January 11 2007

Text By Meera Sethi

A windmill is an amazing thing. Its simple, almost childish design—a single vertical shaft, a few arrowy sails—allows it to do something quite incredible. It changes one thing into another with a kind of wondrous alchemy that is all the more astonishing because it is so straightforward.

A wave of fluid, moving air, invisible but irresistible, pushes on blades. The wind’s kinetic energy—the thing that makes it wind, its very essence— is transferred to those blades. Up in the air they begin to spin; below, a generator hums and clicks, and voila—a person miles away turns on their study light to write another chapter of their novel.

Someone somewhere imagined this flow, this movement of pure power from one form to another. Motion becomes magnetism becomes electricity…and returns to imagination.