No Such Thing as a Fish discuss windmills and wind turbines 🌍

Don't expect great accuracy (after all it's produced by the notoriously inaccurate QI elves, who consider that a quick web search counts as being "research"), but there's a fairly entertaining bit about wind turbines and windmills at the start of a recent episode of No Such Thing as a Fish entitled No such thing as half past purple.

They start by talking about the wind turbine installed in 1941 at Grandpa's Knob, Vermont, then mention mass produced wind engines widely used in America (though say they were used for grinding corn on farms, when they were mostly for pumping water). A question on "is there a society to do with wind turbines and windmills" gets the reply of not having found one (I said their research was shallow!), and the language of windmill sails (mourning, celebration etc) is covered, but not explained very clearly. A ramble around the direction of rotation of wind turbines is concluded with a mention of the Betz limit of how much power can be extracted from the wind. Finally there's coverage of James Blyth's pioneering work, though his 1887 wind turbine was certainly not the first to generate electricity.