Harnessing wind through human history
Wind is one very usable energy resource that can be traced back thousands of years. the first mechanical device that was built to use the wind as a source of power was a sailboat. Larger ships and sailboats provided a critical service because they allowed humans to begin exploring unknown worlds and trading with other civilizations. For this, more and more harbors were built creating towns and cities along coastlines around the world.
The first sailing ships had simple square sails that simply carried them in the direction the wind blew. Arab sailors discovered how to sail into the wind using a triangular sail called the lateen – similar to the triangular sails that are still using today.
The first machine designed to use wind power to do work on land was the windmill, which was invented in the seventh century in Persia (now Iran). This new technology then spread to the Middle East and other countries such as India and China. The windmill was one of the first large-scale inventions designed to make peoples’ workloads easier. Windmills were initially used to grind grain between heavy millstones to make flour. They were also used to pump water from rivers to irrigate crops. In sawmills, people used the motion of the shaft to run a saw, which slid up and down to slice rough logs into pieces of lumber.
Windmills were not built in Europe until the twelfth century. The Europeans used them to generate power and invented a new type of mill, called the post mill. A center post grounded this type of windmill, and the whole building turned around the center post so that the sails always faced into the wind. The stationary windmill – where only the top of the structure in which the sails were mounted turned into the wind – followed this.
Wind-powered grain mills and sawmills were replaced by more efficient machinery in the early 1900s. Some farmers still use windmills today, however, to pump water and drain flooded areas and to pull up underground water for irrigating crops. Today, high-powered wind-mills, called wind turbine generators, are used to make electricity.
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