Technology and Culture

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 generation techniques and applications, the author focuses on four "technical stages" (scènes 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 book's 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 Electricité 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.

The author presents the common analytical pattern in the final chapter, comparing the four cases by computing two indicators. The first is a quality index, applied to rank the various technical artifacts' performance without considering the context in which they were used; the second adds a "regularity factor" (p. 205), which is, indeed, the sociohistorical context. It measures the availability of the source of energy and its actual use. Quality and regularity indicators are the book's most creative output. Bruyerre, an engineer and entrepreneur in the field of wind turbines in France, combines a rigorous measurement of wind generators' technical performance with the analysis of their long-term socioeconomic demand. The "two histories of wind power" resulting from the application of the two indicators show that wind generators' performance improved over time. Nonetheless, the regularity factor fell in the 1900s once it was connected with the production of electric energy. Oil mills around Lille produced a highly regular "local [End Page 1236] service." Modern wind generators produce a "commodity," electric energy, destined for a "global" market, and, while more performant, they have lost their "territorial roots" (p. 206).

This interdisciplinary approach allows novel insights into wind generators' history and engages in fruitful dialogues on energy transition. It also contributes to the recent historiographical debate on the Industrial Revolution, which rejects the narrative of a linear path to modernity.

The four chapters follow a similar pattern. They open with a description of the objects and techniques and a deep analysis of the inventors and firms who developed them. The history of Danish windmills in Chapter 2 is an interesting example of the interaction between innovation and territorial use. Far from the prototype of a modern wind generator, their decentralized technology resisted the adoption of more and more centralized energy networks, showing that twentieth century electrification was a complex and nonlinear dynamic.

The second aspect common to every chapter is analyzing the socioeconomic context of each "technical stage." Including all the historical details in the few pages devoted to each case's historical context is not an easy task, and the various analyses can appear too synthetic. However, the author provides all the useful elements to integrate the...