For thousands of years human beings have been using the power of the wind to do useful work.

At first the wind was just used for sailing ships, but eventually the wind's power was

harnessed to do mundane tasks like milling grain and pumping water.

And unlike many ancient energy sources, wind power is still used today, and it has become a major

source of electrical generation.

Learn more about how humans conquered the wind and made it useful on this episode of

Everything Everywhere Daily. Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. The wind is something that humans have dealt with for as long as there have been humans.

Outside, perhaps drying meat and hides after a hunt, there's no evidence of Paleolithic people doing anything to harness the power of the wind.

The first rule evidence that we can find in the archaeological record of humans using wind goes back about 7,000 years to ancient Egypt, where we found the earliest sailboats. These early sailboats were very simple but they provided

power to move up and down the Nile River and later along the coast of the

Mediterranean Sea. About 5,000 years ago we know that early Austronesian people also use sales.

These were the ancestors of the Polynesians and Micronesians who probably originated from

the island of Taiwan.

Despite the existence of warships with teams of oarsmen propelling the vessel,

usually just for speed and combat, the sail was by far the most popular means of

propulsion for thousands of years. Despite how popular and widespread sailing had become, there was shockingly little evidence for wind power being harnessed for anything else.

The Babylonian King Hammurabi had reportedly planned on building a wind-powered water pump to power his

irrigation network in the Fertile Crescent. But if he did ever build it, it never caught

on. Around 300 BC, the Persians were using wind to power grain mills.

This was believed to be the first example in history of wind being used for such a purpose.

The Persian windmills looked very odd if you're familiar with modern windmills. They were horizontal so they

didn't require gears to transmit rotational energy in a different direction and it

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