History of Danish Wind Power - Wind Power for the World: The Rise of Modern Wind Energy - page 35

the first big Danish North Sea harbour was under construction,
and a local blacksmith had established a workshop servicing the
construction companies. N. J. Poulsen joined the harbour blacksmith
Franz Møller and the small workshop soon grew to a machine
factory and iron foundry. During the following years, the Esbjerg
factory was the first to introduce industrially produced multi-
bladed wind motors on the Danish market in competition with
imported US products [1]. Poulsen quickly adopted new ideas
from abroad. In 1877, he made a wind motor with 7.5 m rotor
diameter and fixed curved metal blades for a land reclamation
project in southwestern Jutland and during the years 1883-1886 he
delivered 11 Halladay-type wind motors for the water supply at
the Danish State Railways stations. In the years 1881, 1883 and
1888 he obtained Danish patents for various types of multi-bladed
windmills.
While the US wind motors were primarily used for water
pumping, bigger types of new Danish windmills were often used
as a power source in, for example, brickyards, spinning mills and
wood workshops. The more efective industrially produced “self-
regulating” power windmills were also competition to the traditional
farm mills in Danish agriculture during the 1880s.
For more than ten years the Esbjerg factory was the only
Danish industrial “wind motor” producer, but in 1889, the products
got competition from inventor and millwright Christian Sørensen,
who established the Skanderborg Wind Motor Factory. Whereas
the Esbjerg wind motors were inspired by American technology,
Sørensen based his products on innovative use of the European
windmill tradition. During the 1870s he had built several big
windmills of the “Dutch-type” in many places in Jutland and made
experiments with diferent blade types and windmills having more
than four blades.
In 1896, he made a patent application for a special type of
a conical wind motor, where the blades (five to eight or more)
with adjustable vanes had a combination of convex and concave
profiles, supposed to “catch the wind” in a more efective way. In
a few years more than 100 windmills of this type were produced.
A license agreement was also made with the firm Theodor Reuter
& and Schumann in Kiel, Germany, where the conical wind motors
were produced for the German market. Here, they were often simply
named “Sorensen Motors”.