The great innovations people once refused to believe in

From wind power to electric vehicles — the great innovations humanity almost missed.

When volunteers, teachers and pupils of a little school in Denmark begged and borrowed tools, equipment and aeronautical technology to build a wind turbine, they unwittingly launched an energy revolution.

There was considerable opposition at the time to government plans to adopt nuclear power and the Tvindkraft turbine, as it was named, showed that it was technically feasible to harness energy from the wind. A marvel of technology, Tvindkraft was the world’s first multiwatt turbine and it changed Denmark’s course.

Instead of going nuclear, Denmark became the hub of the global revival of wind power.

Today, nearly 50 years later, nature in the form of wind provides about 12 percent of the world’s electricity and nearly all of that’s happened since the turn of the millennium. The International Energy Agency expects global wind capacity to nearly double by 2030. And yet the wind has always been free and its energy has been harnessed in various forms on land since the ninth century. But still some don’t – or won’t --see it. Anti-wind turbine protests, especially in America, are blocking many projects – perhaps as many as one in four – that could make the air we breathe cleaner.

Sometimes humanity has a dismaying failure to see past the immediate present.

Charging forward

Even before the 1900s, electric vehicles were far superior to petrol-fuelled ones -- quiet, emission-free, easy to start and particularly popular with women. Ferdinand Porsche began his career by designing battery-powered carriages.

Range anxiety wasn’t much of a problem at the time; the Detroit Electric could cover up to 160 kilometres on a single charge. And it’s only now that small electric trucks are making a welcome comeback a hundred years after their first appearance – an American company called Hartford Electric Light ran a successful battery-exchange service for trucks between 1910 and 1924.

The electric vehicle was displaced by the discovery of cheap oil, the low price of Henry Ford’s Model T, an increasingly reliable combustion engine, people’s desire to travel greater distances, and in my opinion a failure to pour science into batteries. It’s food for thought that electric boats have been plying some of Germany’s pristine lakes for over a hundred years.

Scandalous Bloomers

As for two-wheeled transport, when the first bicycles appeared in the 1880s, the French medical profession warned that women would suffer from dire medical consequences including breathlessness, fainting and permanent damage to vital organs. Some countries tried to ban women from racing these new-fangled machines and high society was shocked and horrified by women wearing bicycle-friendly Bloomer pants.

History is littered with humanity’s short-sightedness about great inventions. When electric refrigerators appeared in the early 1900s, the naysayers said they would never compete with the ice delivery man. But where’s the ice-delivery man now?

Recorded music in the form of the phonograph was ridiculed by musicians for the admittedly poor quality of its sound, but never realised that it would improve. It took 20 years for microwaves to catch on. In the 1930s rocket scientists were considered to be unhinged as they laid the foundation for space travel like the voyage of Artemis II. As for computers, an eminent scientist once told me how he and his colleagues liked to play with a machine called a computer “but we couldn’t see what it would be useful for”.

Some scepticism is understandable. Dishwashers were invented in the 1890s and, although highly popular in hotels and other commercial establishments where the benefits were obvious, they didn’t catch on in the home until the 1950s when they became cheaper and domestic plumbing rose to the challenge.

Devil’s work

But back to wind power. As I wrote in New Energy World (subscription required), the first modern experiments date back to the 1880s when Scottish engineer, professor James Blyth, kept the lights on at his holiday cottage with a towering, eight-bladed turbine of his own design and construction that produced enough energy to serve a nearby village. Far from being grateful, the villagers condemned this God-given power as “the work of the devil” and turned him down. In the same decade American Charles Brush’s elaborate slow-spinning, 144-blade turbine provided his laboratory’s energy for 20 years and Dutch scientist Poul la Cour invented regulator-controlled blades.

The reluctance of some Americans to embrace the wind is at odds with their history. In remote areas off the grid, from the 1920s many farmers and other businesses ran energy from little turbines located near their homes. And American manufacturers produced ingenious wind-harnessing technologies for much of the twentieth century and sold them all over the world, even into Africa.

Meanwhile the Tvindkraft turbine is still turning. Over the years it’s had a lot of maintenance and worn-out parts replaced, but it stands as testament to people who could see past the immediate present.

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