Charles F. Brush

Charles F. Brush was an American inventor and industrialist who built one of the first commercially successful arc lighting systems in the United States in the late 1870s, and in 1888 constructed a large wind turbine at his home in Cleveland, Ohio, that automatically charged batteries and powered his house, among the first wind turbines ever built to generate electricity. Brushs turbine, a much larger and more sophisticated machine than James Blyths contemporaneous Scottish cottage turbine, ran for about twenty years and demonstrated that wind power could be harnessed for electricity rather than only for mechanical work such as pumping. Brush also founded a major arc lighting and dynamo manufacturing company that later became part of the National Carbon Company, and his patents helped establish street and industrial electric lighting as a viable business in American cities. His wind turbine experiment is now recognized, alongside Blyths, as one of the two earliest attempts to generate electricity from wind.