Who was first?
The question of who built the first wind turbine has no tidy answer. Several experimenters turned a windmill into an electricity generator in the late 1880s and early 1890s, working independently on two continents. Which one counts as first depends on how the question is framed: the earliest machine, the first one to run for years, the first with a scientific program behind it, or the first to supply a building or a community. The three best-documented names are James Blyth, Charles F. Brush and Poul la Cour.
Blyth in Scotland, 1887
James Blyth was a Scottish engineer who taught at Anderson’s College in Glasgow. In July 1887 he set up a wind machine in the garden of his holiday cottage at Marykirk, in northeast Scotland. It turned around a vertical axis and used four sails of cloth stretched over wooden frames, a design that did not need to be turned to face the wind. It charged batteries, which powered lighting in the cottage, and Blyth is generally credited with using wind to light a house for the first time.
Reports say that he offered to supply electric light to the local community, but that the villagers were not interested in what some regarded as a strange or even unnatural machine. He later patented his design. He saw wind as a useful local source, but it was a side interest of a working academic, and the machine did not spawn an industry.
Brush in the United States, 1887 to 1888
Across the Atlantic, the American inventor and industrialist Charles F. Brush built a very different machine in Cleveland, Ohio. Brush was already well known for arc lighting, and he had the money and workshop to build at a scale that no previous wind machine had reached. His turbine had a wheel about 17 meters across, carrying 144 narrow blades, and sat on a tall tower. The wheel was geared up to turn a dynamo with a rating of roughly 12 kilowatts, and the output charged a large battery bank in the cellar of his house.
The numbers show an odd feature of early wind machines. The wheel was huge, yet the output was modest. With so many thin blades the wheel turned slowly, and a lot of material produced relatively little power compared with later designs. The machine nonetheless ran for a good number of years, and it supplied incandescent bulbs, motors and other equipment in Brush’s home. In an era when Edison lighting was just beginning to spread through cities, this was a private electric supply powered entirely by wind.
La Cour in Denmark, from 1891
Poul la Cour was a Danish scientist and teacher at the folk high school in Askov. He began wind experiments in 1891 with government support, and where Blyth and Brush mostly built and used machines, la Cour studied them. He built a small wind tunnel to test how blade shapes behaved, and he worked on mechanisms that held the turbine’s speed steady.
His most unusual idea dealt with the central weakness of wind power: it comes and goes. La Cour used the electricity from his turbines to split water into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis, and he stored the hydrogen to burn in gas lamps at the school. It was an early, small-scale attempt at converting wind to a storable fuel, and the same idea appears in modern discussions of hydrogen and the fuel cell. He also trained “wind electricians” and helped to spread small wind plants in rural Denmark. Many Danish villages had wind-powered electric supplies by the early twentieth century, though the exact numbers are not well established.
What these machines had in common
Despite their differences, the three experiments share some features. All of them produced direct current, because alternating current systems were not yet common for small installations. All of them needed some way to store energy for calm days, usually batteries, which were then early forms of the lead-acid battery, bulky and costly to maintain. And all were one-off efforts by individuals, not commercial products.
They also faced economics that did not favor them. Power from coal-fired plants, and from the steam engines that drove generators, was becoming cheaper and more reliable in towns. The wind machines made sense mainly where grid power did not reach, which is where the later story of small farm wind generators begins.
Why the first machines matter
None of the machines would be recognized as a modern turbine, and none produced enough energy to change a country’s supply. Their importance lies in what they proved: that the old windmill could drive a generator, that the output could be stored, and that wind could light a house. They also raised the problem of energy storage, which engineers still work on. Later designers took what they could from these pioneers and improved on the blades and controls, but the central idea was already in place by the 1890s.