Photo: Cleveland Public Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Who He Was
Charles F. Brush (1849 to 1929) was an inventor and engineer from Cleveland, Ohio. He studied mining engineering at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1869, and in 1876 designed an improved dynamo, an electrical generator, that powered the arc lights his company installed in city streets across the United States by the early 1880s. In the winter of 1887 to 1888, he built something new in his backyard: a wind turbine that made electricity and ran itself. It stood 60 feet tall, weighed about 80,000 pounds, and had a wheel of 144 cedar blades. A large vane turned the wheel with the wind, and gears sped up the slow-turning wheel to drive a 12-kilowatt dynamo that charged hundreds of battery cells in his basement. Those batteries powered 350 incandescent lamps, arc lamps, and motors in his mansion. Scientific American described the machine in detail in 1890, and it ran for about 20 years before Brush switched to city grid power in 1908.
Why He Matters
Brush's turbine is generally considered the first automatically operating wind turbine for electricity generation, and it included ideas that every modern turbine still uses: a rotor that turns itself into the wind, a gearbox that steps up the rotor's slow speed, and a way to store the power for when the wind stops. Every wind turbine technician today works on a descendant of the machine in Brush's backyard, and the problems he had to solve- keeping a large, weather-beaten machine running reliably- are the same problems that define the job.
