Fundamentals of wind energy - Wind Power Generation and Wind Turbine Design - page 7

3.1 Sailing

As early as about 4000 B.C., the ancient Chinese were the fi rst to attach sails to
their primitive rafts [5]. From the oracle bone inscription, the ancient Chinese
scripted on turtle shells in Shang Dynasty (1600 B.C.-1046 B.C.), the ancient
Chinese character “ ” (i.e., “ ⑰ ”, sail - in ancient Chinese) often appeared. In
Han Dynasty (220 B.C.-200 A.D.), Chinese junks were developed and used as
ocean-going vessels. As recorded in a topic wrote in the third century [6], there
were multi-mast, multi-sail junks sailing in the South Sea, capable of carrying 700
people with 260 tons of cargo. Two ancient Chinese junks are shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2(a) is a two-mast Chinese junk ship for shipping grain, quoted from the
famous encyclopedic science and technology topic Exploitation of the works of
nature [7]. Figure 2(b) illustrates a wheel boat [8] in Song Dynasty (960-1279).
It mentioned in [9] that this type of wheel boats was used during the war between
Song and Jin Dynasty (1115-1234).
Approximately at 3400 BC, the ancient Egyptians launched their fi rst sailing
vessels initially to sail on the Nile River, and later along the coasts of the
Mediterranean [5]. Around 1250 BC, Egyptians built fairly sophisticated ships to
sail on the Red Sea [9]. The wind-powered ships had dominated water transport
for a long time until the invention of steam engines in the 19th century.

3.2 Wind in metal smelting processes

About 300 BC, ancient Sinhalese had taken advantage of the strong monsoon
winds to provide furnaces with suffi cient air for raising the temperatures inside
furnaces in excess of 1100°C in iron smelting processes. This technique was
capable of producing high-carbon steel [10].

(a) (b)

Figure 2: Ancient Chinese junks (ships): (a) two-mast junk ship [7]; (b) wheel
boat [ 8 ] .