Wind energy - History

I often find the history of an invention or method to be very interesting reading. Not so with the history of wind energy.

The history of wind energy goes something like this....

Someone in Persia (Iran (Islamic Repiblic of Iran)) came up with the idea somewhere around 700 - 800 BCE, but we only have someone else's word for that as there is no record of it anywhere.
It's also claimed someone in Europe came up with it at roughly the same time, but there's no record of that either.
I'd put my money on Persia. They had a stack of good ideas coming out of that area at that time. But who knows. Europe was just gearing up to start burning interesting and particularly intelligent women at the stake, so perhaps the dark ages were brought on by a hundred years or so of property developers getting upset about all the windmills being built. Anyway...

Then the Dutch did a bit of work.

yada yada yada... industrial revolution...

Some farmers used them a lot to pump water, and a bit for generating electricity.

Then a semi-famous actor by the name of Ronald Reagan took some cash that was put aside for R & D on wind energy , and spent it all on ray guns in space or something. I presume that was a good idea.

Then along came the recent past, where we see wind power being a pretty mainstream way of generating lots of nice clean electricity.

This bit's interesting....
According to a recent survey, the present seems to indicate every single person* on earth is taking an intense interest in home made wind energy.

And that's pretty much it for the history of wind.

Did I mention I had a big day yesterday? I'm going back to bed.



*It's possible that there is a fair degree of error in that statistic as my sample size is quite limited, but I'm pretty sure I speak for everyone in this room when I say "Everyone here is actively involved in wind energy."