History
No one knows when people first built windmills to do work. The first instance may have been in China more than 2,000 years ago, but archaeologists have found no definite record of their use there before 1219 AD. The earliest recorded windmill design found was Persian in origin, and was invented around 500–900 AD. This design was the panemone, with vertical lightweight wooden sails attached by horizontal struts to a central vertical shaft. It was first built to pump water, and subsequently modified to grind grain as well.
Read more about this topic: Panemone Windmill
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)