No single inventor
The wind turbine does not have one inventor or one birthday. A wind turbine is a machine that turns the motion of moving air into electricity, and it grew out of older windmills that did mechanical work such as grinding grain and pumping water. Several people in different countries built the first electricity-making windmills in the late 1880s, and the machines then changed in steady steps over more than a century.
That makes the history easier to follow as a series of stages: windmills, experimental electric windmills, small farm generators, a few large trial machines, and finally the commercial turbines and wind farms of today.
Windmills come first
People used wind to do work long before electricity. Written accounts from around the tenth century describe vertical-axis windmills in the Sistan region, in what is now eastern Iran and southwestern Afghanistan. Windmills with sails on a horizontal axis appear in European records from the late twelfth century. Over the following centuries they ground grain, drained wet land and sawed timber, working alongside water mills where rivers were unreliable or missing.
By the nineteenth century, windmills in many places were losing ground to steam engines, which did not depend on the weather. Wind power did not vanish, though. Steel, multi-bladed windmills spread across farmland to pump water, and the idea of using wind for something new was already in the air.
The first electric windmills
Electricity gave the windmill a new job. In July 1887, the Scottish engineer and academic James Blyth built a cloth-sailed, vertical-axis machine at his holiday cottage in Marykirk and used it to charge batteries for lighting. Around the same winter, Charles F. Brush in Cleveland, Ohio, built a much larger machine, with a rotor roughly 17 meters across and many narrow blades, that charged batteries to supply his house and workshop. In Denmark, Poul la Cour began experimenting in the early 1890s and tested blade shapes in a small wind tunnel.
These machines were curiosities, not power stations. They were expensive, heavy for the little electricity they produced, and they dealt with the central problem of wind power by storing energy in batteries. Still, they showed that the old windmill could drive a generator, and the era of electric lighting needed new sources of power.
Farm generators and the grid
In the early twentieth century, small wind generators made practical sense in places the electric grid had not reached. On farms in the American Midwest and Great Plains, a propeller-style machine on a tower could charge a battery bank and run lights and a radio. Their use declined as rural power lines arrived, though they kept a place at remote sites.
The next step was scale. The best-known early attempt to feed a large machine into a utility network was a 1.25-megawatt turbine on a Vermont hilltop, which began operating in 1941 and ended its run in 1945 when a blade failed. In Denmark, Johannes Juul’s three-bladed turbine at Gedser, in service from 1957, worked reliably for years at a much smaller rating and strongly influenced later Danish designs.
From oil crisis to wind farms
Interest in wind power was low while fossil fuel was cheap. The oil price shocks of the 1970s changed that, and governments in the United States, Denmark, Germany and elsewhere funded research and offered incentives. Some of the large experimental machines of that period were disappointing, while smaller Danish-style turbines proved sturdier and more economical.
In the 1980s, California saw a rush of installations, many of them in groups of turbines. These early wind farms had a reputation for breakdowns, but they taught manufacturers a great deal. In 1991, Denmark built what is generally cited as the first offshore wind farm, at Vindeby, with 11 turbines of 450 kilowatts each.
Bigger machines, different problems
A turbine’s output rises with the area its blades sweep and with the cube of the wind speed, so manufacturers kept building taller towers and longer blades. Early commercial turbines were measured in tens of kilowatts. The largest offshore machines today are rated at well over 10 megawatts each, with rotors well over 100 meters across. Better materials, aerodynamic blade shapes borrowed from the study of airplane propellers, and electronic controls that adjust blade angle and speed all contributed.
How a turbine makes electricity
The principle has stayed the same since the 1880s. Moving air pushes on angled blades, the blades turn a shaft, and the shaft turns a generator in which magnets and coils of wire produce an electric current. The early machines stored that current in batteries. Modern turbines instead send it through power electronics and a transformer into the grid, which means the output must be matched to the grid’s frequency and voltage. Few machines run all the time at full power: a turbine typically starts producing at a modest wind speed, reaches its rated output at a stronger one, and shuts down for safety in a storm.
Milestones at a glance
- 1887: James Blyth in Scotland and Charles F. Brush in the United States build the first well-documented electricity-making windmills.
- 1891: Poul la Cour begins his experiments in Denmark.
- 1920s and 1930s: small wind chargers light farms beyond the reach of power lines.
- 1941 to 1945: a 1.25-megawatt turbine feeds a utility network in Vermont.
- 1957: the three-bladed Gedser turbine begins operating in Denmark.
- 1980s: wind farms spread, especially in California and Denmark.
- 1991: the Vindeby wind farm opens off Denmark.
Dates for “firsts” in this list depend on how each is defined, and other machines of the same period are sometimes cited instead.
What wind power does and does not do
Wind now supplies a significant share of electricity in many countries, and a much larger share on windy days in some regions. Turbines produce no smoke or fuel emissions while running, but they have costs and limits. Output varies with the weather, so grids rely on other generating sources, transmission lines and energy storage to keep supply steady. Projects also raise questions about land use, views, noise and wildlife, and the answers differ from place to place.
Wind sits alongside solar panels and, increasingly, electric vehicles in discussions of how energy systems might change. Whether and how fast that happens depends on cost, policy and technology, and the history here suggests that progress tends to come gradually, from many people improving the same basic idea.