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| It is certain that the wind mill can elevate the water to a container placed in the slope of a hill and from it to a hydraulic turbine connected to a dynamo; but the cost of construction of this deposit was too expensive for the usual tasks. Some engineers had projected in those years a compressed air installation moved by a wind mill. In this case, the compressed air in the tank was used to move the machinery when it lacked the wind or it was calm. Nevertheless, the mechanism only elevated the cost of the heavy and powerful compressing installation ; so it turned out economic and less dangerous to buy a gas or petroleum motor. The fact is that the invention of the gas motors and those ones that used oils derived from the soft coal or petroleum had lowered the price of the production of power in many countries, and whereupon the wind motors had more competitors to fight to in the times when they only had the steam engine as the only rival.
A mill working in Trapani (Italy) The captain Robert Falcon Scott installed a wind mill in the ship Discovery when he made his first trip to the Antarctic regions. The wind motor was assembled so that it moved an electrical equipment, with the object to save the small amount of fuel that the ship loaded . Unfortunately, the mill was destroyed by a gust of wind in a strong weather.
ADVERTISEMENT : Naturally, the windmill of the XII century was not the first apparatus that the man has used to take advantage of the wind force. In the years of the sail navigation , it existed boats constructed of steel and covered by thousands of meters of canvas in their sails, suspended in five masts also made of steel that crossed the seas at an average speed of 11 knots per hour, from the New World one to the Old one. Without any doubt it was some genius of the Stone Age , who lived in the borders of the Mediterranean, who first hoisted a sail in a wood of his small boat to avoid the work of rowing when following the course of a river or to cross a bay. The Egyptians, eight thousand years ago, had boats with a sail, that gradually were transforming into sailboats, and is very probable that the first kings of the sea, in Crete, were still more advanced or were more practitioners than the Egyptians in the seacraft taking advantage of the wind force. |
Antique windmills
Typical mill in Malta .
Greek mill in Cerigo Island .
Use of the force of the wind in Siberia early last century
A 350 years old of existence mill in Europe .
Wind mill to elevate water: The "simplex", one of most advanced wind motors the English people used in the United Kingdom towards beginnings of XX century. |
| The winds in the Mediterranean are, nevertheless, too uncertain and irregular for sailboats of great size. As a rule, it was necessary to use the oars, as well as the sails, in the long trips in this inner sea. The Greeks military boats , with their three banks of rowers, were the most manageable ships in the old fight for the dominion of the seas. Until the new civilizations appeared in the beaches of the windy Atlantic, the man did not begin to construct faster, greater and safer ships, than those ones known until then, and these ships surely sailed only by the wind force. It is then when the construction of sailboats was developed, at the same time that the science of navigation; in such a way that at the end of the Middle Age the man acquired such skills in the use of the wind force, that he could navigate around the world impelled by the breeze of the ocean to discover new and extensive continents, beginning to populate them, simply having learned to win and to take advantage of the energy originated by the wind . It was, first of all, the sail boat
which gave to the white races the dominion on the Americas, South
of Africa , Australia and New Zealand .India surrendered to a small
group of brave adventurers who arrived there from the other end
of the Earth dragged by the winds. The British Empire was born due
to the wind force in the seas , although in a different way that
the Dutch one, which created its ground rescuing it from the sea
by means of the wind mill. Thus, considering all whatever has been
said, it is evident that the dominion of the wind force has been
an event in the history of the man until the 1900’s much more
important than the discovery of the application of the steam to
produce driving force.
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