Historical Development of the Windmill - Wind Turbine Technology: Fundamental Concepts of Wind Turbine Engineering - page 6

organon to mean a musical organ or just as a generic term, as we might speak of an organ
of the body. There are design problems as well, such as turning the device into the wind
(stated as being possible in the text) and the peg-driven tripping and return motion (in lieu
of a crank) requiring a very rapid oscillating movement of the piston. Neither of these
operations seems to be possible except in a very small model that could be moved by hand,
and one having a very light piston. So perhaps the device was meant to be a toy and not
an invention to be taken seriously as a useful working machine.
If the inventor of the windmill was not Heron of Alexandria, then who, and where?
This we cannot answer, nor can we think it reasonable that we ever will. Perhaps there was
no one person who ever left such a clear record as Heron's, however suspicious we are of
his particular account. Instead, perhaps a number of small steps, taken by trial and error
in a number of different places over the years, eventually were diffused to yield a working
machine with no speciic birth to record. Vowles points out at some length that, despite
the lack of any direct evidence, the windmill might have been known in Graeco-Roman
times by other than “the not too clear example from Heron's work” [1930]. Thus, we are
not justiied in rejecting the possibility of its invention in that era.
The irst part of the thousand-year medieval period, from the end of the Roman Empire
to the Renaissance, is called the Dark Ages, although perhaps they were not quite so dark
as they were once thought to be. The Greek culture had spread to many places beyond the
mainland (including Alexandria, of course), and schools of learning were established
throughout the Near and Middle East, Palestine, Syria, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Persia,
to call them by their older names. This region became part of Islam by the Mohammedan
conquest in the seventh century, and so the Greek heritage became available to the whole
of Islam. Many Greek texts were translated into Arabic and thus had a much wider, and
less academic, audience. However, although these are known to have included the
Pneumatica , the time of its appearance is problematical and may have been as early as the
ninth century [Vowles 1930]. Thus Heron's work might have stimulated the use of wind
power in the Islamic world, but there is no hard evidence to substantiate that. Nearly all
the stories and the records we have from between the irst and the twelfth centuries come
from the Near East and Central Asia, and so those regions of the world are generally
considered to be the birthplace of the windmill.