Contributor: Why We Ignored Wind Power for a Century

A modern windmill—or wind turbine, to be precise—is not so much a structure as to evoke love or radiate pastoral tranquility. Rather, it is something that is created out of urgent need – the need for better means of generating electricity, an invention created to rid society of self-pollution.

It’s a tool to create some level of anxiety in people’s minds, a harsh reminder of how we all used to be in good shape, or else. If Cervantes was right and 17th-century Spaniards thought of such mills as a sign of danger, then some of us feel the same way today, except that the stakes—our existence—are considerably higher.

It is more than a little surprising that it took so long to invent the wind-powered generator.

It was 1887, 50 years after the English physicist Michael Faraday invented the electric generator, when a Scotsman named James Blyth used the kinetic energy of moving air—the wind that swirled around his holiday cottage in northeast Scotland—to generate electricity for himself. His home-built machine produced enough electricity to keep all 10 of his incandescent lights separate and power a small lantern – with no running costs. The wind in Marykirk, Aberdeenshire, like wind anywhere in the world, was, at least apparently, a precious gift of nature, not given for nothing.

The context of this small piece of history has an incredible irony to it. By James Blyth’s time, the Industrial Revolution was about 90 years old and in full swing. The new idea of ​​generating electricity, which was accepted to improve the various processes of industry on a large scale, and to generate it by employing steam turbines, found special joy in Scotland Day, for a very good reason: Scotland was full of coal. Steam is best produced by boiling water with burning coal.

To the wealthy owners of the Scottish coal mines, the idea of ​​generating electricity from something – like wind – that was free, was an attack on the great principles of capitalism, and a gross indiscretion to boot.

From the beginning, the fossil-fuel lobby resisted wind power. Their first target was Professor James Blyth.

He was teaching engineering at a local college in Glasgow and knew what to do to turn his interest in the potential of wind power into reality: he built a wooden tower on the main road in front of his small cottage, more than 30 feet high, above his roof. To this he attached four 13-foot high canvas sails which he hung from steel arms.

As the wind picked up, the sails turned, like rolling in a bowl of flour, as they turned a large metal spindle that, through a series of gears, turned into a vertical tilt. At its base, through more gears, the rotation was turned back into the movement of a second horizontal rod that turned a large iron flywheel. This in turn was connected by a tight rope to a so-called Bergen dynamo, a modern direct current electric generator consisting of coils of copper wire that revolved between the wings of a powerful magnet – and which produced in a pair of copper wires a continuous current of electricity known as an electric current.

Blyth was a canny friend. Delighted that although he now had a source of electricity for his small cottage, he did not immediately connect the wires that carried his light bulbs or the power tools in his workshop. To do this his night light would be limited to those moments when the wind was blowing outside and the canvas sails were changing. He solved this problem by hooking his dynamo to an imported and newly invented French cluster. collectorsPioneers of modern rechargeable batteries. This arrangement meant that he could use his power when needed.

Besides, his windmill and dynamo worked so well, the North Sea winds so strong, and his family’s needs so modest, that he found himself in the happy state of being without electricity, and offered them to his neighbors. But – and here the intervention of the fossil-fuel industry must be suspected – someone had said that electricity was so built. Devil’s work. He offered to connect, connect and illuminate all the street lights in the center of the village of Marykirk, but the city fathers, under pressure from an unknown quarter, rejected his proposal, and the street remained dark for a quarter of a century during which the Bullet House lighted and invited comfortably.

He built a much larger version of his homemade wind generator for an institution that would accept his Greater Montrose Lunatic Asylum. Mounted on a vertical spindle, it did not need to be turned into wind, as traditional windmills do, and it ran happily for 27 years, charging a battery of accumulators that brought light to hospital patients and staff until it fell apart in 1914, eight years after the death of its inventor.

At the time of this writing, more than 10 percent of America’s electricity is generated by wind. Some European countries enjoy much higher percentages: in Denmark, half of the country’s electricity is generated by wind, in Germany a quarter, and in Brazil and India less than 10% and growing.

In China, the growth of wind power generation and the amount of machines that do this job is simply astronomical: from the western mountains of Yunnan and Sichuan – and in Chinese-occupied Tibet, with its endless monsoons – to the coasts of Shanghai in the east and the island of Hainan in the south, where they exist, they are abundant. A typical feature of each skyline, each horizon.

Questions arise, of course. Birds fly into the blades and die; The noise coming from the towers is a bit annoying; Others complain of the ruined appearance of the countryside. And oil spills from generators can paint the blades and give the towers a decaying appearance. Some wonder how these giant blades will be disposed of once their 20-year lifespan is over. And there are inevitable accidents from keeping equipment at such great heights.

In all other senses, however, wind turbines today are seen as a complete success – leaving only one question. Given that Faraday invented the electric generator in 1831, and that Blyth lit his cabin in a Scottish village with a wind-powered generator just 50 years later, why did it take another century for the world to realize the potential of wind? The planet suffered a lot during this century, because the burning of coal and oil created vast amounts of fossil-fuels that for a long time fueled the world’s tens of thousands of power stations – when, with some thought and imagination, wind – free, clean and endlessly flowing past us – was employed instead. This is a missed opportunity, with incalculable implications for all of us. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

Simon Winchester is the author, most recently, of “Breath of God: The history and future of wind, from which this article is drawn.