News & Articles on History of Wind Power
This page was prompted by a technical question about early electricity-generating wind turbines in the United States. The question followed a similar question about “who was the first” to interconnect a wind turbine with an electricity network. There is a lot of confusion internationally about both subjects.
The history of wind energy is a broad subject and many have written about it. I’ve pulled together a list of sources, books, links, and museums that I know about. This list is far from comprehensive. If anyone wants to add to this list or edit this list, please do so.
A number of the entries below are reviews I’ve written of books that include the history of wind energy. The original book can usually be reached from the review. Other news items are relevant to the history of wind turbine development.
Learning to love monsters: Windmills were once just machines on the land but now seem delightfully bucolic. Could wind turbines win us over too?
By
External Source
Yet perceptions of windmills have not been uniformly idyllic. Since they first appeared on the landscape of medieval Europe, windmills represented an imposition of the technological on the pastoral. They were, in the phrase of the wind energy author Paul Gipe, ‘machines in the garden’, straddling the boundary of the agrarian and mechanical.
200 Term Multilingual Lexicon Posted to Wind-Works.org
By
Paul Gipe
I’ve uploaded a Multilingual Lexicon of more than 200 terms to a Google spreadsheet. The lexicon describes terms used in wind energy in six different languages: English, Dansk, Deutsch, Español, Français, and Italiano.
Glossary of Wind Energy Terminology
By
Paul Gipe
This 30,000 word glossary was written by Paul Gipe and Bill Canter in the late-1990s. I’ve added the glossary to my web site for both its historical content—many of the terms were in use during the 1980s and 1990s—and as a reference for the thousands of newcomers to the wind industry since it was first published.
Wind-Powered Vehicles: Is this a Thing?
By
Paul Gipe
Yes it is. Back in 2022 I wrote two articles on solar and wind-powered EVs. The former I said held …
The Scots engineer who pioneered the wind turbine
By
External Source
When James Blyth created what many believe was the world’s first wind turbine in 1887, villagers dismissed it as the “work of the devil”. The huge structure at Blyth’s family home in the Aberdeenshire village of Marykirk was built with four cloth sails and generated enough power to light 10 bulbs along with a small lathe. It is said that he offered to light the streets of the village with his electricity but the offer was shunned. Blyth’s vision of a future powered by wind only started to be realised many decades after his death
Explanation for FloWind Blade Failures by an Eyewitness
By
Paul Gipe
Because of my critical articles on Vertical-Axis Wind Turbines, Wind Harvest’s Kevin Wolf contacted me with background on what failed …
