Pioneers
James Blyth
Scottish
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The Scottish electrical engineer who first generated electricity from the wind. Born in Marykirk in 1839 and appointed Freeland Professor of Natural Philosophy at Anderson College, Glasgow, in 1880, he raised a cloth-sailed horizontal wind turbine at his Marykirk holiday cottage in July 1887 and charged accumulators to light it, several months before the American Charles F. Brush built the machine many mistakenly call the first.
Facts
Defining ContributionBuilt the first electricity-generating wind turbine, July 1887 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Milestones Credited
Technologies Developed
Blyth built the first wind turbine to generate electricity used to power a home (Marykirk, July 1887); Charles Brush's larger, automatically operated machine followed in Cleveland later the same year, already recorded on this entity's own invented-year fact.
Sources
1. University of Strathclyde Science on the Streets
University of StrathclydeScience on the Streets, James BlythQuote, Science on the Streets, James Blyth
several months before the American Charles F. Brush installed what many mistakenly believe to be the first wind turbine
2. Wikipedia
Wikimedia FoundationJames Blyth (engineer), openingQuote, James Blyth (engineer), opening
James Blyth (4 April 1839 - 15 May 1906) was a Scottish electrical engineer and academic at Anderson's College.
Wikipedia: James Blyth (engineer)
Technologies Developed: Wind Turbine, James Blyth (engineer), Career sectionQuote, Technologies Developed: Wind Turbine, James Blyth (engineer), Career section
In July 1887 Blyth built a cloth-sailed wind turbine (or windmill) in the garden of his holiday cottage in Marykirk and used the electricity it produced to charge accumulators; the stored electricity was used to power the lights in his cottage, which thus became the first house in the world to be powered by wind-generated electricity.
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