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Don Quixote’s Adversary
Wed Dec 28, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton, for The Weather Notebook. After exploring windmill power for our series on Global Climate Change Series, correspondent Val Wang decided to look back a little farther.
Persia is widely believed to be the birthplace of the windmill. There, archeologists have found windmills dating back as far as the 6th century B.C. These windmills had upright wooden or reed sails that spun around a vertical axis. Windmills also appeared in China and Babylonia before the birth of Christ. While these earliest windmills had practical uses - grinding grain and pumping water for irrigation the first recorded design of a windmill, by the fanciful Greek engineer the Hero of Alexandria in the first century B.C., was used to power a pipe organ.
Crusaders in the 12th century brought windmills to Europe, where the design underwent radical upgrades. The vertical axis was made horizontal, the reed sails made cloth and the entire machinery built around a post that could be rotated and turned into the wind. Windmills began to dot the countryside of the England, France and the Netherlands, so much so that in the 13th century, Pope Celestine III began taxing windmill owners, claiming that the air used by windmills was owned by the church.
Wind power reigned supreme in Europe and the New World until the early 19th century, when it was overtaken first by steam power, then the internal combustion engine, then electric power. However, electric power has provided the catalyst for the second coming of the windmill. European energy shortages after World War II, and the U.S. oil embargoes of the 1970's, spurred governments to begin harnessing the power of wind to generate electricity. Now wind farms that feed electricity into the utility grid can now be found in Europe and the U.S.
The Weather Notebook is generously funded by Subaru of America. Find any of our past shows online at www.weathernotebook.org.
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