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Looking through time at the ‘devil’s turbines’
8/4/2026
8 min read
Feature
Wind power has come a long way since 1887 when a far-sighted Scottish engineer, Professor James Blyth, kept the lights on at his holiday cottage with a towering, eight-bladed wind turbine of his own design and construction. It’s a story of repeated cycles of invention and abandonment, writes Selwyn Parker.
Blyth’s invention produced so much electricity that he offered the surplus to villagers in nearby Marykirk. Far from being grateful, they turned him down because, they told the professor, electricity was ‘the work of the devil’.
Nearly 140 years later, the devil’s turbines are producing over 1,130 GW of energy and, in 2024, the total number of turbines increased by at least 23,000. They provide about 12% of the world’s electricity. China leads the way by far, with an annual 885 TWh of wind-delivered energy. And looking ahead, the International Energy Agency expects global wind capacity to nearly double by 2030.
In retrospect though, it’s extraordinary how long the obvious benefits of wind power were ignored, especially considering it had played such an important role in medieval economies. Quickly forgotten were Blyth’s clever device; American Charles Brush’s slow-spinning, 144-blade turbine that powered his mansion for 20 years through no less than 408 batteries in the basement; and Dutch scientist Poul la Cour’s regulator-controlled blades that distributed fluid energy. All of these were up and functioning between 1887 and 1891.