Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [124]
Windmills were among the earliest technologies that replaced humans and domesticated animals as a source of energy, probably after waterwheels, which were easier to fabricate than windmills. Where the first windmills were built is, at least judging from the confident but contradictory available sources, still obscure. Some reference books suggest windmills were operating in China by 2000 B.C., but scant evidence has been found for this assertion. The U.S. Department of Energy maintains that "by 200 B.C., simple windmills in China were pumping water, while vertical-axis windmills with woven reed sails were grinding grain in Persia and the Middle East." There's no real evidence for these dates either. The first actual historical reference to windmills was from Persia in A.D. 644, but no drawings of the device survive. The first sketches date from 950, and show millers in the Persian city of Seistan grinding grain on a vertical axis windmill. By the eleventh century people all over the Middle East were using windmills extensively for food production. Some reports say the Crusaders brought the idea back to Europe at about that time, but this is doubtful. The very different design of the European mills, generally built on a horizontal axis, implies that they were invented independently. It does seem clear that Persian millwrights, captured by the invading forces of Genghis Khan, were sent to China to construct windmills there, mostly to draw water for irrigation projects on the dry plains north of Beijing.
Once domesticated in Europe, windmills spread rapidly. By the fourteenth century almost all mills everywhere in Europe were taxed, sometimes severely, but this didn't stop their spread. By the eighteenth century there were windmills in nearly every field in Europe. In Britain alone, it is now estimated there may have been almost ninety thousand of them. They simply became part of the countryside. In Holland too. The Dutch were among the preeminent millers, using windmills not just for agriculture and industry but also for draining the lakes and marshes of the Rhine delta. By the early eighteenth century the profile that is still familiar from Dutch landscape paintings appeared all over the continent: a squarish building with a section that could rotate into the wind, with four huge, clanking wooden sails. The Zaan River region of the Netherlands became a global industrial powerhouse, a center of heavy industry and a major exporter, all the factories powered by the wind, the oil of its time.
No one regarded these edifices as eyesores. They were utilitarian devices and lacked any charm except for a marked efficiency, but people grew fond of them for what they represented. As the industrial revolution proceeded apace, and as steam engines gradually replaced windmills for milling and drawing water, nostalgia replaced need, and by the 1990s only one of the Zaan windmills was left, courtesy of local pride and heavy subsidies. A few others survive elsewhere, also as historical curiosities or tourist attractions. One relic is in Cape Town, and I poked through it as a boy, fascinated as all boys seem to be with its array of pulleys and levers and wooden gear wheels. I remember its keeper saying that the wind was only sufficient one day a week, and that the mill even then operated for a couple of hours a day, the rest of the time taken up with trimming its sails and repairing the frequent breakdowns. Another such mill survives in the United States, in the Michigan town of Holland, an authentic Dutch mill built in the 1720s, taken to the United States in 1964.
In the colonial era, windmills soon spread to the most arid of places, in many cases making the difference between viable farming and penury. I remember them from when I was a boy. It hardly rained where I grew up, though when it did,