did not need to be turned towards the wind, as traditional windmills do, and it operated happily for 27 years, charging a battery of accumulators that brought light to patients and hospital staff until it was dismantled in 1914, eight years after the death of its inventor.
At the time of this writing, more than a tenth of the United States' energy is generated by wind. Some European countries enjoy a much higher percentage: in stormy Denmark, half of the country's electricity comes from wind, in Germany a quarter, and in Brazil and more in India, 10% and growing.
In China, the rise in wind power generation and the size of the machines performing the task are simply astronomical: from the western mountains of Yunnan and Sichuan (and in Chinese-occupied Tibet, with its plateau battered by endless gales) to the coasts of Shanghai in the east and the island of Hainan in the south, turbines of ever-increasing size are making their languid presence a totally normal feature of every horizon, every horizon.
Of course, questions arise. The birds fly into the swords and die; the noise emanating from the towers irritates some; others complain of the ruined view of the countryside; and oil leaking from generators can discolor blades and give towers a deteriorated appearance. Some wonder how these massive blades will be dismantled and disposed of once their 20-year useful life ends. And there are the inevitable accidents from maintaining equipment at such great heights.
However, in every other sense, wind turbines are today considered a consummate success, which leaves only one question. Given that Faraday invented the electric generator in 1831 and Blyth lit his cottage in a Scottish village with a wind-powered generator just 50 years later, why did it take the world another century to realize the potential of wind? The planet has suffered enormously during that century, as enormous quantities of fossil fuel byproducts have been created by the burning of the coal and oil that long powered the world's tens of thousands of power plants, when, with a little thought and imagination, the wind could have been used, free, clean and blowing endlessly above us. It was a missed opportunity, with incalculable effects for all of us. Let's hope we're not too late.
Simon Winchester is the author, most recently, of “The breath of the gods: The history and future of wind”, from which this article has been adapted.
