James Blyth operates the first working wind turbine

Background. James Blyth was a Scottish electrical engineer and academic at Anderson's College, now the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow. He was a pioneer in electricity generation through wind power, and his wind turbine, used to light his holiday home in Marykirk in Aberdeenshire, was the world's first-known structure by which electricity was generated from wind power.

Installation in Marykirk. In July 1887, Blyth built a cloth-sailed wind turbine in the garden of his holiday cottage in Marykirk. The turbine charged accumulators, and the stored electricity powered the lights in his cottage. This made his home the first house in the world to be powered by wind-generated electricity.

Technical Specifications. Blyth described his wind turbine in a paper to the Philosophical Society of Glasgow on 2 May 1888. The design featured a tripod structure with a 33-foot windshaft, four arms of 13 feet with canvas sails, and a Burgin dynamo driven from the flywheel using a rope.

Limitations and Context. Blyth's original generator lacked a braking mechanism, making it prone to damage in strong winds. Although Blyth received recognition for his contributions to science, wind power was considered uneconomical in the United Kingdom, and no more wind turbines were built there until 1951. As a contemporaneous comparison only, in the winter of 1887, some months after Blyth's build, Charles F. Brush built the first automatically operated wind turbine; this is not part of Blyth's event.