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| Records in the IET Archives reading room. |
| Having embarked on the ‘Mills to Megawatts’ project to document and tell the story of wind energy across Europe, funded by the Council of Europe and the European Commission, a few of us were privileged to visit the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Archives. The IET is one of the world’s leading professional organisations for engineers and technicians. They inspire, inform and influence the global engineering community to engineer a better world. As a diverse home across engineering and technology, they share knowledge that helps make better sense of the world to solve the challenges that matter. The IET Archives collect and retain material relating to the IET and its predecessor institutions as well as the history of engineering and technology. Their collections cover innovation and developments in these areas from the fourteenth century to the present day. They were one of the first to complete our questionnaire designed to identify what other wind energy archives exist in Europe, and it was immediately obvious that their institution has important records in the wind energy area. |
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| A technical illustration of the 100 kW Enfield-Andreau wind turbine, which accompanies a typewritten translation of a letter sent to E. W. Golding at the UK’s Electrical Research Association from M. Durand of the Electricity and Gas Research Department of Algeria. |
| Asha, their Archivist greeted Mills Archive Trust Archivist Nathanael, energy archives consultant and questionnaire designer Kolya Abramsky, and me. We were taken to the reading room, where we were joined by IET’s Library and Archives Manager, Anne. They had set out a selection of records for us to peruse, covering a range of time periods and types of record, such as annotated photograph albums from the 1930s and illustrated diaries, and important documents and correspondence relating to the development of UK wind energy during the late 1940s and 1950s, along with reports of wind power generating projects in other countries such as the USA. We received a tour of their on-site storage facility and were shown a selection of old, rare and beautiful books, which while not related to our project, strictly speaking, are very special. |
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| 1511 edition of the ancient Roman engineer, architect and author Vitruvius’ ‘De architectura libri decem’ (Ten Books on Architecture) |
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| Manuscript of Chaucer’s ‘Treatise on the Astrolabe’ (1391), the first work written in the English language about a scientific instrument. |
| We also talked more about our two organisations, our collections and potential opportunities for collaboration such as through network building and signposting to each other’s related collections. The IET Archives are open to researchers by appointment, so if you fancy a trip to this treasure trove, which is located close to the Savoy Hotel in central London, we would fully encourage you to do so. We are very grateful to our colleagues at IET Archives for making this visit possible, and we hope to return the favour by offering a reciprocal visit to the Mills Archive Trust in the near future. We would also like to thank them for completing the questionnaire in the first place. Theirs and other contributions will form a report of our findings from the European Wind Energy Archives Survey, which we will publish soon. If you would like to receive a copy of this report when it is ready, please get in touch. |
