Why the world neglected wind power for a century

The planet has suffered hugely as vast amounts of fossil-fuel byproducts have been created unnecessarily

- SIMON WINCHESTER GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

SCOTT OLSON Getty Images ALMOST since its invention in 1887, wind power has been undermined by the fossil-fuel industry.

A MODERN windmill — or wind turbine, to be exact — is not so much a construction that invites affection or radiates pastoral comfort. Rather, it is something built out of an urgent necessity — a need for a better means of generating electricity, an invention made to wean society away from polluting ourselves into oblivion.

It is a device that triggers in the public mind a certain degree of apprehension, being a stern reminder of how we had all better shape up, or else. If Cervantes was right and 17th century Spaniards did think of such mills as icons of menace, then some of us feel similarly today, except that the stakes — our very existence — are considerably higher.

It is more than a little surprising that the wind-powered electricity generator took so long to invent.

It was 1887, more than 50 years after the English physicist Michael Faraday invented the electrical generator, when a Scotsman named James Blyth used the kinetic energy of moving air — the wind blowing around his holiday cottage in northeastern Scotland — to generate electrical power for himself. His homemade machine managed to produce enough electricity to keep all 10 of his incandescent light bulbs burning and to power a small lathe — for no running cost whatsoever. The wind in Marykirk, Aberdeenshire, like the wind everywhere else in the world, was, at least ostensibly, the precious gift of nature, given away for nothing.