James Blyth

James Blyth (1839 to 1906) was a Scottish electrical engineer and university teacher who built one of the earliest wind turbines to generate electricity. Born at Marykirk in Kincardineshire, he graduated from Edinburgh University in 1861, taught mathematics in Crieff and Edinburgh, and in 1880 became Professor of Natural Philosophy at Anderson's College in Glasgow, where he stayed for the rest of his life. His research there centred on generating and storing electricity from wind. In 1887 he put up a small windmill in the garden of his holiday cottage at Marykirk, with a 33 foot windshaft and four 13 foot arms with canvas sails, driving a dynamo through a rope from the flywheel and charging storage cells to light the cottage. Unlike the contemporary turbine of Charles Brush, it had no automatic brake. He patented a wind engine in 1891, and in 1895 licensed Mavor and Coulson to build a modified vertical axis machine at the Montrose asylum, which supplied storage cells for lighting there for 27 years. He died at home in Glasgow in 1906.