The invention of windmill

The power of the wind was well recognised in antiquity when people took advantage of its to propel ships. Sailing ships using wind power to drive their ships by 3000 BC. Some historians believed that the windmill had its origin in Tibet or China,where wind-driven prayer wheels that rotated on a vertical axis were common.

The earliest known wind powered grain mills and water pumps were used by the Persians in A.D. 500-900. Communities in Persia were mounting small sails of reed mats, woven palm fronds, and occasionally slats of wood onto vertical shafts extending through the roofs of buildings. The sails spun horizontally turning the vertical shaft to provide grinding power below.

In China in the 8th century AD, windmills were apparently employed for helping to haul canal boats past canal locks but were not used for grinding grain.

Around AD 1100, the ‘Mediterranean’ windmill began to appear in Italy. Massive, two story stone building were mounted with vertical sails and it was connected to a vertical shaft that drove the mill grinding stone below. Windmills were used in Holland in the 15th century for pumping water over the dikes.

The first windmill manufactured in the United States was designed by Daniel Halladay, who began inventing windmills in 1854 in his Connecticut machine shop.

By the early nineteenth century steam engines had begun to replace windmills as the preferred power source for grinding and for industrial uses.
The invention of windmill