Windmill sails - an engineer's thoughts

This article looks at how old wooden windmills,

and particularly their sails, have come to be the
shape they are. It tries to explain how the sails
start rotating, why they don't self-destruct in a
gale, and why a windmill sail looks like a piece
of garden trellis. The design of sailing boats
seems to be important, and also (to a lesser
extent) basic aerodynamics.

Free energy?
Using the wind as a source of power seems such
a simple and obvious idea that one might expect
to find that there were windmills in England
long before the Conquest. And yet there weren't
any. Waterwheels have been around for much
longer. The 6,000 mills recorded in the
Domesday Book were most probably powered by
waterwheels.

This rather grainy photograph shows a windmill

on the Sussex Downs around a hundred years
ago, when such sights must have been
commonplace.
But it's a much more challenging task to extract
energy from moving air than from moving
water. The amount of water flowing through a
waterwheel can be controlled quite closely by
using artificial millponds and sluices, but the
strength and direction of the wind can change
dramatically during a day, or even in the course
of a few minutes. 'The wind bloweth where it
listeth', as St. John helpfully pointed out.
So the problem faced by an aspiring windmill
designer is this: how can the energy in an
erratically-moving mass of air be harnessed, and
then used to drive a shaft at ground level which
needs to rotate at a more-or-less constant
speed?

European designers have pondered this problem

for nearly a thousand years. The first English
windmills seem to have been built in about the
twelfth century, and since their introduction
followed Richard Coeur-de-Lion's ill-fated
attempt to retake Jerusalem in 1191, historians
suppose that the Crusaders brought the
technology back with them from the Middle
East. Windmills seem to have been an Arab
invention, along with algebra, the symbol for
zero, and, apparently, mattresses. Yet once the
first English mill had been built, it was quickly
copied. Two hundred years later there may have
been as many as 4,000 windmills in England.
Cheaper to construct than watermills - because
they didn't need a special water-course to drive
them - they were still expensive capital
investments, and they had to pay their way.
The first definite mention of an English
windmill, as far as I know, was in the reign of
Richard I. The head of the abbey at St.
Edmondsbury (now known as Bury St.
Edmunds) was at the time one Abbot Samson, a
choleric and energetic cleric, whose chief
weapon was widespread and indiscriminate
excommunication of those who dared to oppose
him. Carlyle, in Past and Present (1843), says
that Samson,
 ... found all men more or less headstrong,
irrational, prone to disorder; continually
threatening to prove ungovernable.
... just like the managers of most engineering
departments I've worked in.
One day, Abbot Samson discovered that an
unauthorised windmill had been erected on
lands under his control. The story of how he
dealt with this threat to his income sheds an
interesting light on life at the time. Carlyle tells
it like this.
We said withal there was a terrible flash of
anger in him: witness his address to old Herbert
the Dean, who in a too thrifty manner has
erected a wind-mill for himself on his glebe-
lands at Haberdon. On the morrow, after mass,
our Lord Abbot orders the Cellerarius to send
off his carpenters to demolish the said
structure brevi manu, and lay up the wood in
safe keeping. Old Dean Herbert, hearing what
was toward, comes tottering along hither, to
plead humbly for himself and his mill. The
Abbot answers:
"I am obliged to thee as if thou hadst cut off
both my feet! By God's face, per os Dei, I will
not eat bread till that fabric be torn in pieces.
Thou art an old man, and shouldst have known
that neither the King nor his Justiciary dare
change aught within the Liberties without
consent of Abbot and Convent: and thou hast
presumed on such a thing? I tell thee, it will not
be without damage to my mills; for the
Townsfolk will go to thy mill, and grind their
corn at their own good pleasure; nor can I
hinder them, since they are free men. I will
allow no new mills on such principle. Away,
away; before thou gettest home again, thou wilt
see what thy mill has grown to!"
The very reverend, the old Dean totters home
again, in all haste; tears the mill in pieces by
his own carpentarii, to save at least the timber;
and Abbot Samson's workmen, coming up, find
the ground already clear of it.
Holland
At the time windmills were used in England
mainly for grinding corn, but the Dutch had a
different and much more urgent need. Their
country was being swallowed by the sea. To
reclaim it, they needed power, and lots of it.
Before about 1400 Holland was a swamp, with
just a few isolated settlements dotted here and
there. Every few years the sea swept in and took
over vast areas of the country. The great flood of
1421, for example, destroyed 72 villages and
hamlets and drowned thousands. The people
began to build defences against these attacks,
damming the main channels and gradually
converting into pools and lakes those areas that
had formerly been connected to the open sea.
Their next step was to reclaim the land by
draining the lakes. To do this, the water had
somehow to be lifted uphill to a place where it
could flow safely back into the sea, so the
engineers needed pumps and a power source to
drive them.

They knew of two types of pump - the

waterwheel, and the Archimedean screw, which
looks rather like a giant corkscrew inside a
tube. The revolving helix miraculously
persuades the water to flow uphill. A similar
design is apparently still used today in sewage
plants.
Waterwheels were already being used to power
corn mills in those few areas of the country that
had suitable rivers, and using a waterwheel as a
pump involves little more than arranging to
drive the shaft instead of taking power from it.
And for a power source, there was always the
horse.
 The
mediaeval woodcut on the right illustrates a
pump that seems to combine elements of both a
waterwheel and an Archimedean screw. If you
look closely, the plane of the wheel is not
vertical. It is inclined at about 45 degrees, so
that the water spilling out of the buckets falls
outside the wall around the shaft. But I feel
sorry for the chap in the pixie hat who walks
endlessly round and round with the horse.
Where's the job satisfaction in that?
Horses may have been the first controllable
power source, but the power a single horse can
deliver - 746 watts, according to the textbooks -
does rather limit what can be achieved. Just to
heat a room would take the power of four horses
harnessed together (plus a man in a pixie hat to
look after them). Horse-power would have been
a totally inadequate solution to the Dutch
problem of draining large lakes. Projects with
power demands in the tens of kilowatt range
require something altogether more powerful.
Free energy has long been the researchers' holy
grail, of course. Nuclear fission, touted in the
1950s as producing electricity that would be too
cheap to meter, turned out to have huge hidden
costs. No doubt the first fusion reactor too,
when it eventually gets built, will end up costing
far more than its enthusiastic promoters expect.
One of my favourite Escher drawings shows how
easy it would be to get limitless power from a
waterwheel if only the laws of perspective
applied instead of the laws of physics.
But the Dutch engineers were pragmatic men,
more interested in solving real problems than
impossible dreams. They needed a reliable
source that would provide them with lots of free
energy. If they had lived in a mountainous
country filled with streams rushing down steep
slopes, no doubt they would have perfected the
waterwheel. But as their homeland is flat and
windswept, they worked with what they had.
It's still common to see a working windmill in
Holland (I should really say, in the Netherlands -
strictly speaking, Holland is just that region of
the country nearest to the sea) but it's been over
a hundred years since this was true of England.
 I wondered why this should be so. Like Holland,
East Anglia has few hills and is exposed to the
North Sea ('Very flet, Norfolk' as Noel Coward
observed), yet unlike Holland the Norfolk
windmills are now just tourist attractions.
Impressive machines they are, too, but about as
much use as chocolate teapots.
Flanders
There's a windmill museum at Villeneuve, just
east of Lille, and worth a visit if you're
interested in the technology. The main
attraction is a (reconstructed) mill designed to
extract linseed oil from flax seed and convert
the residue to animal feed.
The process is quite complicated. First, the flax
grains are put through a roller to break the
husks, then hammers crush the seed to flour.
Next, the flour is heated to release the oil, put
into linen bags, and placed inside a hinged
wooden press lined with horsehair. Hammers
are arranged to fall onto wedges that crush the
bags. As the flour is compressed, the oil drips
out into a container below, and the contents of
the linen bag become oil cake. (This could well
have been what Marie Antoinette was talking
about when she said dismissively of the starving
peasants, "Oh, let them eat cake!")
The sail assembly is said to weigh 35 tons, and
the sails are 26m long, tip to tip. They drive 7
hammers, via a camshaft, but light winds give
enough energy to power just a couple of the
hammers. The mill's beams are made of oak,
and its walls of poplar; the teeth of the small
wheels are made of applewood, and those of the
brake wheel of "charme" (we can't find a
translation of this word).

Why do the sails go round?

There's something beautiful about a well-
designed machine, whether it be a steam
locomotive or a fighter aircraft, a clock or a
racing car. Every component, large and small, is
there for a reason. Each has been made in a
particular way, from the most appropriate
material available, to interact with the other
components in just the way their designer
intended. Most important of all, a machine is
useful. Someone has paid good money to have it
built.
For me at least, part of the pleasure I get from
machines comes from trying to understand how
they work. Windmills are not just pleasing to
look at. They are machines, and like all
machines they have been engineered to do a
useful job at minimum cost. Every single
component has been thought about, and
designed, and optimised.

At first glance, it seems obvious how windmills

work. They have huge flat sails that face the
wind, so when the sails are rotating they cut
through the air just like the wings of an aircraft.
But then I asked myself, if the wind is blowing
directly at the sails, why should they
ever begin to rotate?
And whilst an aircraft's wing is a smooth solid
surface, a windmill's sails seem to be mostly
empty space. The wind would blow straight
through the holes. That surely makes no sense.
This one's sails seem to be all twisted, as though
they had been left out in the rain. And why is
there a sail on only one side of the stock (the
spar attached to the hub)? Wouldn't the
machine be better balanced with a sail on both
sides? And why are the sails all set at different
angles? What's the point of that? And why does
this windmill have a bolt through its neck, like
Frankenstein? And anyway, why do most
windmills have four sails when modern wind
turbines have only three?
I tried to find out the answers to these
questions. My usual sources of information (my
books, the internet, the local library, the county
library) had practically nothing of any use. This
was disappointing, but not really surprising -
nobody builds windmills like this any more, so
there's little point in writing books on how to do
it. If I wanted to understand how windmills work
I would have to sort it out for myself.
This was not a great surprise. Most of the
engineering projects I've worked on have begun
with questions. Engineers are paid to solve
interesting technical puzzles by applying the
laws of physics in new ways, to address new
problems. If there's already a book on how to
design something, the main problems have
already been solved. Simply copying someone
else's design - what I tend to dismiss as "cook-
book engineering" - usually leads to a less than
optimum solution, because each new situation
offers a different mix of problems and
opportunities. And anyway, I'd rather try to
understand why something has been built the
way it has rather than just shrug and say, oh
well, they probably knew what they were doing.
Experience has taught me that sometimes, they
simply didn't.
So I decided to spend a little time thinking
about the principles that guided these early
millwrights, to see if I could understand why
they built windmills in the way they did. The key
question seems to be: How does the wind makes
the sails revolve? Once I understood that, it
should be easier to see why the sails have the
shape they do.
Sailing a boat
Sailing ships capture wind energy and convert it
into forward motion, so an obvious starting
point in designing a windmill's sails would be to
think about a sailing boat. Boats have been
around for a very long time, and to be useful
they must have some means of changing the
direction of the force supplied by the wind into
the direction the captain wishes to steer. With
care, they can even sail into the wind.

The force of the wind acts on the sail, of course.

That's what the sail is for. But the sail is
attached to the boat, and it's the boat that
moves. If it were a raft, it would move in
whatever direction the wind was blowing, but a
sailing boat is designed to go in just one
direction - forwards. So from the perspective of
someone on the boat, the force of the wind can
be seen as having two related components -
a wanted force pushing the boat forwards, and
an unwanted force pushing it sideways. There's
just one force, but to someone on the boat it's
like the curate's egg - only good in parts.
Engineers talk about resolving the force into its
two components.
Windmills don't move, but they do need a force
component that acts at an angle to the wind.
Perhaps this second force could be used to push
a windmills' sails round.
To make a shaft rotate, the sail must somehow
twist the force of the wind through 90 degrees.
Suppose the sail and its mast are attached to a
shaft, like this. The dashed lines show the plane
through which the wind is blowing. The sail is
deliberately set at an angle to this plane.
What will happen? Will the shaft rotate, or will it
try to move along its own axis?
The answer is, it will do both. The force on the
sail acts not in the direction of the wind but at
right angles to the sail, as shown in the
diagrams. If it didn't, sailing boats wouldn't
work.

Many of the ropes visible in this picture

are there to move the ships' sails to
exactly the right compromise angle
between the present direction of the wind
and the ship's course. The others are
mostly to keep the whole structure rigid
and prevent it from collapsing under the
forces applied to it. The ship experiences
a rotational force too, but its keel stops it
from being blown over.
There are only two ways the shaft can move (it's
free to rotate, or to go backwards), so the
designer need only worry about the forces
acting in these two directions. The shaft
experiences two separate forces - one pushing it
backwards, along its axis, and the other
(the turning force) at right angles to its axis.
But this second force acts through the centre of
the sail, which is at some distance from the
shaft, and so its effect is to make the mast - and
hence the shaft - rotate.
The size of the turning force evidently depends
on the angle between the sail and the wind. The
other force, pushing the shaft backwards, is not
wanted and can be countered by building a
structure that won't be blown over.
This is exactly the opposite approach to a sailing
boat, which is designed to make maximum use
of the force along its axis and to counter the
sideways and rotational force by means of a
keel.
Early windmill designs used simple canvas sails
mounted on wooden frames, attached radially to
a shaft which pointed directly into the wind.
They worked - when the wind blew steadily, the
shaft went round. But sudden gusts or abrupt
changes in wind direction would make the sails
flap uselessly, and the shaft might even begin to
rotate in the wrong direction. Experiment
showed that the system became more tolerant of
wind surges if the leading half of the sail (the
 half that meets the wind first - the darker grey
half in my diagrams) was simply removed, but
the problem was only solved by making the sails
more rigid. Heavier sails also increased the
system's inertia, which made gusts less
important.
What's the best angle for the sail?

The next question is, what should be the angle

between the sail and the wind? The diagrams
indicate that the turning force (the force that
will do useful work) gets larger as the sail is
rotated (anti-clockwise in this case) to make it
more and more nearly parallel with the wind.
The logical conclusion of this is that windmills
should be built with their sails edge-on to the
wind, to use all the available turning force, with
the wind flowing over the sails as it does over
the wings of an aircraft. In fact, aircraft
designers know this turning force as 'lift', and
it's what makes aircraft fly. Windmill sails were
actually called 'wings' in Anglesey (and 'sweeps'
in Kent, and 'arms' in Yorkshire.)
But if the sails were mounted edge-on to the
wind, when they went round they would flail
wildly at the air like giant cricket bats, instead
of slicing though it smoothly like swords. The
resulting turbulence and air resistance would be
enormous, and would seriously limit how fast
the sails could rotate. This wouldn't do at all,
since it was already known that the windmill's
power output increases greatly as the speed of
rotation rises.

On the other hand, if the sails were mounted

square-on to the wind, there would be no
turning force at all. So it's essential to set the
sails at a compromise angle that will persuade
them to start moving in slow-moving air, yet still
give a reasonable power output in normal
operation when the wind speed is higher. The
optimum angle turned out to be about fifteen
degrees, as shown in the diagram below.
As it happened, the first engineer to analyse this
properly (in 1759) was one of my heroes - a
Yorkshireman called John Smeaton. He
pioneered the approach that engineering is an
applied science and not just a collection of rules-
of-thumb. His achievements included making
waterwheels more efficient and building the first
Eddystone lighthouse that didn't fall down.
Scientists may live in ivory towers, but
engineers design them.
 There was one more oddity about the wind's
behaviour that had to be tackled. When you
stand on top of a tall building, the wind feel
stronger than it does at ground level, and that's
because it is stronger. As the wind blows along
the ground, those layers nearest the earth lose
energy through friction, and slow down. The
result is that the wind appears to blow slightly
downwards, towards the earth, and so the
windmill sails work better if they rotate in a
plane which is tilted slightly upwards (again, by
about 15 degrees), as can be seen in the
photographs of real mills a little later.

Coping with different wind speeds

Once the sails are capturing the wind energy
efficiently, the next problem is how to transmit
the power down to ground level, where it can be
applied to the job in hand - driving a pump, or
turning millstones, or whatever it might be.
Clearly, the need is for a fixed vertical shaft
inside the mill which is driven from the shaft on
which the sails are mounted. This is not quite as
straightforward as it sounds, because for one
thing the sails must always face into wind, no
matter which direction the wind is blowing
from, and for another the shaft on which the
sails are mounted (known as the 'wind shaft') is
not quite horizontal.
Since the wind shaft bearings are firmly
attached to the mill frame, turning the sails into
wind involves rotating the whole structure - the
entire mill - about its vertical axis. Early mills
were supported on a hollow post, with the drive
shaft running down its centre. But by the 1600s
it had been realised that only the cap need
rotate, which meant that the body could be
heavier, and taller, and more strongly built.The
gearing mechanism would originally have been
as simple as the one I show here, but was again
soon refined into one based on hand-carved
wooden bevel gears. Even though they would
have been well-greased with animal fat, the
wear rate of those gear teeth must have been a
constant worry to the miller.
The only major design problem remaining to be
solved is how to cope with gales. If the wind
speed becomes excessively high, the sails will
whirl round frantically until either something
breaks or an overheated bearing catches fire.
To avoid disaster, the system needs to be fitted
with some sort of brake, which can convert the
excess rotational energy into heat. The solution
universally chosen was a form of drum brake in
which the shoe (made of wood) was made to rub
against the outside of the large gearwheel (also
made of wood) on the wind shaft. This wheel
 naturally came to be known as the brake wheel.
It was a high-risk design - if the wind speed
rose, and the miller didn't apply the brake in
time, the braking system would not be able to
cope, and the whole mill would be set ablaze.
Power output depends not only on the wind
speed, but also on the area swept by the sails.
Long sails generate more power than short
ones, and a typical sail might be 10m. long and
2m. wide. If it were made of solid wood it would
obviously be very heavy indeed, but experiment
showed that it didn't need to be solid.
Lift and drag

Ideally, the sails should rotate at a constant

speed whatever the wind conditions, and in
practice this means that additional braking must
be applied when the wind speed is high. The
most elegant solution would be if the moving
sail could itself somehow supply a braking force
which increased with speed, and it turns out
that this happens if the sail is constructed as an
open lattice instead of with a smooth continuous
surface. The holes generate turbulence, which
acts as a brake (and also reduces lift). Aircraft
designers call this braking force 'drag', and do
their best to avoid it, which is why aircraft
wings don't have big holes in them.
But whilst increased drag is an advantage when
the sails are actually rotating, the reduced lift
makes the system more difficult to start. The
wind speed has to be higher before the sails can
generate enough lift (turning force) to get them
moving. So the mill needs solid sails when the
wind speed is low, but open lattice sails when
the wind is blowing more strongly. How can this
dilemma be resolved?
 The answer is, by using open lattice sails, and
covering them with cloth when the wind is
light.This mill is in the middle of the small town
of Zierikzee in the Netherlands. It was a cloudy
and showery day with hardly any wind when we
were there in 2005, but the mill was working.
The photograph also illustrates that although
the inner edges of the sails (near the hub) do
meet the air at about 15 degrees, the angle at
the tips of the sails is very much less. This
gradual change in angle was another of
Smeaton's ideas.
It arises from the fact that the speed at which
the edge of the sail cuts through the air varies
from zero at the hub to a maximum at the sail
tip. In fact, when the mill is running at its full
speed of 20 rpm, the tip of a 10m. sail is slicing
through the air at about 21 metres/second (45
mph). Like all moving machinery, windmills can
be dangerous. Being hit on the head by several
tons of wood travelling at that speed could
easily spoil your whole day.
The area of sail covered by cloth could be
tailored to suit the wind conditions. If the wind
speed picked up, the miller could shorten sail,
just like the captain of a sailing ship. But that
would involve stopping the mill and adjusting
each sail in turn. He would save time and money
if the sails could be designed to cope
automatically with a wider range of wind
speeds.
Leading-edge slot
This is a post-mill near Abbeville, in France.
Like the mill at Zierikzee, the leading edge of
each sail has been extended forwards, but the
mill-wrights who did the work have deliberately
left a small gap between the new leading edge
and the main wing spar (the stock).
Why did they do that? What purpose does it
serve? To find out, I had to find out a little more
about how an aircraft wing actually works.
Why does a wing generate lift? The answer is a
bit more complicated than one might expect,
because two things are happening at the same
time. First, air meeting the leading edge of the
wing is deflected upwards or downwards. The
air pushed upwards is accelerated, so it speeds
up and becomes thinner - its pressure falls. The
air below the wing is not disturbed as much. So
there is a pressure difference between the
upper and lower surfaces of the wing, and this
tends to lift it upwards. However, at the trailing
edge of the wing, the higher-pressure air tries to
flow round into the lower-pressure region above
the wing.
The higher-pressure air doesn't normally get
very far. The angle at which the air meets the
wing (A in the diagrams, because in
aerodynamics A is known as the angle of attack)
determines how far this unwanted higher-
pressure air can flow up along the top surface of
the wing. As this angle becomes larger, the
invading higher-pressure air penetrates further
and further. Its effect is to push the lift-
generating low-pressure region higher above
the wing surface, which means the air has to
speed up even more, which means that the lift
force actually increases as angle A becomes
larger. But eventually the higher-pressure air
creeps sufficiently far up the top surface that it
detaches the low-pressure region altogether
from contact with the wing. Airflow then
becomes chaotic and turbulent, and lift falls
abruptly to zero. A pilot would say that the wing
has stalled.
Unfortunately, a windmill's sails meet the air at
the highest angle when the sails are stationary.
Once they begin to move, their forward speed
reduces the effective angle, as the diagrams
below illustrate, and so the sails continue to
revolve. Starting is the big problem.

The unknown genius who made starting easier

did so not by adding complexity but by taking
part of the sail away. He made a long slot-
shaped hole in the sail, just behind its leading
edge. The idea may have grown out of his rough-
and ready hands-on knowledge of aerodynamics,
but my guess is that he just happened to notice
one day that a broken sail that was damaged in
this way seemed to work better.

When a slot exists

just behind the leading edge, air from beneath
the wing can flow through the slot and down
along the top surface. This stops the air that is
creeping upwards from below the wing from
interfering with the low-pressure region
(because now much of the lift is coming from
the small section of wing ahead of the slot), and
so the wing continues to generate lift even when
the angle A is large.
High lift at a large angle of attack is exactly
what is needed to make the sails begin to rotate.

The aircraft designer Fred Handley Page re-

invented the idea in 1920. He used slotted wings
to improve the low-speed handling
characteristics of his aeroplanes, and today all
modern high-performance combat aircraft use
slots to delay the onset of a stall. Maybe Sir
Fred got the idea from looking at a windmill.
The slot can clearly be seen on the sails of this
mill on the left, too. It's at Hessle, in Yorkshire,
and was used for crushing limestone into the
powder that formed the basis of many products
from face-powder to fertiliser.
As a matter of fact, a distant cousin of mine
used to own it. He began as a labourer in the
chalk quarries, and by hard work,
entrepreneurial skill (and probably a certain
amount of luck), he ended his days as a rich man
owning ships and other businesses, as well as
this mill. It's an interesting story, and in due
course it will appear in the Family History
section of this website.

Curiously, the mill at Hessle seems to have been

equipped with five sails instead of the usual
four. Perhaps its location, on the north bank of
the Humber, did not have the steady breeze that
would be needed by a business that had to
operate all the year round.
There are other five-bladed windmills - this one
at Alford, for example - but the relatively slight
improvement in efficiency was not usually
 considered a good enough trade-off for the
additional complexity of the design. After all, the
miller isn't actually paying for the wind to blow.
Patent sails

The sails of the two five-bladed mills pictured

above are evidently not of simple lattice
construction. Instead, they look more like a
stack of open letterboxes. This mill seems to be
fitted with the so-called 'patent sails', which
were invented in 1807. They consist of a series
of hinged shutters linked together, as shown in
the drawing. By sliding the bar, the miller could
control exactly how much lift and drag each sail
generated, and hence optimise his mill's
performance in winds of any speed.
But with five sails, the miller would have to take
care to set the shutter positions identically on
each sail. If one sail produced more torque than
the rest, the out-of-balance forces would make
the whole mill shake like a terrier with a rat.
The inventor cunningly got round this by
including a linkage from each sail through to
inside the mill, which allowed the miller to
adjust all the sails simultaneously.
Patent sails are naturally more complex and
expensive to construct and maintain than
ordinary sails, so a common nineteenth-century
compromise was to build mills with two patent
sails located opposite each other and two
ordinary sails. It's
not a coincidence that most mills were built with
four sails. In an emergency - for example, when
one sail has become damaged, but the mill
needs to operate despite this - it was possible to
run with just a single pair of sails. This option
does not exist on a five-bladed windmill, and
suggests to me that the designer of the Hessle
mill may have been more interested in how
impressive it looked rather than how well it
worked.
It is clear from the photograph that the Hessle
mill sails were stationary at the time it was
taken, and the shutters have been left open in
case a sudden breeze springs up. Perhaps it was
a Sunday.
To turn the sails into the wind, the miller steers
his mill by turning the cap - the structure on top
of the building, to which the sails are attached -
by means of the poles sticking out of it. They
extend to a platform lower down, where they
can be anchored to make the mill face in the
most suitable direction.
This picture of the mill at Veere (a beautiful
village on the Dutch coast) shows the
arrangement a little more clearly.The mills in
these photographs and the mill at Hessle were
built with a steering platform. This mill was not
in use when we saw it and the sails were left
uncovered to offer minimum wind resistance.
Strong winds can cause difficulties even with
steel structures today. Large modern cranes -
the T-shaped ones found on building sites - are
regularly turned every hour of the day and night
to face into the wind. Anyway, so says my son-in-
law Ed, who spent a wet weekend keeping a
bored eye on one.
This investigation into windmills led into some
quite unexpected areas, and has increased the
respect I feel for the engineers who solved the
many design problems and came up with a
workable system that their clients could operate
successfully.
Oh, by the way, the reason why there are still so
many working windmills in Holland seems to be
because we have more coalmines than they do.
Or at least, we used to have.