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By Root 448 0

the clouds burst, and for most of the year the rivers were dry, dusty places where thorn-bushes grew and weaver birds made their intricate nests. My grandfather only had water courtesy of a borehole he had drilled 950 feet into the shale and rock of the substrata, into an aquifer left over from prehistory, and it was drawn to the surface by a clanking windmill, a mechanical, charmless thing. For a while I thought it made the water, somewhere in its rusty heart. Windmills just like it became critical to human spread in the nineteenth century; they made life in the South African barrens possible, they opened up the Australian hinterlands, they followed the dispersal of Americans westward through the dusty High Plains and allowed them to settle there with their stock, in what would otherwise have been a desert. A little later, in the first decades of the twentieth century, windmills not only drew water; they generated what little electricity a household needed. My grandfather had a small Delco wind generator on a tower above his house, which charged up a single battery, enough to fire up the primitive radio (not much better than a crystal set, as I remember), which the family used in the 1940s to gather news of the ominous doings in Europe.

Windmills still clank in remote places of the American West, drawing water without supervision and hardly needing maintenance, far from the grid or any homestead. But in most places the useful windmills have disappeared; replaced at first by the steam engine and then by electricity. In America the Rural Electrification Administration's programs brought inexpensive electric power to most areas in the United States in the 1930s.

The very industrialization that killed traditional windmills also laid the foundations for their further development. Windmills may have been vanishing everywhere, but they had been around recently enough that many scientists remembered them, and the memory set off a generation of inspired tinkerers. As the hunger for electricity increased, so did the notion of capturing the perpetual motion machine of the world's winds, not for direct power as in the past, but to generate power that could then be used for other purposes.

The first wind turbines, as they came to be called, appeared in Denmark in the 1880s. Still, the first windmill built expressly to generate electricity was built by a mechanical engineer, Charles Brush, in Cleveland in 1888. Before him, few had dared to grapple with it, Scientific American opined in 1890, "for the question not only involved the motive power itself and the dynamo, but also the means of transmitting the power of the wheel to the dynamo, and apparatus for regulating, storing and utilizing the current."

Brush was, to use a labored pun commonly used to describe him at the time, a dynamo. He was one of the founders of the American electricity industry, for the company he founded merged with Thomas Edison's business under the name General Electric Company. His wind turbine is now largely forgotten, except to cultural historians. It was a great clanking thing fifty-six feet in diameter, with no fewer than 144 rotor blades made of cedar, and developed a measly 12 kilowatts.16

Brush's system used solenoids to control the power output, a technology that didn't change until the 1980s, when computers took over the task. But otherwise his device was soon superseded; the so-called wind-rose design, a large wheel with many blades, was inherently inefficient, and it was a Dane, Poul la Cour, who made the next breakthrough. He built his first models in a wind tunnel and discovered that faster rotation, using many fewer blades, was much better at generating electricity than the slow-moving windmills adapted by Brush. La Cour's first prototype was a sleek, four-bladed machine that turned extremely rapidly.

La Cour was trained as a meteorologist, not an engineer, but he was an inveterate tinkerer and tried out many of his devices in Askov, the community where he and his wife lived. He gave courses on electrical generation at the local high school,