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History of Wind Power
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History of Wind Power.
The history of wind power is a long one. In fact we have been harnessing wind power for millennia. Of course, electricity hasn’t been around that long, so what were we doing with the wind? Well, the first use was for propulsion; we used it to sail ships. We’ve been doing that for so long that we’re not even sure who started the practice. There are signs of sailing in both ancient Mesopotamia and China, and as usual no one wants to concede the title of inventor, and we lack enough evidence to prove it one way or the other.
The second use we invented in the history of wind power brought us a lot closer to the current incarnation of wind power. We invented the windmill at some point in the first millennium CE. This was a turning point (no pun intended) in the development of wind power. Instead of using the wind to propel something across the surface of the earth we harnessed it via a stationary structure that used it to do work. In the case of a windmill, the work was to turn a millstone and grind grain into flour.It was only in the last century that the latest chapter of the history of wind power was opened, and that chapter is all about creating electricity. Shortly after the discovery of electricity, we came up with the dynamo, which is the father to the modern turbine. Once the dynamo had given way to the turbine, we had an ideal apparatus to harness the wind’s power for electricity. A turbine operates by spinning a magnet inside an electric coil to create current. Attach the magnet portion of a turbine to an old fashioned windmill, and all of a sudden the wind can be used to turn the magnet, creating clean, carbon-free energy.
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