The Pre-Industrial Sources of Power: Wind Power

Of all the sources of natural power, the windmill is the most evocative. While the number of windmills has greatly diminished in our century and almost none are now operating commercially, pictures of medieval Rhodes, of the Spain of Cervantes' Don Quixote or of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century remind us that there were once landscapes which were full of them. And a few examples still survive, such as the plateau of Lassithi in Crete. Despite the general interest in windmills and a copious if sometimes repetitive and uncritical literature on the subject, the early history of this source of power is still obscure. For centuries, perhaps millenia, man had harnessed the wind to drive his ships across the waters of the world and must often have pondered how the power of the wind could be employed for productive purposes. Yet it is only within the past thousand years or so that he appears to have succeeded. Windmills of different types have been used widely in many parts of the world as a source of power.