The first electric wind turbine charged batteries at an 1883 exhibition
Visitors entering the main hall of the 1883 Vienna International Electrical Exhibition passed a 6.6-metre American wind motor. Installed by Josef Friedländer, it turned a dynamo that filled batteries, which in turn ran lamps, tools and a threshing machine. It was the first wind turbine built to make electricity.
Others soon followed. In July 1887 the Scottish academic James Blyth rigged a battery-charging machine to light his holiday cottage at Marykirk, and months later the American inventor Charles Brush built the first automatically operated wind turbine. Blyth's design was judged uneconomical in Britain, but wind generation made more sense where people lived far apart. By 1900 Denmark had around 2,500 windmills and windpumps, and by 1908 the United States had 72 wind-driven generators of 5 to 25 kilowatts. Around the First World War, American makers were turning out 100,000 machines a year, mostly to pump water, but as power lines reached farms in the 1930s, rural turbines faded.
Engineers kept scaling up. A 100-kilowatt machine on a 30-metre tower at Yalta in 1931 achieved an annual capacity factor of 32 percent, close to modern figures. In autumn 1941 the Smith-Putnam turbine in Vermont became the first megawatt-class unit connected to a utility grid; after about five years a blade snapped off, and wartime material shortages meant it was never repaired. Britain's first grid-connected turbine went up in Orkney in 1951.
The modern industry grew from grassroots energy. In the early 1970s, anti-nuclear protests in Denmark prompted craftsmen to build small 22-kilowatt turbines, and owners' cooperatives then lobbied for support that encouraged bigger machines through the 1980s. Activists in Germany, fledgling manufacturers in Spain and American investors pushed similar policies in the early 1990s.
By 2024 hundreds of thousands of large turbines produced more than 1,136 gigawatts, with 117 more added each year. Commercial machines usually have three blades of glass-fibre composite facing upwind of the tower, though carbon fibre, stiffer and lighter, is also used. Vertical-axis alternatives include the eggbeater-shaped Darrieus and the scooped Savonius, suited to rooftops and ships. Turbines are classed by design wind speed and turbulence.
Source: Wind turbine
