Who developed the first wind turbine to create electricity?
Wind turbine
The first electricity-generating wind turbine was a battery charging machine installed in July 1887 by Scottish academic James Blyth to light his holiday home in Marykirk, Scotland. Some months later American inventor Charles F. Brush was able to build the first automatically operated wind turbine after consulting local University professors and colleagues Jacob S. Gibbs and Brinsley Coleberd and successfully getting the blueprints peer-reviewed for electricity production in Cleveland, Ohio. Although Blyth's turbine was considered uneconomical in the United Kingdom, electricity generation by wind turbines was more cost effective in countries with widely scattered populations.
History of wind power
In 1891 Danish scientist, Poul la Cour, constructed a wind turbine to generate electricity, which was used to produce hydrogen by electrolysis to be stored for use in experiments and to light the Askov High school. He later solved the problem of producing a steady supply of power by inventing a regulator, the Kratostate, and in 1895 converted his windmill into a prototype electrical power plant that was used to light the village of Askov.
Jet engine
The first patent for using a gas turbine to power an aircraft was filed in 1921 by Frenchman Maxime Guillaume. His engine was an axial-flow turbojet, but was never constructed, as it would have required considerable advances over the state of the art in compressors. Alan Arnold Griffith published "An Aerodynamic Theory of Turbine Design" in 1926 leading to experimental work at the RAE.
In 1928, RAF College Cranwell cadet Frank Whittle formally submitted his ideas for a turbojet to his superiors. In October 1929 he developed his ideas further. On 16 January 1930 in England, Whittle submitted his first patent (granted in 1932). The patent showed a two-stage axial compressor feeding a single-sided centrifugal compressor. Practical axial compressors were made possible by ideas from A.A.Griffith in a seminal paper in 1926 ("An Aerodynamic Theory of Turbine Design"). Whittle would later concentrate on the simpler centrifugal compressor only. Whittle was unable to interest the government in his invention, and development continued at a slow pace.
In 1935 Hans von Ohain started work on a similar design in Germany, both compressor and turbine being radial, on opposite sides of same disc, initially unaware of Whittle's work. Von Ohain's first device was strictly experimental and could run only under external power, but he was able to demonstrate the basic concept. Ohain was then introduced to Ernst Heinkel, one of the larger aircraft industrialists of the day, who immediately saw the promise of the design. Heinkel had recently purchased the Hirth engine company, and Ohain and his master machinist Max Hahn were set up there as a new division of the Hirth company. They had their first HeS 1 centrifugal engine running by September 1937. Unlike Whittle's design, Ohain used hydrogen as fuel, supplied under external pressure. Their subsequent designs culminated in the gasoline-fuelled HeS 3 of , which was fitted to Heinkel's simple and compact He 178 airframe and flown by Erich Warsitz in the early morning of August 27, 1939, from Rostock-Marienehe aerodrome, an impressively short time for development. The He 178 was the world's first jet plane. Heinkel applied for a US patent covering the Aircraft Power Plant by Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain in May 31, 1939; patent number US2256198, with M Hahn referenced as inventor.
Austrian Anselm Franz of Junkers' engine division ("Junkers Motoren" or "Jumo") introduced the axial-flow compressor in their jet engine. Jumo was assigned the next engine number in the RLM 109-0xx numbering sequence for gas turbine aircraft powerplants, "004", and the result was the Jumo 004 engine. After many lesser technical difficulties were solved, mass production of this engine started in 1944 as a powerplant for the world's first jet-fighter aircraft, the Messerschmitt Me 262 (and later the world's first jet-bomber aircraft, the Arado Ar 234). A variety of reasons conspired to delay the engine's availability, causing the fighter to arrive too late to improve Germany's position in World War II, however this was the first jet engine to be used in service.
Meanwhile, in Britain the Gloster E28/39 had its maiden flight on 15 May 1941 and the Gloster Meteor finally entered service with the RAF in July 1944. These were powered by turbojet engines from Power Jets Ltd., set up by Frank Whittle. The first two operational turbojet aircraft, the Messerschmitt Me 262 and then the Gloster Meteor entered service within three months of each other in 1944.
Howard Knob
In 1977, the Federal Energy Research and Development Administration and the Department of Energy announced that Howard Knob had been selected as the site for an experimental wind turbine, which was later built by General Electric in October 1978. The project was part of a surge in renewable energy research which began under then-President Jimmy Carter. The turbine, formally known as MOD-1, was managed by NASA and operated by Blue Ridge Electric Membership Corporation. It stood tall and had two long steel blades that rotated counterclockwise at . It was designed to power 300 to 500 average-sized homes, given wind speeds of .
Fausto Veranzio
His areas of interest in engineering and mechanics were broad. Mills were one of his main point of research, where he created 18 different designs. He envisioned windmills with both vertical and horizontal axes, with different wing constructions to improve their efficiency. The idea of a mill powered by tides incorporated accumulation pools filled with water by the high tide and emptied when the tide ebbed, simply using gravity; the concept has just recently been engineered and used. The first wind turbines were described by Fausto Veranzio. In his book Machinae Novae (1616) he described vertical axis wind turbines with curved or V-shaped blades.
Wind tunnel
In France, Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923) built his first open-return wind tunnel in 1909, powered by a 50 kW electric motor, at Champs-de-Mars, near the foot of the tower that bears his name.
Glidden Doman
In January 1970, Doman went to work for Boeing Vertol – Boeing's helicopter division in Philadelphia. There he continued his helicopter pioneering, working on U.S. Army funded research and patenting additional design improvements for helicopter speed increases and vibration reductions. The 1973 arab oil embargo triggered a great interest in wind energy at Boeing and numerous other companies. While continuing his helicopter innovations, Doman began to conduct wind turbine research. He adapted computer simulation models designed for helicopters to study wind turbines. Doman and his team then built scale-model wind turbines to test them in a wind tunnel normally used for helicopters and airplanes. Doman soon understood the similarities and key differences between wind turbines and helicopters. Wind turbine designers with no experience in helicopters might not know the lessons-learned from the history of helicopter technology, but by the mid-1970s Doman had more than 30 years of such learning that was directly applicable to wind turbines. Boeing's MOD-2 with the Doman-conceived flexible design, two-bladed wind turbine with a teeter hinge, became a flagship achievement in a 7-year NASA managed wind energy program for the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Wind power in Denmark
Danish inventor Poul la Cour experimented, taught and constructed wind power subjects around the year 1900.
NASA wind turbines
In 1975 NASA designed and built its first prototype wind turbine, the 100 kW Mod-0 in Sandusky Ohio, with funding from the National Science Foundation and ERDA. The Mod-0 was modeled after the light weight two-bladed research turbine by Austrian Ulrich Hütter. The two-bladed wind turbine with flexible or teetered rotor hubs characterized the NASA-led program. NASA and its contractors found that two blades can produce essentially equivalent energy as three blades but at a savings of the cost and weight of a blade. Two-blade rotors turn faster than equivalent three-blade rotors, reducing the ratio in the gearbox. Flexibility in the rotor minimizes the transfer of bending loads into the drive train; none of the NASA wind turbines experienced gearbox failures that are often a problem for rigid rotor systems in use today.
William Kamkwamba
Kamkwamba, after reading a book called "Using Energy", decided to create a makeshift wind turbine. He experimented with a small model using a cheap dynamo and eventually made a functioning wind turbine that powered some electrical appliances in his family's house. Local farmers and journalists investigated the spinning device and Kamkwamba's fame in international news skyrocketed. A blog about his accomplishments was written on Hacktivate and Kamkwamba took part in the first event celebrating his particular type of ingenuity called Maker Faire Africa, in Ghana in August 2009.
Henrik Stiesdal
In 1978, Henrik Stiesdal designed (along with Karl Erik Jørgensen) one of the first wind turbines representing the so-called "Danish concept". In 1979, his design was licensed to Vestas A/S, a Danish manufacturer of farm wagons, truck cranes and ship coolers. Stiesdal's design formed the basis of this company's rise to become one of the leading wind turbine manufacturers. After first working for Vestas as a consultant, he joined the company in 1983 as project manager. 
In 1987, Stiesdal joined the Danish wind turbine manufacturer Bonus Energy A/S as a development specialist. In 1988, he became a technical manager and in 2000 he took the role of Chief Technology Officer. In 2004, Bonus Energy A/S was acquired by the German technology company Siemens. Stiesdal became the Chief Technology Officer of Siemens Wind Power and remained in this position undtil the end of 2014, when he retired. According to rough calculations by Stiesdal, one person's work for a year at a wind turbine manufacturer or subcontractor compensates for 650 western peoples' CO emissions for that year. In 2016, he became affiliate professor at DTU Wind, the Technical University of Denmark´s Department of Wind Energy.
NASA wind turbines
In 1977 Boeing won the NASA and US-DOE contract for the design, fabrication, construction, installation and testing of several 2.5-megawatt wind turbine models in the United States. The first four MOD-2 models went into operation during the early 1980s. The dedication ceremony for the first three turbines was held on April 17, 1980, at Goodnoe Hills, Washington. On September 2, 1982, a fourth began operating at Medicine Bow, Wyoming. The Bonneville Power Administration bought the generated electricity of the Goodnoe Hills turbines and integrated it into the regional power grid. During the periods of May 1981, the three turbines at the Goodnoe Hills site formed the first wind farm in the world. The Goodnoe Hills site was primarily a research project for Boeing, Bonneville Power Administration, NASA and the Battelle Memorial Institute. The Solar Energy Research Institute also evaluated the suitability of megawatt-class wind turbines as a source of electricity. During 1986, the MOD-2 wind turbines of Goodnoe Hills were dismantled. In 1985, the last full year of operation, the combined electrical output of the three turbines was 8,251 megawatt-hours. The Medicine Bow MOD-2 wind turbine was sold for scrap in 1987. In 2008, the Goodnoe Hills Wind Farm opened on the same site with 47 REpower 2.0 MW wind turbines for a combined nameplate capacity of 94 MW. enXco/Power Holdings owns the wind farm, with PacifiCorp as the power purchaser.
Block Island Wind Farm
Block Island Wind Farm is a project of Deepwater Wind located about southeast of Block Island, the first offshore wind farm in the United States. The 30 megawatt, five-turbine demonstration project is expected to produce more than 125,000 megawatt hours of electricity annually. Power is transmitted from the turbines to the electric grid along a transmission submarine power cable buried under the ocean floor, making landfall north of Scarborough Beach in Narragansett, Rhode Island. The structures were designed by Alstom Wind, standing . They can withstand a Category 3 storm. The system connects New Shoreham, Rhode Island to the grid for the first time and allows it to cease using diesel generators which have been replaced with power from the cable supplying the island. Gulf Island Fabrication was interested in building the foundations.
Wind power in Thailand
In 1983, Thailand had its first set of electricity generating wind turbines, consisting of six turbines, installed at Laem Phromthep in Phuket Province by EGAT as a pilot project. The generated electricity was used to power nearby research stations. The outcome was satisfying, so in 1988 EGAT planned to connect the turbines to the power grid of the Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA), and in 1990 they started operating. This was the first time Thailand had electricity generated by wind power supplying the power grid. Later, in 1992, two more turbines with 10 kW of capacity were installed and connected to the grid.
Sustainable energy
Wind energy research dates back several decades to the 1970s when NASA developed an analytical model to predict wind turbine power generation during high winds. Today, both Sandia National Laboratories and National Renewable Energy Laboratory have programs dedicated to wind research. Sandia’s laboratory focuses on the advancement of materials, aerodynamics, and sensors. The NREL wind projects are centered on improving wind plant power production, reducing their capital costs, and making wind energy more cost effective overall.
The Field Laboratory for Optimized Wind Energy (FLOWE) at Caltech was established to research renewable approaches to wind energy farming technology practices that have the potential to reduce the cost, size, and environmental impact of wind energy production. The president of Sky WindPower Corporation thinks that wind turbines will be able to produce electricity at a cent/kWh at an average which in comparison to coal-generated electricity is a fractional of the cost.
A wind farm is a group of wind turbines in the same location used to produce electric power. A large wind farm may consist of several hundred individual wind turbines, and cover an extended area of hundreds of square miles, but the land between the turbines may be used for agricultural or other purposes. A wind farm may also be located offshore.
Electric generator
In electricity generation, a generator is a device that converts motive power (mechanical energy) into electrical power for use in an external circuit. Sources of mechanical energy include steam turbines, gas turbines, water turbines, internal combustion engines and even hand cranks. The first electromagnetic generator, the Faraday disk, was invented in 1831 by British scientist Michael Faraday. Generators provide nearly all of the power for electric power grids.
Oscillating Water Column
The Hanna Turbine  U.S. patent 8,358,026, was invented by environmental activist John Clark Hanna in 2009. The Hanna Turbine was developed to improve upon the pioneering Wells Turbine. As with the Wells, the Hanna device has no moving parts that come in direct contact with the ocean. The turbine has two rotors with back-to-back asymmetrical airfoils. Both rotors are mirror images with low angles of attack. The airfoils have higher lift coefficients and less drag than the Wells Turbine. This makes the Hanna design less prone to stalling and offers more torque with a larger operating window. The Hanna design also drives two generators that operate outside of the enclosed air duct in a relatively dry environment. This allows for easy maintenance of the generators.
Electric motor
The first electric motors were simple electrostatic devices described in experiments by Scottish monk Andrew Gordon and American experimenter Benjamin Franklin in the 1740s. The theoretical principle behind them, Coulomb's law, was discovered but not published, by Henry Cavendish in 1771. This law was discovered independently by Charles-Augustin de Coulomb in 1785, who published it so that it is now known with his name. 
The invention of the electrochemical battery by Alessandro Volta in 1799 made possible the production of persistent electric currents. After the discovery of the interaction between such a current and a magnetic field, namely the electromagnetic interaction by Hans Christian Ørsted in 1820 much progress was soon made. It only took a few weeks for André-Marie Ampère  to develop the first formulation of the electromagnetic interaction and present the Ampère's force law, that described the production of mechanical force by the interaction of an electric current and a magnetic field. The first demonstration of the effect with a rotary motion was given by Michael Faraday in 1821. A free-hanging wire was dipped into a pool of mercury, on which a permanent magnet (PM) was placed. When a current was passed through the wire, the wire rotated around the magnet, showing that the current gave rise to a close circular magnetic field around the wire. This motor is often demonstrated in physics experiments, substituting brine for (toxic) mercury. Barlow's wheel was an early refinement to this Faraday demonstration, although these and similar homopolar motors remained unsuited to practical application until late in the century.
Tesla turbine
The Tesla turbine is a bladeless centripetal flow turbine patented by Nikola Tesla in 1913. It is referred to as a "bladeless turbine". The Tesla turbine is also known as the "boundary-layer turbine", "cohesion-type turbine", and "Prandtl-layer turbine" (after Ludwig Prandtl) because it uses the "boundary-layer effect" and not a fluid impinging upon the blades as in a conventional turbine. Bioengineering researchers have referred to it as a multiple-disk centrifugal pump. One of Tesla's desires for implementation of this turbine was for geothermal power, which was described in "Our Future Motive Power".
Airborne wind turbine
In 2015, a sails on rope wind and ocean current energy system was invented by a Taiwanese Johnson Hsu.
Electrification
The first electricity-generating wind turbine was a battery charging machine installed in July 1887 by Scottish academic James Blyth to light his holiday home in Marykirk, Scotland. Some months later American inventor Charles F Brush built the first automatically operated wind turbine for electricity production in Cleveland, Ohio. 
Advances in recent decades greatly lowered the cost of wind power making it one of the most competitive alternate energies and competitive with higher priced natural gas (before shale gas). Wind energy's main problem is that it is intermittent and therefore needs grid extensions and energy storage to be a reliable main energy source.
Marine propulsion
Steam turbines were fueled by coal or, later, fuel oil or nuclear power. The marine steam turbine developed by Sir Charles Algernon Parsons raised the power-to-weight ratio. He achieved publicity by demonstrating it unofficially in the "Turbinia" at the Spithead Naval Review in 1897. This facilitated a generation of high-speed liners in the first half of the 20th century, and rendered the reciprocating steam engine obsolete; first in warships, and later in merchant vessels.
Thermal power station
The initially developed reciprocating steam engine has been used to produce mechanical power since the 18th Century, with notable improvements being made by James Watt. When the first commercially developed central electrical power stations were established in 1882 at Pearl Street Station in New York and Holborn Viaduct power station in London, reciprocating steam engines were used. The development of the steam turbine in 1884 provided larger and more efficient machine designs for central generating stations. By 1892 the turbine was considered a better alternative to reciprocating engines; turbines offered higher speeds, more compact machinery, and stable speed regulation allowing for parallel synchronous operation of generators on a common bus. After about 1905, turbines entirely replaced reciprocating engines in large central power stations.
NASA wind turbines
NASA contracted with General Electric in 1978 to scale up from the MOD-0A with a 10-fold increase in power. The Mod-1 was the first wind turbine in the world to produce 2 megawatts and also General Electric's first wind turbine. The Danish with a hub height of 46 meters above the ground, a larger rotor and a rating at a higher wind speed, had a capacity of 2000 kW but never achieved 2 MW power output of the Mod-1. The Mod-1's design weight prevented it from becoming a competitive commercial product, but a prototype was installed and run at Howard's Knob near Boone, North Carolina. The quick design cycle to multi-megawatt size based on the first generation Mod-0 caused technical and operational challenges. Low-frequency noise from the heavy truss tower blocking the wind to the downwind rotor caused problems to residences located close by. With additional pressure of a reduction in federal program funding, the turbine was dismantled in 1983.
Johannes Juul
In 1962, the windpower committee stated that the Gedser turbine had operated well and had been able to withstand the pressures of use. It had also been able to produce power for the grid. In the meantime, power produced by coal-fired plants cost 8 to 9 Danish crowns per Gcal while power from the Gedser turbine was costing 19 crowns per Gcal. They therefore concluded there was no reason to continue to develop wind power. Juul, who at the time was 75 and had long been retired, totally disagreed explaining that the experimental turbine at Gedser was over-dimensioned and a compromise between various options with the result that it was only 40% efficient compared to the Bogø efficiency of 53%. Moreover, new materials such as plastics and fibreglass would bring increases in efficiency. Juul's visionary conclusions in 1962 turned out to be confirmed by subsequent progress in the Danish wind industry which 40 years later had become the greatest supplier of turbines to the world market. Today the Gedser wind turbine, referred to as the Danish design, is widely regarded as the basis on which new turbines were developed. The inventor was Johannes Juul.
Turbo generator
The first turbo-generators were water turbines which propelled electric generators. Irish engineer Charles Algernon Parsons demonstrated a DC steam-powered turbogenerator using a dynamo in 1887. and by 1901 had supplied the first large industrial AC turbogenerator of megawatt power to a plant in Eberfeld, Germany.
Thomas O. Perry
Thomas Osborn Perry was born in Franklin, Michigan on February 28, 1847.
In 1882 and 1883, while working for the U.S. Wind Engine and Pump Company, Perry conducted a series of over five thousand experiments on windmill rotors and rotor blades. His experiments resulted in a windmill design that was 87% more efficient than other windmills manufactured at that time. Perry's main improvements were the use of concave windmill blades made from steel, rather than flat wooden blades. In order to conduct his experiments, Perry had designed and built an enclosed wind tunnel, a research tool that was not in common use at this time.
Michael J. Osborne
Renewable Energy Business.  Influenced by architect, inventor and philosopher, "Buckminster Fuller", who believed in the importance of "renewable energy", Osborne began to focus on the renewable energy business in the late 1970s by building "passive solar homes" and selling energy-saving wood stoves. In 1981 he developed the first "wind energy" project (consisting of five 25-kilowatt "wind turbines") that sold energy to an "electric utility" in Texas. in 1983, he signed on as the first distributor in Texas for "Solarex", a now-defunct maker of "solar cells" used then as power sources for such things as ranch gates, railroad signals and other places where stringing power lines was difficult or expensive. In the 1990s he ran the Texas operations for "Zond Energy", which is now part of "GE Wind Energy", the largest U.S. "wind turbine" maker. Throughout the 80's and 90s, Osborne documented and leased the wind resource for Texas wind fields. Many of his exploits are documented in the book, "The Great Texas Wind Rush".
Floating wind turbine
In June 2013, the University of Maine deployed the VolturnUS 1:8, a tall floating turbine prototype that is 1:8th the scale of a 6-megawatt (MW), rotor diameter design. 
VolturnUS 1:8 was the first grid-connected offshore wind turbine deployed in the Americas. 
The VolturnUS design utilizes a concrete semi-submersible floating hull and a composite materials tower designed to reduce both capital and Operation & Maintenance costs, and to allow local manufacturing. 
The technology was the result of collaborative research and development conducted by the University of Maine-led DeepCwind Consortium.
Smith–Putnam wind turbine
In 1939, the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT) was approached by Palmer C. Putnam, to design the turbine. Theodore von Kármán had William Rees Sears and W. Duncan Rannie carry out the aerodynamic design. Unfortunately, Rannie's analytical findings regarding the stability of the giant windmill were not incorporated in the prototype that was built and tested on the mountain.
GE Wind Energy
The GE platform began development with the creation of the 1.5MW series of wind turbines which was developed with the cooperation of the United States Department of Energy. It consisted of three fibreglass blades attached to a horizontal axis hub. The hub is connected to the main shaft which turns a multi-stage system of gears. The gears increase the rotational rate and send the kinetic energy obtained from the wind to a doubly fed electric machine, where it is converted into electrical energy. The angle of the blades and the direction which the turbine faces are controlled by an active, all electric pitch and yaw system. The generator and gearbox are contained in the nacelle which is further insulated to minimize noise emissions.
Aerodynamics
In 1799, Sir George Cayley became the first person to identify the four aerodynamic forces of flight (weight, lift, drag, and thrust), as well as the relationships between them, and in doing so outlined the path toward achieving heavier-than-air flight for the next century. In 1871, Francis Herbert Wenham constructed the first wind tunnel, allowing precise measurements of aerodynamic forces. Drag theories were developed by Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Gustav Kirchhoff, and Lord Rayleigh. In 1889, Charles Renard, a French aeronautical engineer, became the first person to reasonably predict the power needed for sustained flight. Otto Lilienthal, the first person to become highly successful with glider flights, was also the first to propose thin, curved airfoils that would produce high lift and low drag. Building on these developments as well as research carried out in their own wind tunnel, the Wright brothers flew the first powered airplane on December 17, 1903.
Charles F. Brush
In 1884, Brush built a mansion on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland that showcased many of his inventions. There he raised his family and lived the remainder of his life. The basement housed Brush's private laboratory. In 1888, he powered the mansion with the world's first automatically operated wind turbine generator which charged the home's 12 batteries. It was the first home in Cleveland to have electricity. Over its 20-year life, the turbine never failed to keep the home continuously powered. In 1926, Brush pioneered the first piezo-electric featherweight stylus.
Wind power in Ohio
Most of the MOD-series wind turbines went to sites outside of Ohio, but the first unit, the MOD-0 operated at NASA's Plum Brook facility near Sandusky from 1975 to 1988. Initially the wind turbine had a lattice tower, a 38.1m diameter two-bladed rotor mounted downwind from the tower, and a capacity of 100 kW. Lockheed Corporation manufactured the aluminum rotor blades. The discovery of severe stress resulting from the rotor blades passing through the tower's wind shadow led to several redesigns. In 1979, NASA rebuilt the MOD-0 with an upwind rotor mounted on a teetering hub, with a steel spar reinforcing the blades. In 1982, a tubular tower replaced the lattice tower. Finally, in 1985 NASA tested a single-bladed rotor with a teetering hub. In 1981, two NASA Glenn engineers, Larry Viterna and Bob Corrigan, used the adjustable-pitch blade feature of the MOD-0 to invent an analytical method for calculating wind turbine output in high winds, which has since become widely used in the wind power industry as the Viterna method.
Wind power in Ohio
From 1974 to 1981, NASA's Glenn Research Center (then the Lewis Research Center) in Brook Park, Ohio led the U.S. Wind Energy Program for large horizontal-axis wind turbines, designing a series of 13 experimental large horizontal-axis wind turbines. In conjunction with the United States Department of Energy, NASA developed and tested megawatt-class wind turbines. The program's goal was to develop the technology, and then turn it over to private industry. While none of the program's wind turbine designs saw mass commercialization, the tests generated valuable data and pioneered modern design concepts such as tubular towers and computer control of blade pitch and rotor yaw.
Luis Zambrano
He developed water turbines used to generate electricity and to move a carpenter's mechanical instruments such as a lathe or plane. His home was the first house in the area to have electric light, which was generated by a turbine of his own design before the national electric company CADAFE reached his village. For that reason, his hydraulic electricity generator plans were widely used in the villages and houses of the Andes.
Water turbine
In 1866, California millwright Samuel Knight invented a machine that took the impulse system to a new level. Inspired by the high pressure jet systems used in hydraulic mining in the gold fields, Knight developed a bucketed wheel which captured the energy of a free jet, which had converted a high head (hundreds of vertical feet in a pipe or penstock) of water to kinetic energy. This is called an impulse or tangential turbine. The water's velocity, roughly twice the velocity of the bucket periphery, does a u-turn in the bucket and drops out of the runner at low velocity.
Floating wind turbine
SeaTwirl deployed its first floating grid connected wind turbine off the coast of Sweden in August 2011. 
It was tested and decommissioned. 
The design intended to store energy in a flywheel, thus, energy could be produced even after the wind stopped blowing.
Ganz Works
The first turbo generators were water turbines which drove electric generators. The first Hungarian water turbine was designed by engineers of the Ganz Works in 1866. Mass production of dynamo generators started in 1883.
Early flying machines
In 1871 Wenham and Browning made the first wind tunnel. Members of the Society used the tunnel and learned that cambered wings generated considerably more lift than expected by Cayley's Newtonian reasoning, with lift-to-drag ratios of about 5:1 at 15 degrees. This clearly demonstrated the possibility of building practical heavier-than-air flying machines: what remained were the problems of controlling and powering the craft.
Alphonse Pénaud, a Frenchman living from 1850 to 1880, made significant contributions to aeronautics. He advanced the theory of wing contours and aerodynamics and constructed successful models of aeroplanes, helicopters and ornithopters. In 1871, he flew the first aerodynamically stable fixed-wing aeroplane, a model monoplane he called the "Planophore", a distance of . Pénaud's model incorporated several of Cayley's discoveries, including the use of a tail, wing dihedral for inherent stability, and rubber power. The planophore also had longitudinal stability, being trimmed such that the tailplane was set at a smaller angle of incidence than the wings, an original and important contribution to the theory of aeronautics.
Ægidius Elling
His first gas turbine patent was granted in 1884. In 1903 he completed the first turbine that produced excess power; his original machine used both rotary compressors and turbines to produce net. He further developed the concept, and by 1912 he had developed a gas turbine system with separate turbine unit and compressor in series, a combination that is now common.
Gedser wind turbine
The Gedser wind turbine is located near Gedser in the south of the Danish island of Falster. It was constructed by the engineer Johannes Juul in 1957 for the SEAS ("Sydsjællands Elektricitets Aktieselskab") electricity company with support from the Marshall Plan. Its innovative design was a major breakthrough in the development of wind turbines.
Johannes Juul
Denmark had suffered from fuel shortages during the Second World War. In 1947, Juul therefore embarked on the wind turbine project that was to bring him worldwide fame. After much experimentation with wind tunnels, the first turbine with two blades and producing 10 kW, was developed in 1950 and installed at Vester Egesborg in the south of Zealand. The turbine turned out to be generally self-regulating as the rotor was automatically slowed down by the generator's braking action, even in heavy winds. For additional protection, he invented a system consisting of aerodynamic brakes on the blade tips. Two years later he produced a turbine for Bogø with an output of 45 kW.
Nikola Tesla
Trying to come up with a better way to generate alternating current, Tesla developed a steam powered reciprocating electricity generator. He patented it in 1893 and introduced it at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition that year. Steam would be forced into the oscillator and rush out through a series of ports, pushing a piston up and down that was attached to an armature. The magnetic armature vibrated up and down at high speed, producing an alternating magnetic field. This induced alternating electric current in the wire coils located adjacent. It did away with the complicated parts of a steam engine/generator, but never caught on as a feasible engineering solution to generate electricity.
History of wind power
From 1974 through the mid-1980s the United States government worked with industry to advance the technology and enable large commercial wind turbines. The NASA wind turbines were developed under a program to create a utility-scale wind turbine industry in the U.S. With funding from the National Science Foundation and later the United States Department of Energy (DOE), a total of 13 experimental wind turbines were put into operation, in four major wind turbine designs. This research and development program pioneered many of the multi-megawatt turbine technologies in use today, including: steel tube towers, variable-speed generators, composite blade materials, partial-span pitch control, as well as aerodynamic, structural, and acoustic engineering design capabilities. The large wind turbines developed under this effort set several world records for diameter and power output. The MOD-2 wind turbine cluster of three turbines produced 7.5 megawatts of power in 1981. In 1987, the MOD-5B was the largest single wind turbine operating in the world with a rotor diameter of nearly 100 meters and a rated power of 3.2 megawatts. It demonstrated an availability of 95 percent, an unparalleled level for a new first-unit wind turbine. The MOD-5B had the first large-scale variable speed drive train and a sectioned, two-blade rotor that enabled easy transport of the blades. The 4 megawatt WTS-4 held the world record for power output for over 20 years. Although the later units were sold commercially, none of these two-bladed machines were ever put into mass production. When oil prices declined by a factor of three from 1980 through the early 1990s, many turbine manufacturers, both large and small, left the business. The commercial sales of the NASA/Boeing Mod-5B, for example, came to an end in 1987 when Boeing Engineering and Construction announced they were "planning to leave the market because low oil prices are keeping windmills for electricity generation uneconomical."
Wind power in India
In September 1954, a Symposium on Solar Energy and Wind Power organised by the CSIR and UNESCO was held in New Delhi; among the attendees was E. W. Golding, a British power engineer and authority on wind energy generation. Convinced of the potential of wind power in India, he recommended continued and extensive wind velocity surveys in different regions of India, the full-time assignment of staff to experimental wind power studies, the establishment of a dedicated research laboratory and development of small to medium-sized wind-powered electrical generators. Golding's recommendations were adopted by the CSIR in 1957. By this time, regions of Saurashtra and around Coimbatore had been identified as promising sites for generating electricity from wind power, and the Wind Power Sub-Committee had begun to erect 20 wind velocity survey stations across India, in addition to testing its indigenously designed windmills and obtaining a 6 kw. Allgaier wind turbine, which was presented to India by the West German government; experiments at Porbandar with the latter had commenced by 1961. The Indian government also considered a proposal to erect over 20,000 small to medium-sized wind-powered electrical generators in rural districts, to be used for powering water pumps and supplying electricity for remotely situated structures such as lighthouses.
Wave power
The first known patent to use energy from ocean waves dates back to 1799, and was filed in Paris by Girard and his son. An early application of wave power was a device constructed around 1910 by Bochaux-Praceique to light and power his house at Royan, near Bordeaux in France. It appears that this was the first oscillating water-column type of wave-energy device. From 1855 to 1973 there were already 340 patents filed in the UK alone.
Turbomachinery
The first use of turbomachines were technically water wheels between the 3rd and 1st century BCE, credited to the people in the Mediterranean region (see more at water wheel). The first real modern turbomachines did not appear until the late 1880s. It was not until the industrial revolution, however, steam power started to be utilized with reciprocating engines and turbines, which opened up the potential of steam power. The first impulse type turbine was created by Carl Gustaf de Laval in 1883. This was closely followed by the first practical reaction type turbine in 1884, built by Charles Parsons. Parsons’ first design was a multi-stage axial-flow unit, which George Westinghouse acquired and began manufacturing in 1895, while General Electric acquired de Laval’s designs in 1897. Since then, development has skyrocketed from Parsons’ early design, producing 0.746 kW, to modern nuclear steam turbines producing upwards of 1500 MW. Today, steam turbines account for roughly 90% of electrical power generated in the United States. The first patents for gas turbines were filed in 1791 by John Barber. Then the first functioning industrial gas turbines were used in the late 1890s to power street lights (Meher-Homji, 2000).
R. Tom Sawyer
Robert Thomas Sawyer, known as R. Tom Sawyer, (June 20, 1901 – January 19, 1986) was the inventor of the first successful gas turbine locomotive. He also assisted in development of the diesel locomotive while he worked for General Electric, which led him to be known as the "Father of the Diesel Locomotive". Sawyer was the founder of what is now the modern-day "International Gas Turbine Institute" (IGTI), and among industry professionals was known as "Mr. Gas Turbine". Sawyer authored books about gas turbines, locomotives, and atomic power, and was awarded three U.S. Patents. The ASME established the "R. Tom Sawyer Award" to honor him for advancing gas turbine technology in all of its aspects for over 40 years. The award in his name is the highest award given by the IGTI, and is awarded annually at their international "Turbo Expo."
Unconventional wind turbines
Two or more rotors may be mounted to the same driveshaft, with their combined co-rotation together turning the same generator: fresh wind is brought to each rotor by sufficient spacing between rotors combined with an offset angle (alpha) from the wind direction. Wake vorticity is recovered as the top of a wake hits the bottom of the next rotor. Power has been multiplied several times using co-axial, multiple rotors in testing conducted by inventor and researcher Douglas Selsam, for the California Energy Commission in 2004. The first commercially available co-axial multi-rotor turbine is the patented dual-rotor American Twin Superturbine from Selsam Innovations in California, with 2 propellers separated by 12 feet. It is the most powerful turbine available, due to this extra rotor. In 2015, Iowa State University aerospace engineers Hui Hu and Anupam Sharma were optimizing designs of multi-rotor systems, including a horizontal-axis co-axial dual-rotor model. In addition to a conventional three-blade rotor, it has a smaller secondary three-blade rotor, covering the near-axis region usually inefficiently harvested. They were considering the overall efficiency of the wind farm, and checking many variations beyond the one mentioned. Preliminary results indicated 10-20% gains, less efficient than is claimed by existing counter-rotating designs but those are complex.
When a system expels or accelerates mass in one direction, the accelerated mass causes a proportional but opposite force on that system. The spinning blade of a single rotor wind turbine causes a significant amount of tangential or rotational air flow. The energy of this tangential air flow is wasted in a single-rotor propeller design. To use this wasted effort, the placement of a second rotor behind the first takes advantage of the disturbed airflow, and can gain up to 40% more energy from a given swept area as compared with a single rotor. Other advantages of contra-rotation include no gear boxes and auto-centering on the wind (no yaw motors/mechanism required). A patent application dated 1992 exists based on work done with the Trimblemill.
Henrik Stiesdal
Stiesdal's initial work in the late 1970s and early 1980s contributed significantly to the development of the simple and robust technologies of the so-called Danish Concept, comprising upwind, automatic yawing and two-speed stall-regulated turbines with fail-safe safety systems. This concept is considered as the basis of the dominant position of the Danish wind industry through the following decades.
In 1990, Stiesdal had overall responsibility for Vindeby Offshore Wind Farm, the world's first offshore wind farm, including the first offshore adaptation of wind turbines. The wind farm, comprising 11 450 kW turbines, was installed in 1991. 
From 1995 onwards, Stiesdal was responsible for the development of the proprietary IntegralBlade® manufacturing technology. In this manufacturing process, blades are cast in one piece, eliminating weak spots of known technologies.
In 1996, Stiesdal developed the CombiStall® blade regulation system which was fully implemented in the company's megawatt-range turbines. 
Two years later in 1998, Stiesdal designed the first variable-speed turbine for Bonus Energy A/S. The technology was tested commercially in 2002 and from 2005 onwards, it has been used in all of Siemens’ new products. 
From 1999 onwards, Stiesdal was in charge of the development of Siemens’ Direct Drive technology, eliminating the gearbox which is the classical weak spot of traditional wind turbine design. Stiesdal is involved in around 175 inventions, including thermal storage.
Floating wind turbine
WindFloat is a floating foundation for offshore wind turbines designed and patented by Principle Power.
A full-scale prototype was constructed in 2011 by Windplus, a joint-venture between EDP, Repsol, Principle Power, A. Silva Matos, Inovcapital, and FAI. 
The complete system was assembled and commissioned onshore including the turbine. 
The entire structure was then wet-towed (from southern to northern Portugal) to its final installed location offshore of Aguçadoura, Portugal, previously the Aguçadoura Wave Farm. 
The WindFloat was equipped with a Vestas v80 2.0-megawatt turbine and installation was completed on 22 October 2011. 
A year later, the turbine had produced 3 GWh.
The cost of this project is around €20 million (about US$26 million). 
This single wind turbine can produce energy to power 1300 homes.
North East England
Charles Algernon Parsons invented the steam turbine in 1884, and having foreseen its potential to power ships he set up the Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company with five associates in 1893. To develop this he had the experimental vessel built in a light design of steel by the firm of Brown and Hood, based at Wallsend on Tyne. He also pioneered in the field of electricity generation, establishing the Newcastle and District Electric Lighting Company in 1889. The company opened the first power station in the world to generate electricity using turbo generators in 1890, at Forth Banks in Newcastle.
Floating wind turbine
The concept for large-scale offshore floating wind turbines was introduced by Professor William E. Heronemus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1972. 
It was not until the mid 1990s, after the commercial wind industry was well established, that the topic was taken up again by the mainstream research community. 
Blue H Technologies of the Netherlands deployed the first 80-kW floating wind turbine off the coast of Apulia, Italy in December 2007. 
The prototype was installed in waters 113 m deep in order to gather test data on wind and sea conditions, and was decommissioned at the end of 2008.
The turbine utilized a tension-leg platform design and a two-bladed turbine.
The first large-capacity, 2.3-megawatt floating wind turbine was Hywind, which became operational in the North Sea near Norway in September 2009. 
The turbine was constructed by Siemens Wind Power and mounted on a floating tower with a 100 m deep draft, with a float tower constructed by Technip.
AC motor
Because of AC's advantages in long-distance high voltage transmission, there were many inventors in the United States and Europe during the late 19th century trying to develop workable AC motors. The first person to conceive of a rotating magnetic field was Walter Baily, who gave a workable demonstration of his battery-operated polyphase motor aided by a commutator on June 28, 1879, to the Physical Society of London. Describing an apparatus nearly identical to Baily's, French electrical engineer Marcel Deprez published a paper in 1880 that identified the rotating magnetic field principle and that of a two-phase AC system of currents to produce it. Never practically demonstrated, the design was flawed, as one of the two currents was “furnished by the machine itself.” In 1886, English engineer Elihu Thomson built an AC motor by expanding upon the induction-repulsion principle and his wattmeter. In 1887, American inventor Charles Schenk Bradley was the first to patent a two-phase AC power transmission with four wires.
Savonius wind turbine
The Savonius wind turbine was invented by the Finnish engineer Sigurd Johannes Savonius in 1922. However, Europeans had been experimenting with curved blades on vertical wind turbines for many decades before this. The earliest mention is by the Italian Bishop of Czanad, Fausto Veranzio, who was also an engineer. He wrote in his 1616 book "Machinae novae" about several vertical axis wind turbines with curved or V-shaped blades. None of his or any other earlier examples reached the state of development made by Savonius. In his Finnish biography there is mention of his intention to develop a turbine-type similar to the Flettner-type, but autorotationary. He experimented with his rotor on small rowing vessels on lakes in his country. No results of his particular investigations are known, but the Magnus effect is confirmed by König. The two Savonius patents: US1697574, were filed in 1925 by Sigurd Johannes Savonius, and US1766765, in 1928.
Wind turbine design
All grid-connected wind turbines, from the first one in 1939 until the development of variable-speed grid-connected wind turbines in the 1970s, were fixed-speed wind turbines.
As recently as 2003, nearly all grid-connected wind turbines operated at exactly constant speed (synchronous generators) or within a few percent of constant speed (induction generators).
As of 2011, many operational wind turbines used fixed speed induction generators (FSIG).
As of 2011, most new grid-connected wind turbines are variable speed wind turbines—they are in some variable speed configuration.
Clipper Windpower
Clipper Windpower is a wind turbine manufacturing company founded in 2001 by James G.P. Dehlsen. It designed one of the largest wind turbines in the United States, manufactured in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It was working collaboratively with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Eben Ernest Hayes
Eben Ernest Hayes (Ernest Hayes) (1851–1933) was a New Zealand engineer and inventor who founded the Hayes Engineering works in Oturehua, Central Otago. He developed a wind turbine and manufactured wind pumps and agricultural tools for farms.
Parabolic trough
In 1897, Frank Shuman, a U.S. inventor, engineer and solar energy pioneer built a small demonstration solar engine that worked by reflecting solar energy onto square boxes filled with ether, which has a lower boiling point than water, and were fitted internally with black pipes which in turn powered a steam engine. In 1908 Shuman formed the Sun Power Company with the intent of building larger solar power plants. He, along with his technical advisor A.S.E. Ackermann and British physicist Sir Charles Vernon Boys, developed an improved system using mirrors to reflect solar energy upon collector boxes, increasing heating capacity to the extent that water could now be used instead of ether. Shuman then constructed a full-scale steam engine powered by low-pressure water, enabling him to patent the entire solar engine system by 1912.
Windmill
A wind turbine is a windmill-like structure specifically developed to generate electricity. They can be seen as the next step in the development of the windmill. The first wind turbines were built by the end of the nineteenth century by Prof James Blyth in Scotland (1887), Charles F. Brush in Cleveland, Ohio (1887–1888) and Poul la Cour in Denmark (1890s). La Cour's mill from 1896 later became the local powerplant of the village Askov. By 1908 there were 72 wind-driven electric generators in Denmark, ranging from 5 to 25 kW. By the 1930s, windmills were widely used to generate electricity on farms in the United States where distribution systems had not yet been installed, built by companies such as Jacobs Wind, Wincharger, Miller Airlite, Universal Aeroelectric, Paris-Dunn, Airline, and Winpower. The Dunlite Corporation produced turbines for similar locations in Australia.
Forerunners of modern horizontal-axis utility-scale wind generators were the WIME-3D in service in Balaklava USSR from 1931 until 1942, a 100-kW generator on a 30-m (100-ft) tower, the Smith–Putnam wind turbine built in 1941 on the mountain known as Grandpa's Knob in Castleton, Vermont, United States of 1.25 MW and the NASA wind turbines developed from 1974 through the mid-1980s. The development of these 13 experimental wind turbines pioneered many of the wind turbine design technologies in use today, including: steel tube towers, variable-speed generators, composite blade materials, and partial-span pitch control, as well as aerodynamic, structural, and acoustic engineering design capabilities. The modern wind power industry began in 1979 with the serial production of wind turbines by Danish manufacturers Kuriant, Vestas, Nordtank, and Bonus. These early turbines were small by today's standards, with capacities of 20–30 kW each. Since then, commercial turbines have increased greatly in size, with the Enercon E-126 capable of delivering up to 7 MW, while wind turbine production has expanded to many countries.
Community wind energy
Baywind Energy Co-operative was the first co-operative to own wind turbines in the United Kingdom. Baywind was modeled on the similar wind turbine cooperatives and other renewable energy co-operatives that are common in Scandinavia, and was founded as an industrial and provident society in 1996. It grew to exceed 1,300 members, each with one vote.
Steam turbine
The first device that may be classified as a reaction steam turbine was little more than a toy, the classic Aeolipile, described in the 1st century by Hero of Alexandria in Roman Egypt. In 1551, Taqi al-Din in Ottoman Egypt described a steam turbine with the practical application of rotating a spit. Steam turbines were also described by the Italian Giovanni Branca (1629) and John Wilkins in England (1648). The devices described by Taqi al-Din and Wilkins are today known as steam jacks. In 1672 an impulse steam turbine driven car was designed by Ferdinand Verbiest. A more modern version of this car was produced some time in the late 18th century by an unknown German mechanic. In 1775 at Soho James Watt designed a reaction turbine that was put to work there. In 1827 the Frenchmen Real and Pichon patented and constructed a compound impulse turbine.
Benoît Fourneyron
Using the proposal of a former teacher (Claude Burdin) as a guide, Fourneyron built in 1827, at age of 25, his first prototype for a new type of waterwheel, called a "turbine". (The term turbine is derived from the Latin word for a spinning top). In Fourneyron's design, the wheel was horizontal, unlike the vertical wheels in traditional waterwheels. This turbine used two sets of blades, curved in opposite directions, to get as much power as possible from the water's motion. Fourneyron won a 6,000 franc prize offered by the French Society for the Encouragement of Industry for the development of the first commercial hydraulic turbine.
Wind turbine
"Eggbeater" turbines, or Darrieus turbines, were named after the French inventor, Georges Darrieus. They have good efficiency, but produce large torque ripple and cyclical stress on the tower, which contributes to poor reliability. They also generally require some external power source, or an additional Savonius rotor to start turning, because the starting torque is very low. The torque ripple is reduced by using three or more blades, which results in greater solidity of the rotor. Solidity is measured by blade area divided by the rotor area. Newer Darrieus type turbines are not held up by guy-wires but have an external superstructure connected to the top bearing.
Windmill
The windwheel of the Greek engineer Heron of Alexandria in the first century is the earliest known instance of using a wind-driven wheel to power a machine. Another early example of a wind-driven wheel was the prayer wheel, which has been used in Tibet and China since the fourth century.
George Westinghouse
One of his first inventions had been a rotary steam engine, but it had proven impractical. The British engineer Charles Algernon Parsons began experimenting with steam turbines in 1884, beginning with a 10-horsepower (7.5 kW) turbine. Westinghouse bought rights to the Parsons turbine in 1885, improved the Parsons technology, and increased its scale.
History of wind power
The windwheel of the engineer Heron of Alexandria in 1st-century AD Roman Egypt is the earliest known instance of using a wind-driven wheel to power a machine. Another early example of a wind-driven wheel was the prayer wheel, which has been used in ancient India, Tibet, and China since the 4th century.
Daniel Halladay
Daniel Halladay (born November 24, 1826 in Marlboro, Vermont – March 1, 1916 in Santa Ana, California was an American engineer, inventor and businessman, best known for his innovative 1854 self-regulating farm wind pump at Ellington, Connecticut. Versions of this windmill became an iconic part of the rural landscape in the United States, Argentina, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa - mostly because of the role they play in a natural source of electricity. 
His invention of the windmill was a crucial key to the old steam trains as back then, they were mainly powered by water, so the water pumping mechanism (the windmill) helped the advance of trains.
Viktor Kaplan
In 1918 the first Kaplan turbine with 26 kW power and a diameter of 60 cm was built by the Storek construction company for a textile manufacturer in Lower Austria. This turbine was used until 1955 and today is exhibited at the Technisches Museum Wien. After the success of the first Kaplan turbines they started being used worldwide and remain one of the most widely used kinds of water turbines.
History of wind power
In 1941 the world's first megawatt-size wind turbine was connected to the local electrical distribution system on the mountain known as Grandpa's Knob in Castleton, Vermont, United States. It was designed by Palmer Cosslett Putnam and manufactured by the S. Morgan Smith Company. This 1.25 MW Smith–Putnam turbine operated for 1100 hours before a blade failed at a known weak point, which had not been reinforced due to war-time material shortages. No similar-sized unit was to repeat this "bold experiment" for about forty years.
Steam turbine
A number of other variations of turbines have been developed that work effectively with steam. The "de Laval turbine" (invented by Gustaf de Laval) accelerated the steam to full speed before running it against a turbine blade. De Laval's impulse turbine is simpler, less expensive and does not need to be pressure-proof. It can operate with any pressure of steam, but is considerably less efficient. Auguste Rateau developed a pressure compounded impulse turbine using the de Laval principle as early as 1896, obtained a US patent in 1903, and applied the turbine to a French torpedo boat in 1904. He taught at the École des mines de Saint-Étienne for a decade until 1897, and later founded a successful company that was incorporated into the Alstom firm after his death. One of the founders of the modern theory of steam and gas turbines was Aurel Stodola, a Slovak physicist and engineer and professor at the Swiss Polytechnical Institute (now ETH) in Zurich. His work "Die Dampfturbinen und ihre Aussichten als Wärmekraftmaschinen" (English: The Steam Turbine and its prospective use as a Heat Engine) was published in Berlin in 1903. A further book "Dampf und Gas-Turbinen" (English: Steam and Gas Turbines) was published in 1922.
Smith–Putnam wind turbine
A study completed in 1945 suggested that a block of six turbines similar to the prototype, producing 9 MW, could be installed in Vermont for around US$190 per kilowatt. However, the economic value to the power utility was only $125 per kilowatt, and the wind turbine was not considered economically viable by a factor of 1.5. Although the S. Morgan Smith company had spent more than US$1.25 million on the prototype turbine, entirely private funding, it concluded that there was insufficient prospect for profit on further development. Repairs were never done after the March 1945 failure. The prototype turbine was dismantled in 1946, leaving only concrete footings and a marker plaque at the site today. In the introduction to Putnam's book, Vannevar Bush stated that the project achieved proof of the concept of synchronous generation of wind power, and projected future commercial use of wind-generated electricity.
AC motor
"Commutatorless" alternating current induction motors seem to have been independently invented by Galileo Ferraris and Nikola Tesla. Ferraris demonstrated a working model of his single-phase induction motor in 1885, and Tesla built his working two-phase induction motor in 1887 and demonstrated it at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1888 (although Tesla claimed that he conceived the rotating magnetic field in 1882). In 1888, Ferraris published his research to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Turin, where he detailed the foundations of motor operation; Tesla, in the same year, was granted a United States patent for his own motor. Working from Ferraris's experiments, Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky introduced the first three-phase induction motor in 1890, a much more capable design that became the prototype used in Europe and the U.S. He also invented the first three-phase generator and transformer and combined them into the first complete AC three-phase system in 1891. The three-phase motor design was also worked on by the Swiss engineer Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown, and other three-phase AC systems were developed by German technician Friedrich August Haselwander and Swedish engineer Jonas Wenström.
Turbinia
Charles Algernon Parsons invented the modern steam turbine in 1884 and, having foreseen its potential to power ships, he set up the Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company with five associates in 1893. To develop this he had the experimental vessel "Turbinia" built in a light design of steel by the firm of Brown and Hood, based at Wallsend on Tyne in the Northeast of England.
History of electromagnetic theory
William Stanley made the first public demonstration of a transformer that enabled commercial delivery of alternating current in 1886. Large two-phase alternating current generators were built by a British electrician, J. E. H. Gordon, in 1882. Lord Kelvin and Sebastian Ferranti also developed early alternators, producing frequencies between 100 and 300 hertz. After 1891, polyphase alternators were introduced to supply currents of multiple differing phases. Later alternators were designed for varying alternating-current frequencies between sixteen and about one hundred hertz, for use with arc lighting, incandescent lighting and electric motors.
Ægidius Elling
Jens William Ægidius Elling (also Aegidus or Aegidius) (26 July 1861 – 27 May 1949) was a Norwegian researcher, inventor and pioneer of gas turbine who is considered to be the father of the gas turbine. He built the first gas turbine that was able to produce more power than needed to run its own components.
Kaplan turbine
The Kaplan turbine is a propeller-type water turbine which has adjustable blades. It was developed in 1913 by Austrian professor Viktor Kaplan, who combined automatically adjusted propeller blades with automatically adjusted wicket gates to achieve efficiency over a wide range of flow and water level.
History of Newcastle upon Tyne
Charles Algernon Parsons invented the steam turbine and, in 1889, founded his own company C. A. Parsons and Company in Heaton, Newcastle to make steam turbines. Shortly after this, he realised that steam turbines could be used to propel ships and, in 1897, he founded a second company, Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company in Wallsend. It is there that he designed and manufactured Turbinia. Parsons turbines were initially used in warships but soon came to be used in merchant and passenger vessels, including the liner "Mauretania" which held the blue riband for the Atlantic crossing until 1929. Parsons' company in Heaton began to make turbo-generators for power stations and supplied power stations all over the world. The Heaton works, reduced in size, remains as part of the Siemens AG industrial giant.
Floating wind turbine
In October 2011, WindFloat prototype was installed 4 km offshore of Aguçadoura, Portugal by Principle Power in approximately 45 m of water (previously the Aguçadoura Wave Farm site). 
The WindFloat was fitted with a Vestas V80 2.0-MW offshore wind turbine and grid connected. 
The installation was the first offshore wind turbine to be deployed without the use of any offshore heavy lift vessels as the turbine was fully commissioned onshore prior to the unit's being towed offshore. 
This is the first offshore wind turbine installed in open Atlantic waters, and the first to employ a semi-submersible type floating foundation.
Northern Power Systems
In 1978, North Wind was awarded a U.S. Department of Energy contract to develop a high-reliability 2 kW wind turbine for the growing telecommunications market. As a result of that work, North Wind developed its HR2 wind turbine, a three-bladed, horizontal axis up wind rotor configuration utilizing a slow-speed, direct-drive 2.2 kW alternator. This small wind turbine soon gained international market acceptance as one of the most rugged, high-reliability wind turbines available. Over 600 HR2 and its successor HR3 wind turbines were sold over approximately 20 years of production. Northern Power wind turbines have been installed in over 40 countries on all seven continents, with many still operational today.
Voith
At about the same time, Friedrich Voith decided to begin working on water-driven turbines, and in 1870, the first Voith turbine was delivered. In 1873, the first Francis turbine was produced, and in the same year Friedrich Voith was awarded a Medal of Achievement for his innovations at the World Fair in Vienna. Thereafter, Voith decided to move beyond the production of individual components for paper machines. In 1881, he built a new machining plant, the Maschinenfabrik J. M. Voith, and he delivered the first complete paper-making machine to his customer Raitelhuber, Bezner & Cie. in Gemmrigheim, Germany.
Smith–Putnam wind turbine
The turbine had two blades, 175 feet (53 m) in diameter, on the down-wind side of a 120-foot (36 m) steel lattice tower. Each blade was approximately 8 feet (2.4 m) wide and 66 feet (20 m) long, and weighed eight tons. The blades were built on steel spars and covered with a stainless steel skin. The blade spars were hinged at their root attachment to the hub, allowing them to assume a slight cone shape. The generator was a 1250 kW 600 RPM synchronous generator made by General Electric, producing 2,400 V at 60 cycles. The generator and rotor hub were mounted on a pintle beam, which allowed the rotor to capture wind from varying directions. The pitch of the blades was controlled by hydraulic cylinders to maintain constant speed.
Palmer Putnam became interested in production of electric power from wind after observing high winds at Cape Cod. Putnam was aware of the Balaklava 100 kW turbine and desired to improve on its performance. By 1937 he had enlisted General Electric, and the Central Vermont Public Service Corporation. General Electric provided a generator, and Central Vermont Public Services Corporation was interested in an energy supply that could displace purchased power for meeting peak loads. Only 23 months elapsed between first discussions and production of power.
History of the jet engine
The key to a practical jet engine was the gas turbine, used to extract energy from the engine itself to drive the compressor. The gas turbine was not an idea developed in the 1930s: the patent for a stationary turbine was granted to John Barber in England in 1791. The first gas turbine to successfully run self-sustaining was built in 1903 by Norwegian engineer Ægidius Elling. Limitations in design and practical engineering and metallurgy prevented such engines reaching manufacture. The main problems were safety, reliability, weight and, especially, sustained operation.
Mary-Ann (turbine generator)
Mary-Ann was the nickname given to the first steam turbine used in a public utility to generate electricity in America. Hartford Electric Light Company of Hartford, Connecticut, realized an extra demand for electricity in 1900 and decided in 1901 to purchase this steam turbine generator. The turbine, built by Westinghouse and rated at 1.5 megawatts, ran at Hartford Electric's Pearl Street plant from 1901 to 1905.
Garboldisham Windmill
Although millers were recorded in Garboldisham during the sixteenth century, the first record of a windmill was in 1739 when Ishmael Pizzey left his windmill to his wife. In the 1770s, James Turner, a farmer of Blo' Norton, built the surviving mill. The mill was marked on Joseph Hodskinson's map of Suffolk, 1783 and Faden's map of Norfolk, 1797. Also shown on this map was a smock mill to the south which had been erected by James Turner in 1788. In 1802, he sold both mills to John Button for £795. A tower mill was built to the north of the post mill in 1820. A new windshaft was fitted on 8 July 1827. In March 1831, a pair of Patent sails were fitted to the mill. A fantail was also added at this time. It is likely that the mill was re-arranged with both pair of millstones relocated to the breast instead of being arranged head and tail. All three mills were shown on the 1837 Ordnance Survey map. The smock mill had gone by 1839. The post and tower mills were offered for sale by auction on 21 November 1839 at the Fox Inn, Garboldisham. The mills were not sold and were offered for sale or to let in February 1840. The smock mill may have burnt down on 22 August 1840. A fire was reported at a tower mill in Garboldisham on that date. Mary Button owned the mill in 1842, with John Button as the miller. William Button was the miller in 1854. The tower mill had been demolished by 1864 when the mill was offered for sale by auction at the King's Head, Diss. William Alfred Lawrence was the tenant miller at this time. He continued at the mill until he caught frostbite while tending the sails. This led to his death on 25 December 1871. His widow Emma was left to run the business. She engaged John Nunn from Dickleburgh to run the mill and farm.
History of wind power
The most widely used small wind generator produced for American farms in the 1930s was a two-bladed horizontal-axis machine manufactured by the Wincharger Corporation. It had a peak output of 200 watts. Blade speed was regulated by curved air brakes near the hub that deployed at excessive rotational velocities. These machines were still being manufactured in the United States during the 1980s. In 1936, the U.S. started a rural electrification project that killed the natural market for wind-generated power, since network power distribution provided a farm with more dependable usable energy for a given amount of capital investment.
Wind power in Michigan
The development of alternative energy sources has stimulated new businesses and employment. In 2011, the Environmental Law & Policy Center identified more than 100 businesses in Michigan involved in engineering and manufacturing wind turbine components, and employing 4,000 people.
The first commercial wind turbine installed in the state, a 0.6 MW model, was erected in Traverse City in 1996. It remained the only turbine for several years. Traverse City Light & Power has announced a project to generate 30% of its power from renewable sources by 2020. In 2001 Mackinaw City installed 2 turbines rated at 0.6 MW each. Laker Elementary School in the Thumb region installed three 65KW turbines and a 10KW one, totaling 0.2 MW in 2005.
Palmer Cosslett Putnam
Palmer Cosslett Putnam (1900–1984) was an American consulting engineer and wind-power pioneer, the son of George Haven Putnam and Emily (Smith) Putnam (1865–1944). Putnam graduated from MIT in 1924 as a geologist after serving in the RAF during World War I. He is known as the designer of the Smith–Putnam wind turbine installed in 1941 in Vermont, the first megawatt-scale wind turbine project. Putnam wrote on the subject of wind power including "Power from the Wind" published in 1948, with an introduction by Vannevar Bush, describing the Smith–Putnam project. His book "Energy in the Future", 1953, was reviewed in the journal "Science".
Kaplan turbine
Kaplan turbines are now widely used throughout the world in high-flow, low-head power production.
Viktor Kaplan living in Brno, Austria-Hungary, obtained his first patent for an adjustable blade propeller turbine in 1912. But the development of a commercially successful machine would take another decade. Kaplan struggled with cavitation problems, and in 1922 abandoned his research for health reasons.
History of electromagnetic theory
In 1860 an important improvement had been made by Dr. Antonio Pacinotti of Pisa who devised the first electric machine with a ring armature. This machine was first used as an electric motor, but afterward as a generator of electricity. The discovery of the principle of the reversibility of the dynamo electric machine (variously attributed to Walenn 1860; Pacinotti 1864 ; Fontaine, Gramme 1873; Deprez 1881, and others) whereby it may be used as an electric motor or as a generator of electricity has been termed one of the greatest discoveries of the 19th century.
Dale Vince
In 1991, he saw his first windfarm ("I thought, either I can carry on by myself with the windmill on my van, or I can get into the big stuff") and in 1995 he founded the Renewable Energy Company. In 1996, he launched his first wind turbine supplying "green electricity".
Unconventional wind turbines
Nearly all modern wind turbines uses rotors with three blades, but some use only two blades. This was the type used at Kaiser-Wilhelm-Koog, Germany, where a large experimental two-bladed unit—the GROWIAN, or "Große Windkraftanlage" (big wind turbine)—operated from 1983 to 1987. Other prototypes and several wind turbine types were also manufactured by NedWind. The Eemmeerdijk Wind Park in Zeewolde, Netherlands uses only two-bladed turbines. Wind turbines with two blades are manufactured by Nordic Windpower, such as model # N 1000, and by GC China Turbine Corp. The NASA wind turbines (1975-1996) each had 2-blade rotors, producing the same energy at lower cost than three-blade rotor designs.
Hugh Merewether
Merewether was also the inventor of the Ampair wind turbine generator which was initially used predominantly by cruising sailors. He also developed the Aquair towed turbine generator in which the same electrical generator was rotated by means of a towed turbine, again used by cruising sailors. These two generators allow long range cruisers to generate electricity for charging their battery banks from the free power of the winds and were manufactured by the 'Ampair' company in the UK.
History of wind power
Across the Atlantic, in Cleveland, Ohio a larger and heavily engineered machine was designed and constructed in the winter of 1887–1888 by Charles F. Brush, this was built by his engineering company at his home and operated from 1886 until 1900. The Brush wind turbine had a rotor 17 m (56 foot) in diameter and was mounted on an 18 m (60 foot) tower. Although large by today's standards, the machine was only rated at 12 kW; it turned relatively slowly since it had 144 blades. The connected dynamo was used either to charge a bank of batteries or to operate up to 100 incandescent light bulbs, three arc lamps, and various motors in Brush's laboratory. The machine fell into disuse after 1900 when electricity became available from Cleveland's central stations, and was abandoned in 1908.
Eclipse windmill
The Eclipse windmill was one of the more successful designs of windmill used to pump water in the nineteenth century United States. It was invented by Leonard Wheeler, a Presbyterian minister who was working among the Ojibwe on the south shore of Lake Superior. Wheeler perfected the device on his missionary homestead for nearly two decades, unknown to the larger technological world. In 1866 health issues forced him to move to Beloit, Wisconsin, then a bustling industrial city, where he was persuaded to patent the basic function of the device. Although Wheeler died before he could witness the success of his invention, his sons carried on the legacy. Some of the companies that succeeded the original Eclipse Windmill Company remain viable in the 21st century.
Electricity sector in New Zealand
Electricity was first generated by wind in New Zealand in 1993, by a 225 kW demonstration turbine in the Wellington suburb of Brooklyn. The first commercial wind farm was established in 1996 – the Hau Nui Wind Farm, 22 km southeast of Martinborough had seven turbines and generated 3.85 MW. The Tararua Wind Farm was first commissioned in 1999 with 32 MW of generating capacity, gradually expanding over the next eight years to 161 MW – the largest wind farm in New Zealand. Other major wind farms include Te Apiti, West Wind and White Hill.
Tower mill
In the earliest tower mills the cap was turned into the wind with a long tail-pole which stretched down to the ground at the back of the mill. Later an endless chain was used which drove the cap through gearing. In 1745 an English engineer, Edmund Lee, invented the windmill fantail – a little windmill mounted at right angles to the sails, at the rear of the mill, and which turned the cap automatically to bring it into the wind.
Gramme machine
A Gramme machine, Gramme ring, Gramme magneto, or Gramme dynamo is an electrical generator that produces direct current, named for its Belgian inventor, Zénobe Gramme, and was built as either a dynamo or a magneto. It was the first generator to produce power on a commercial scale for industry. Inspired by a machine invented by Antonio Pacinotti in 1860, Gramme was the developer of a new induced rotor in form of a wire-wrapped ring (Gramme ring) and demonstrated this apparatus to the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1871. Although popular in 19th century electrical machines, the Gramme winding principle is no longer used since it makes inefficient use of the conductors. The portion of the winding on the interior of the ring cuts no flux and does not contribute to energy conversion in the machine. The winding requires twice the number of turns and twice the number of commutator bars as an equivalent drum-wound armature.
Windmill
The American windmill, or wind engine, was invented by Daniel Halladay in 1854 and was used mostly for lifting water from wells. Larger versions were also used for tasks such as sawing wood, chopping hay, and shelling and grinding grain. In early California and some other states, the windmill was part of a self-contained domestic water system which included a hand-dug well and a wooden water tower supporting a redwood tank enclosed by wooden siding known as a tankhouse. During the late 19th century steel blades and steel towers replaced wooden construction. At their peak in 1930, an estimated 600,000 units were in use. Firms such as U.S. Wind Engine and Pump Company, Challenge Wind Mill and Feed Mill Company, Appleton Manufacturing Company, Star, Eclipse, Fairbanks-Morse, Dempster Mill Manufacturing Company and Aermotor became the main suppliers in North and South America. These windpumps are used extensively on farms and ranches in the United States, Canada, Southern Africa, and Australia. They feature a large number of blades, so they turn slowly with considerable torque in low winds and are self-regulating in high winds. A tower-top gearbox and crankshaft convert the rotary motion into reciprocating strokes carried downward through a rod to the pump cylinder below. Such mills pumped water and powered feed mills, saw mills, and agricultural machinery.
North East England
A major pioneering innovation in marine engineering was the steam turbine, invented by Charles Algernon Parsons. He patented the first steam turbine on Tyneside in 1884. Parsons, born in Ireland in 1854, was the youngest son of the Earl of Rosse and a keen inventor, who was a junior partner in the Tyneside engineering firm of Clarke Chapman. In 1894 Parsons' Marine Turbine Company launched , the first ship to be powered by electric turbines. She can be still be seen (and boarded) at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne.