Windmills Trivia
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48 free Windmills trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This windmills trivia quiz covers a thousand years of catching the wind: the horizontal panemone mills of 9th-century Persia, the first European post mills of the 1100s, tower mills, smock mills and fantails, patent sails, the machinery inside (brake wheel, wallower, stone nuts), and how the Dutch drained a country with hollow-post mills and scoop wheels. It also asks about the culture around them: the Dutch sail positions that signal a birth or a death, the 19 mills of Kinderdijk, the Zaan district that was arguably the world's first industrial region, Don Quixote and 'tilting at windmills', the red mill on the Moulin Rouge, the Cape's Oude Molen, the American farm windpump, and the line from Blyth and Brush in 1887 to the megawatt turbines and 7 percent of world electricity today. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on windmills, wind turbines and the named sites, and each explanation adds one further fact. Good for history and engineering buffs, Netherlands-bound travellers and quiz nights.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which country did the first known windmills, with sails turning horizontally on an upright shaft, appear over 1,000 years ago?
Persia
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.
Q 02Morgan Lewis Mill is the last intact windmill of the many that once processed which crop on Barbados?
Sugar
Sugar cane was last ground here for trade in 1947; after a late-1990s restoration the sails turned again and crushed cane for visitors.
Q 03Which Babylonian king is said to have planned wind-powered irrigation nearly 4,000 years ago?
Hammurabi
Hammurabi's plan is often repeated but unproven; the earliest firm written records of windmills come more than 2,000 years after his reign.
Q 04In which triangle of regions did the vertical windmill first appear in the 12th century?
Northern France, eastern England and Flanders
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.
Q 05Which great Dutch painter, born in Leiden in 1606, was a miller's son?
Rembrandt
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.
Q 06Which type of windmill, the earliest in Europe, had to be swung bodily to face the wind?
Post mill
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.
Q 07In a tower mill, which part rotates to face the wind?
Only the cap
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.
Q 08What is the small windmill behind the sails that turns a mill's cap into the wind automatically?
Fantail
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.
Q 09What does a smock mill use in place of a tower mill's masonry walls?
An octagonal wooden frame
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.
Q 10What was the main job of the wipmolen, a small mill type that spread across the Netherlands in the 1400s?
Draining wetlands
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.
Q 11What must a miller do before resetting a windmill's cloth sails?
Stop the mill
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.
Q 12How many sails do the majority of windmills have?
Four
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.
Q 13In George Orwell's Animal Farm, which animal draws up the plans for the windmill?
Snowball
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.
Q 21Which Dutch village's 19 drainage windmills became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997?
Kinderdijk
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.
Q 22In 1964 a city called Holland bought the Dutch windmill De Zwaan and shipped it home to which US state?
Michigan
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.
Q 23Which Greek island's row of whitewashed 16th-century windmills above Little Venice has become its trademark sunset view?
Mykonos
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.
Q 14Windmills across the Netherlands were set in the mourning position in July 2014 after which disaster?
The MH17 shootdown
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.
Q 15Which classic 1930s horror film ends with a mob of villagers setting an old windmill ablaze?
Frankenstein
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.
Q 16What is the horizontal shaft that carries the sails called?
Windshaft
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.
Q 17In a pair of millstones, what is the stationary lower stone called?
Bedstone
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.
Q 18Legend says a miller's threat to sue stopped which Prussian king removing the noisy windmill beside his summer palace?
Frederick the Great
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.
Q 19Of the roughly 10,000 windmills working in the Netherlands around 1850, how many still stand?
About 1,000
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.
Q 20Which Dutch area, where some 600 industrial windmills once turned at the same time, is often called Western Europe's oldest industrial region?
The Zaan
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.
Q 24In which novel does the hero charge at windmills on horseback?
Don Quixote
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.
Q 25Which Paris cabaret, founded in 1889, has a landmark windmill on its roof?
Moulin Rouge
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.
Q 26Two giant Dutch-style windmills were built in the early 1900s to pump irrigation water for which American city park?
Golden Gate 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.
Q 27Why did American railroads build trackside windmills?
To water steam locomotives
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.
Q 28In the 1890s teacher Poul la Cour stored windmill power as hydrogen to light his school, in which country?
Denmark
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.
Q 29Marykirk villagers reportedly refused street lights from James Blyth's 1887 wind turbine as 'the work of the devil' in which country?
Scotland
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.
Q 30The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind tells how teenager William Kamkwamba built a scrap windmill in which African country?
Malawi
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.