In preparation for an interview with British journalist Henry Sanderson about the significance of Charles Brush’s windmill in Cleveland, Ohio I jotted down some observations. During the past decade I’ve been posting articles on the history of wind energy. These notes represent thoughts on the wind inventions of the late 19th century.
Charles Brush (1888) was a well-known and wealthy inventor. He was not a scientist. He had the money and time to experiment. He and Edison were competitors.
Josef Friedländer (1883) and Charles de Goyon–Duc de Feltre–(1887) were entrepreneurs. They were not scientists.
James Blyth (1887) was a scientist. He made observations and published his findings. He made the prescient observation that “any fool can make a wind turbine go round to generate electricity, but the challenge is to make one that can be left unattended without over-speeding to destruction.” All wind turbine design could be boiled down to that one observation–essentially the same lesson that Danish wind turbine designers learned the hard way nearly 100 years later.
Poul la Cour (1891) was not only a scientist but a social activist. He published his observations and placed his patents in the public domain for the benefit of the Danish people. He taught others how to build electricity-generating wind turbines. It was la Cour’s work that led to modern wind turbines.
Josef Friedländer and Charles de Goyon (Duc de Feltre) both used US Wind Engine & Pump Cos. Halliday power mill, a version of the American water-pumping windmill.
In 1891 US Wind Engine & Pump Co. said they had experimented using the wind to generate electricity and would continue to do so. But batteries were too expensive for widespread use.
Blyth offered to give the village of Marykirk in Scotland electricity. They refused thinking that it was from the devil. Like Brush he used the electricity in his own home.
Charles de Goyon was the first to sell electricity from a windmill. He powered batteries at the Cap de la Heve lighthouse for the French government for a brief time.
Poul la Cour’s windmill design was the first to be widely used across Denmark through his acolytes, the students at Askov Folkehøskole where he taught.
Brush exhibited two unfortunate American traits.
- He seemed to inflate his success.
- He abandoned his windmill when no longer needed. He did not remove it.
We await a historian of technology to wade into Brush’s development of his 17-meter diameter electricity-generating windmill. The best source we have today is Robert Righter’s Wind Energy in America: A History published in 1996.
