Ancient wind power was not electric
Strictly speaking, there were no wind turbines in ancient times. A turbine, in the modern sense, is a rotating machine that turns moving air into electricity, and electricity was not harnessed until the nineteenth century. What the ancient world did have was wind used as a source of motion. The history of wind energy runs from there to modern generating turbines, but it is not a single straight line.
Wind used as a push
The oldest large-scale use of wind was probably on the water. Sailing ships with a square sail were in use in the eastern Mediterranean and on the Nile thousands of years ago, and later designs, such as the triangular sail on Arab and Mediterranean vessels, made it easier to sail across or partly against the wind. These sails take energy from air, but they carry boats, not machinery, and they have little direct connection to the turbine.
Old stories sometimes say that wind-driven machines existed much earlier than the record supports. One example is the claim of windmills in ancient Babylon in the time of Hammurabi. Such claims are poorly supported, and historians generally do not accept them. Another is Hero of Alexandria, who described a small device that has been interpreted as a wind-driven wheel working an organ. Whether it was really a windmill is debated, and even if it was, it was a demonstration, not a working industry.
Windmills with a job
The first well-documented windmills were working machines. Vertical-axis windmills are described in written sources from the Sistan region of the Persian world around the tenth century, where they turned millstones. Horizontal-axis windmills appear in European records from the late twelfth century. Neither the Persian nor the European type is known to have evolved directly from the other, and historians still discuss whether the European mill was an independent invention or an idea carried across from the Islamic world.
For centuries these mills did mechanical work: grinding grain, lifting water, and in some places sawing wood, crushing materials or paper making. Their output went directly into a task through gears and shafts. If the wind dropped, the work stopped, and nobody much expected otherwise. Some of this work later went to water mills and to steam engines, which could run on demand.
The change of purpose
The key shift in the story is not blade shape or tower height but the purpose. In the 1880s, experimenters in Scotland, the United States and Denmark began attaching a dynamo to a windmill and storing the output in batteries. A windmill that once ground grain now produced a form of energy that could be moved along wires, stored and used for light.
That change of purpose brought a change in design priorities. A grain mill could be slow and heavy, since a few turns per minute were enough to move a stone. A generator needs high shaft speed, so electric wind machines were lighter, faster and shaped more like propellers than the sails of a traditional mill. Over the twentieth century, engineers drew increasingly on aircraft aerodynamics, a very different tradition than millwrighting.
Two lines meet
For a time the two traditions ran in parallel. Traditional windmills declined in Europe through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as engines and the electric grid took over. Multi-bladed farm windmills, meanwhile, kept pumping water across much of the Americas, Africa and Australia. In the 1920s and 1930s, small wind generators supplied lights and radios on remote farms. Utility-scale trials came later, notably in Vermont in the 1940s and Denmark in the 1950s.
The oil price shocks of the 1970s revived government interest, and from the 1980s wind turbines moved from a niche technology to one that connects to the main grid at large scale. Modern turbines share an inheritance with the old mills, which is the idea of capturing the push of the wind on an angled surface, but their blades, controls and materials come from newer engineering.
What stayed the same
Two things connect the Persian millstone and a modern offshore turbine. First, they are both bound by the same fuel: wind is free but variable, so output depends on the weather. Second, both rely on putting a rotor where the wind is strongest, which explains the hilltops of old mill sites and the choice of coastal and offshore locations now. Energy storage, which the early battery-charging experiments tried to address, is still part of the conversation about how wind power fits into electricity supply.
A note on dates
Because many early records are sparse, dates for ancient and medieval wind machines are approximate, and some specifics are disputed. For the electric era the record is better, but even there credit is shared among several experimenters instead of resting with one inventor. The safest way to read the history is as a long chain of adaptations, each one using wind for the needs of its time.