Wind Power!

Wind Power!. City of Rocks State Park. Since ancient times, Man has harnessed the power of the wind. The earliest known use of wind power is the sailboat, and this technology played an important role in the development of sail-type windmills., Windmills have been around for at least 1,300 years. The first windmills had vertical shafts and were built in Persia around the 7th century AD. Made of six to twelve sails covered in fabric or palm leaves, they were used to grind corn and pump water., The pinnacles of windmill design include those built by the Dutch and British. The Dutch used windmills extensively to pump water as well as grind flour. They also developed many advanced "automatic control" mechanisms over the centuries., The promise of power from the wind lives on, both in the form of wind turbines producing electricity and in the form of small-scale wind pumps, still used extensively in world agriculture., Wind Farms , Wind power plants, or wind farms as they are sometimes called, are clusters of wind machines used to produce electricity. A wind farm usually has dozens of wind machines scattered over a large area, standing tall and wide to capture as much wind as possible. Horizontal-axis wind machines have blades like airplane propellers. A typical horizontal wind machine stands as tall as a 20-story building and has three blades that span 200 feet across. The largest wind machines in the world have blades longer than a football field!