La Puissance du vent: Des moulins a vent aux eoliennes modernes The power of the wind: From windmills to modern wind turbines

摘要

Philippe Bruyerre's La Puissance du vent is an important contribution to the history of wind power generators in Europe over the past three hundred years.Resulting from his Ph.D., the book introduces an original interdisciplinary approach to the history of technology by analyzing wind energy in France, Denmark, and Germany. Instead of producing a chronological account of wind gen- eration techniques and applications, the author focuses on four "technical stages" (scenes techniques) in different times and spaces, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. This focus is at once stimulating and challenging: Stimulating because readers can take full advantage of the theoretical and historiographical framework proposed in the introduction. Bruyerre applies the concept of "dual-use" of technical artifacts (Kroes and Meijers, 2006), whose physical and functional properties should be analyzed in the interaction between technical and socioeconomic dynamics (p. 25). This approach is also challenging because it requires a careful choice of the historical "stages" to create the interaction. It is also crucial to find a common pattern linking the four "microhistories" that make up four of the books five chapters (p. 197). The book starts by describing the French oil mills around Lille in the 1700s and 1800s, then Danish rural windmills in the early 1800s. Chapter 3 focuses on the experimental wind turbines of the national public company Electricite de France (EDF) in the 1950s and 1960s, and Chapter 4 is devoted to northern Germany's modern wind turbines in the 1990s. As the descriptions of the specific objects are very technical and specialized, the target audience is the academic community rather than the general public.