48 Fun Facts About Windmills

In which country did the first known windmills, with sails turning horizontally on an upright shaft, appear over 1,000 years ago?

Persia's mills, recorded in its windy eastern region of Sistan, stood inside walled buildings with openings that let the wind through to push sails mounted on an upright shaft.

Morgan Lewis Mill is the last intact windmill of the many that once processed which crop on Barbados?

Sugar cane was last ground here for trade in 1947; after a late-1990s restoration the sails turned again and crushed cane for visitors.

Which Babylonian king is said to have planned wind-powered irrigation nearly 4,000 years ago?

Hammurabi's plan is often repeated but unproven; the earliest firm written records of windmills come more than 2,000 years after his reign.

In which triangle of regions did the vertical windmill first appear in the 12th century?

Northern France, eastern England and Flanders all have records from the 1180s and 1190s; unlike the older eastern mills, these turned upright sails on a horizontal shaft and had to face the wind.

Which great Dutch painter, born in Leiden in 1606, was a miller's son?

Rembrandt grew up opposite the windmill where his father milled malt; the family was comfortable enough to send him to Latin School and, at 14, to Leiden University.

Which type of windmill, the earliest in Europe, had to be swung bodily to face the wind?

Post mill bodies pivot on a single stout post, and the miller pushed a long tailpole to swing the whole building, sails and all, into the wind.

In a tower mill, which part rotates to face the wind?

Only the cap turns, carrying the sails with it on a track at the top; earlier mills had to be swung bodily into the wind, which took more effort, and a fixed masonry tower could stand taller and sturdier.

What is the small windmill behind the sails that turns a mill's cap into the wind automatically?

Fantail vanes sit at right angles to the main sails, so a shifting wind spins them and gearing turns the cap until the sails face it squarely; Edmund Lee invented the device in England in 1745.

What does a smock mill use in place of a tower mill's masonry walls?

An octagonal wooden frame, boarded or thatched, carries the turning cap; lighter and cheaper than masonry, it suited marshy ground, and its flared shape is said to recall a countryman's linen smock.

What was the main job of the wipmolen, a small mill type that spread across the Netherlands in the 1400s?

Draining wetlands was the job: a drive shaft ran down through the mill's hollowed-out support to pumping gear at the base, while the small body above still turned to face the wind.

What must a miller do before resetting a windmill's cloth sails?

Stop the mill and set each sail by hand; William Cubitt's 1807 'patent sail' ended the chore, its shutters worked by a chain from the ground while the sails kept turning.

How many sails do the majority of windmills have?

Four is standard, but Lincolnshire millers went further: Heckington Windmill, built with five sails in 1830, was rebuilt after an 1890 storm with eight and still stands with all of them.

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, which animal draws up the plans for the windmill?

Snowball is chased off the farm by Napoleon's dogs; Napoleon then builds the windmill anyway, claims the idea as his own and blames his exiled rival when a storm topples it.

Windmills across the Netherlands were set in the mourning position in July 2014 after which disaster?

The MH17 shootdown over Ukraine killed 298 people, about two-thirds of them Dutch; on the national day of mourning millers stopped their sails just past upright, the old sign that a life has passed.

Which classic 1930s horror film ends with a mob of villagers setting an old windmill ablaze?

Frankenstein himself, the scientist, is hurled from the top of the mill and survives only because a turning sail breaks his fall; the mob then burns the mill with his Monster inside.

What is the horizontal shaft that carries the sails called?

Windshaft is the term: it enters the cap tilted slightly up from the horizontal and carries the big brake wheel as well as the sails, passing their power to the gears below.

In a pair of millstones, what is the stationary lower stone called?

Bedstone is the fixed lower stone of the pair; only the upper runner stone turns, and the scissoring of their grooved faces grinds the grain caught between them.

Legend says a miller's threat to sue stopped which Prussian king removing the noisy windmill beside his summer palace?

Frederick the Great backed down at Sanssouci, the story goes, when the miller threatened to go to court in Berlin; in fact the king called the mill an ornament to his palace.

Of the roughly 10,000 windmills working in the Netherlands around 1850, how many still stand?

About 1,000 survive, some 1,200 on a generous count; only about forty millers still work them for a living, and trained volunteers keep the rest turning.

Which Dutch area, where some 600 industrial windmills once turned at the same time, is often called Western Europe's oldest industrial region?

The Zaan, close to Amsterdam, sawed timber for Golden Age shipyards and milled oil, paint and paper by wind; a handful of its mills still work at the Zaanse Schans museum village.

Which Dutch village's 19 drainage windmills became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997?

Kinderdijk means 'children's dike': legend says a cradle carrying a baby, kept level by a cat, washed up there after the great flood of 1421.

In 1964 a city called Holland bought the Dutch windmill De Zwaan and shipped it home to which US state?

Michigan's city of Holland won rare Dutch permission to buy the war-damaged mill, one of the last to leave the Netherlands, and reopened it on Windmill Island in 1965.

Which Greek island's row of whitewashed 16th-century windmills above Little Venice has become its trademark sunset view?

Mykonos catches stiff Aegean breezes for most of the year, and its mills, first built under Venetian rule, ground wheat for islanders and passing ships well into the 20th century.

In which novel does the hero charge at windmills on horseback?

Don Quixote, Cervantes' would-be knight of 1605, charges with his lance despite his squire Sancho Panza's warning, and a turning sail shatters it and sends horse and rider rolling across the plain.

Which Paris cabaret, founded in 1889, has a landmark windmill on its roof?

Moulin Rouge means 'red mill': Montmartre was once a hill dotted with working windmills, two of which survive, and the can-can made the cabaret famous.

Two giant Dutch-style windmills were built in the early 1900s to pump irrigation water for which American city park?

Golden Gate Park was planted on San Francisco's Pacific sand dunes and needed constant watering; the first mill, finished in 1903, pumped groundwater until electric motors took over.

Why did American railroads build trackside windmills?

To water steam locomotives: they needed frequent refills, so railroads became big buyers of the self-regulating windpump Daniel Halladay patented in 1854, which turned itself out of a gale.

In the 1890s teacher Poul la Cour stored windmill power as hydrogen to light his school, in which country?

Denmark's Poul la Cour split water with surplus wind electricity and lit Askov's folk high school with the hydrogen; he went on to train rural electricians at his test mill.

Marykirk villagers reportedly refused street lights from James Blyth's 1887 wind turbine as 'the work of the devil' in which country?

Scotland's James Blyth, a Glasgow professor, lit only his own holiday cottage after the refusal, the story goes; a larger version of his turbine went on to power a Montrose asylum for almost 30 years.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind tells how teenager William Kamkwamba built a scrap windmill in which African country?

Malawi is where the school dropout, teaching himself in a village library, built his turbine from bicycle parts, a tractor fan blade and plastic pipe, swapping his family's paraffin lamps for light bulbs.

Hornsea 2, the world's largest offshore wind farm when it opened in 2022, stands in which sea off Yorkshire?

The North Sea farm's 165 turbines stand far out of sight of land and can power well over a million homes, enough for a city the size of Manchester.

At the end of 2025, which country had about four times as much installed wind power as any other nation?

China ended 2025 with about 640 gigawatts of wind capacity, against roughly 160 in the second-placed United States, and added nearly 120 gigawatts in that year alone.

Which Impressionist painted Parisians dancing in the garden of a Montmartre windmill turned dance hall in 1876?

Renoir painted his own friends among the Sunday dancers at the Moulin de la Galette, a mill named after the bread its millers sold with a glass of wine; the canvas now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.

What is the simple triangular cloth sail, common on Mediterranean windmills, called?

Jib sail mills look rigged like boats: each triangle of cloth is furled on its spar to reef it when the breeze stiffens, a sight familiar from postcards of the Greek islands.

What did a drainage windmill typically drive to lift water?

A scoop wheel or screw did the lifting, but a scoop wheel raises water only a metre or two, which is why Dutch drainage mills worked in teams, passing it up step by step towards the river.

Speculaas, the spiced Dutch biscuits sold abroad as 'windmill cookies', are a traditional treat for which winter feast?

St Nicholas's Day, kept on 5 or 6 December, is speculaas season: bakers press the spiced dough into carved wooden moulds, often of the saint himself, then knock the figures out to bake.

What is the large housing at the top of a wind turbine tower, holding the gearbox and generator, called?

Nacelle comes from the French for a small boat and also names an aircraft's engine pod; on a turbine it sits behind the blades and swivels on the tower to keep them facing the breeze.

Mostert's Mill, built about 1796, stands in which African city?

Cape Town nearly lost the mill when a Table Mountain wildfire swept through in April 2021; volunteers had it milling wheat again within three years, and it bills itself as Africa's last working windmill.

What was the main use of the earliest European windmills of the 12th century?

Grinding cereals was the first job and stayed the chief one, freeing millers from the need for a stream; only later, and mostly in the Low Countries, were mills set to draining land, sawing timber and pressing oil.

What did the Industrial Revolution mainly replace wind and water mills with?

Steam and combustion engines won only slowly: the windmill's decline was gradual, and new mills were still being built late in the nineteenth century.

Which La Mancha town is famous for the twelve white windmills lined up along the ridge beside its castle?

Consuegra keeps twelve of its original thirteen mills on the Calderico ridge, several christened with names from Cervantes' novel, such as Sancho, the mill that hosts the town's saffron festival.

In Dutch windmill signalling, what does a slight tilt with the top sail at 1 o'clock mean?

Joy, such as a birth or a wedding, is shown by stopping a sail just short of the top: Dutch sails turn anticlockwise, so it is still 'coming', while one just past the top is 'going' and means mourning, though codes vary by region.

What advantage does an even number of windmill sails give?

It can still run after losing a sail: the miller takes off the opposite one too, keeping the rotor balanced, so a six-sailed Lincolnshire mill could grind on with two pairs while repairs waited.

The world's tallest traditional windmills, in the Dutch city of Schiedam, ground grain for distillers of which spirit?

Gin, or jenever, made Schiedam rich, and its distillers' mills were built some 33 metres tall to catch the breeze above a crowded town; a handful of the giants still stand, one now a restaurant.

What is the structure that encloses a post mill's trestle called?

A roundhouse was often a later addition: walling in the open trestle gave the miller a storeroom at the foot of the mill.

Thought to be America's oldest working windmill, a mill dated 1746 grinds corn on which New England island?

Nantucket's Old Mill was sold in the 1820s as firewood, but the carpenter who bought it repaired the mill instead of breaking it up and put it back to work grinding corn.

What mechanism does a wind-powered sawmill use to give the saws a back-and-forth motion?

A crankshaft, fitted to a windmill by Dutchman Cornelis Corneliszoon in the 1590s, turned the sails' rotation into an up-and-down stroke and let mills cut far more timber than hand sawyers ever could.

As of 2024, which US state had led the nation in wind power for over a decade?

Texas was also the nation's top oil producer in 2024, yet turbines on its wide-open land made more than a quarter of all American wind power.