Though the use of iron in millwrighting is not as traditional as that of wood, iron has firmly cemented its place as a valuable material in the craft. Two types of iron have been used in millwrighting, these being wrought iron and cast iron. Wrought iron was used mainly for bearings and hinges, as it was…
John Smeaton F.R.S (1724-1792) by Mather Brown. Credits Science Museum Group. John Smeaton, Civil Engineer. By his definition, John Smeaton was not a millwright but a ‘civil engineer’. However, his contributions to millwrighting are too influential to ignore. Smeaton was born in Leeds in 1721. He attended the Leeds Grammar School before becoming a mathematical…
Portrait of John Rennie by Sir Henry Raeburn, 1810. Credit: National Galleries of Scotland John Rennie was born in 1761 in East Lothian in Scotland. Rennie showed a natural taste in engineering at a young age and trained in the workshop of the famous Scottish millwright Andrew Meikle on his dad’s farm in East Lothian…
Vincent Pargeter at David’s Tower, Jerusalem in 2007 Vincent was born in Islington in late 1943. After attending school, he worked in Westminster Bank from 1961 until 1969. At the age of 27, he decided to leave to start working on mills. Vincent had been interested in windmills since the age of 5, as a…
Since mills first appeared in Britain, the main material that has been used to construct them has been wood. The first mills reported in Britain date back as early as the Domesday Book in 1086. Though there is no mention of windmills, it is confirmed that both water and animal powered mills existed at this…
Ulrich Hütter was an Austrian-German engineer and professor who pioneered in the generation of electricity through wind power. After completing school in Salzburg, Hütter studied mechanical engineering and shipbuilding at the Vienna University of Technology from 1930 to 1936. In 1932, during his time in Vienna, Hütter joined the NSDAP, which later become the Nazi…
Hermann Honnef was a German inventor and a visionary for the use of wind power for energy. At the age of fifteen, Honnef began an apprenticeship at the metalwork company Jacob Hilgers Bruckenbau in Rheinbrohl. By the age of seventeen, Honnef was a heading one of the company’s offices. At the same time, he attended…
Albert Betz was a Germany physicist and a pioneer of wind turbine technology. Betz was born in Schweinfurt in Bavaria in 1885. After graduating as a naval engineer in 1910, Betz became a researcher at the University of Göttingen aerodynamics laboratory in 1911. He was awarded a PhD in 1919 for his work on ship…
Palmer C Putnam was an American engineer and a pioneer of wind power. He was born in 1900 to American writer George Haven Putnam and his wife, Emily Putnam. Putnam served in the RAF during the First World War, likely because his dad was born in London, before graduating from MIT in 1924 as a…
Charles Brush was an inventor and engineer born in March 1849. After developing an early interest in science, Brush attended the University of Michigan to study mining engineering, graduating in 1869. He then finished his PhD at Western Reserve in Cleveland in 1880. Prior to finishing his PhD, Brush secured backing for his design of…
