The history of solar and wind power stretches back thousands of years. Wind energy has been around ever since humans have been making use of sails. The first instance of a machine driven by wind was invented by a Greek engineer named Heron. For a long time windmills were by far the most widespread examples of using wind energy. The first windmills made an appearance in a region of Iran somewhere between the 7th and 9th centuries, and they appeared in Europe in the 12th century.
The very first windmill to generate electricity was developed in Scotland by James Blyth in 1887. However, it was not thought to be economically practical and as such it was not extensively developed. Denmark took hold of the baton and concentrated on developing the technology. In 1978 a cutting edge multi-megawatt turbine was built.
After this, the US government worked together with business leaders to further advance this technology. This led to a lot of features available currently like variable speed generators. Recently the wind energy industry has expanded greatly, as a consequence of concerns over the depletion of fossil fuels.
The history of solar and wind power are similar because both may be traced to distant civilizations. Greeks and Native Americans both constructed houses into the sides of hills in order to benefit from the heat. Romans used glass in order to trap the heat of the sun in their houses. Nevertheless, even with this long history the very first solar collector wasn't built until 1776, by Horace de Saussere. Around a century later Auguste Mouchout built a solar driven steam engine. This was quite expensive and no more were made. Twenty years later the very first solar cells were built.
Regardless of this leap it took until the 1950's for great advances to be taken, as solar energy was used in the mainstream for the first time. It was nonetheless less expensive to use oil to power homes, so it took until the oil embargo of the 1980's to make it possible for solar energy to come to the fore. Its worldwide recognition has steadily increased since then, and during the 1990's over one million homes had some kind of solar energy installed.
Solar and wind energy has been used throughout human history. Ever since the early discoveries of the Greeks and Romans, humans have been developing and advancing the technology. Now that we're conscious of the problems with non-renewable fossil fuels, a great deal of research money is spent on finding alternative energy sources. Nature provides us with a lot of energy, so by learning the history of solar and wind power experts can improve the potential to harness it effectively.
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