Wind Mills
Listen in RealAudio
Email your weather question

Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is the Weather Notebook. Today we begin a look at a machine that is powered by nothing more complicated than the wind.

Unlike this example of a creaking windmill in Shattuck, OK. Windmills were generally used in England in medieval times to mill wheat or corn. And a single windmill could grind up to six bushels of grain an hour if the breeze was even remotely close to being steady.

By the year 1400 there were more than 10,000 windmills in England alone. And many more appeared on the continent, and especially and famously, in Holland. Where they were used to help pump water out of the lowlands and into canals. Windmills soon dominated the European landscape. And in many places they were the biggest buildings in town. They became such a common presence in Holland that many of the Dutch masters included windmills as central figures in their landscape paintings.

By the 1800s, windmills were at their peak in Europe. But soon after that another kind of power, electricity, was harnessed and windmills fell out of favor. Now there are only about 90 windmills left in England, but preservationists are working to keep those intact and to rebuild others.

The late Dutch writer Frederick Stokhuyzen saw windmills as something to celebrate. He wrote that windmills "carry our thoughts back to the remote past, these windmills which saw so many generations come and go...their sails turn round in sunshine and rain, in the biting cold of a winter's day, in the bright spring skies as well as in the heat of summer".

Tomorrow we'll take a further look at windmills, the windmills of America and we'll look at a museum dedicated to their preservation. Our show is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory. We are funded by Subaru, the beauty of all-wheel drive with major support provided by the National Science Foundation.