From Windmills to Wind Turbines: The Same Idea, 800 Years Apart

By WonderBooks · Aug 20, 2026

A modern wind turbine and a medieval grain mill run on the identical principle — moving air turning a shaft. What changed across a thousand years was what that shaft was made to do.

The earliest windmills date back roughly 1,400 years, to Sistan, a region on the border of modern Iran and Afghanistan, where 7th-century builders erected vertical-axis mills with sailcloth-covered wooden blades to grind grain and lift water from wells. The design spread west along trade routes over the following centuries — by the 11th century, wind power was in wide use across the Middle East, and merchants and returning Crusaders are credited with carrying the technology into Europe.

European builders changed the design substantially. Rather than the vertical-axis mills of Persia, they developed horizontal-axis windmills with the now-familiar rotating sails mounted on a tower or post, and the Dutch in particular used large windpumps to drain lakes and marshes across the low-lying Rhine delta, reclaiming land that would otherwise have stayed underwater. By the 14th century, windmills had spread as far as Russia, and grinding grain with a mill turned by wind — rather than by a person, an animal, or flowing water — had become one of the most important pieces of technology in the medieval world.

A New Continent, a New Shape

When European settlers brought windmill technology to North America, the design changed again to suit a different landscape. Instead of one large rotor on a horizontal axis, American mills typically used many short blades arranged around a vertical axis, letting the mill catch wind arriving from any direction — useful on the open, changeable plains of the American West, where thousands of these smaller mills were installed to pump water for homesteads and cattle. A commercial breakthrough came in the 1850s, when Daniel Halladay and John Burnham built a windmill that automatically turned to face the wind and regulated its own speed, making wind-pumped water dramatically more practical and reliable across the frontier.

The Jump From Grinding Grain to Generating Power

The turn toward electricity happened in the late 19th century, and it happened in two places almost at once. In Scotland, electrical engineer James Blyth built what is generally credited as the first wind-powered generator of electricity. In the United States, inventor Charles F. Brush built a much larger machine in 1887 and installed it in Ohio the following year — a rotor 56 feet across, feeding batteries that lit his own home, producing about 12 kilowatts. That machine, and the ones that followed it, are why the word changed too: a windmill that ground grain stayed a windmill, but a windmill built to produce electricity started being called a wind turbine. Development continued through the 20th century — steel blades in place of wood and cloth, and by 1941, the first turbine designed to produce a full megawatt of power. The 1970s oil crises then pushed wind technology from a niche pursuit into a subject of serious national investment, a trajectory that runs in a more or less unbroken line to the very large offshore turbines being installed today.

Told as an illustrated story