Below, Simon Winchester shares five key insights from his new book, The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind.
Simon is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Professor and the Madman, The Men Who United the States, The Map That Changed the World, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa, all of which were New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. In 2006, Winchester was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen.
What’s the big idea?
The wind, once seen as the mysterious work of deities, continues to hold a subtle, almost mystical influence over our lives, even as science has revealed its vast and complex power. Its impact is far greater and more pervasive than early humans—or even we—could have imagined.
1. Stilling.
What on earth is a stilling? I read a piece in The Guardian about 20 years ago that referred to a research paper in which a statistician was suggesting that in the first 15 years of this century, the average wind speed in Europe would decline by 10 percent. This caught my attention because the number of tornadoes, cyclones, and hurricanes around the world seem to be increasing, and the wind speeds and destructive power of these storms grows evermore catastrophic. Yet the average wind speed seems to be going down?
Global terrestrial stilling and a phenomenon called wind drought is happening all over the world. Some people say, implausibly, that this is due to the increasing roughness of the Earth’s surface, such as more skyscrapers. But the more likely answer is our all-too-familiar suspect: global warming.
Wind happens when hot air rises, cold air moves in to take its place, and fill that void. That is wind, and that movement of air is being affected (and lessened) by a lowering of the temperature differential. Warmer poles mean less wind. It is not a certainty yet, but that may be the answer to this new puzzle.
2. Chernobyl.
How could a gentle spring breeze trigger the collapse of the Soviet Union? It was a warm spring morning in April 1986. Workers at an atomic plant north of Stockholm in Sweden were lining up to begin their morning shift. An alarm began to sound, indicating that there was radiation in the air. Everything in Sweden was shut down as testing began.
It was determined that there was no leak in the plant, but the radiation had to be coming from somewhere. The wind that morning was blowing from the southeast. If they tracked this gentle breeze backwards, they could see that this plume of radiation was from an accident at a nuclear power station somewhere across the Baltic Sea, behind the Iron Curtain, beyond Latvia, beyond Lithuania, beyond Estonia, somewhere in the Soviet Union itself.
“Mikhail Gorbachev would later say that this event triggered the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Yes, this was the disaster at the power station in Chernobyl. Moscow said nothing, claiming there had been no incident at all. But as the wind shifted and more and more radiation piled into Western Europe, the cat was out of the bag. Moscow had to admit they had an almighty problem. Now, we all know what happened. The deaths, the fire, the uncontrollable release of radiation as the core melted, the evacuations, and all sorts of terrible things had to be admitted. Chernobyl has passed into history as one of the deadliest mishaps in nuclear history. Mikhail Gorbachev would later say that this event triggered the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which indeed threw in the towel in 1991, five years later.
What’s strange is that the wind in the Ukraine that was blowing over the power station normally blew from the west. Had it done so that April day, then the plume of radiation would not have gone to Sweden at all. The cat would not have been released from the bag. The radiation would’ve swept over to the deserts of Kazakhstan and allowed the Soviets to keep this incident quiet. The Soviet Union would have staggered on for a few more years, but because the wind blew from the southeast, the end of communism in Russia was triggered. The world has been changed, all because of a fickle wind.
3. Fossil fuel lobby.
Most people these days would agree that the fossil fuel lobby is the devil’s work. I personally think that wind turbines that dot the landscape are rather spectacular and beautiful things. But they face a lot of opposition, especially from the fossil fuel industry.
We might think wind energy is something new, but it is actually as old as the hills. And the very beginning of wind power generation was at the end of the 19th century. The first wind-powered generator was invented by a man called James Blyth, a professor of engineering at a university near Glasgow in Scotland. In 1887, he decided to build his own private wind generator at his little seaside cottage in a village called Marykirk, north of Aberdeen.
It took him just a few months to come up with the design. It looked like a very primitive windmill, but it rotated using cloth sails attached to a spindle, which in turn powered a dynamo—just as Michael Faraday had demonstrated earlier that century. If you rotate a copper coil between the poles of a magnet, it generates electricity. He then stored this electricity in a battery. From the battery, he illuminated his house with about 25 light bulbs, newly invented by Thomas Edison.
“We might think wind energy is something new, but it is actually as old as the hills.”
He was very happy. He could read at night and all the rest of the things you could do with electricity, but he had too much. He had an enormous surplus, so he went to his neighbors and offered them free light bulbs and electricity. However, his neighbors said no—they were wary of his wind-generated electricity, calling it the work of the devil. They had been coached to say such things by the owners of the local coal mines who felt (same as fossil industries do today) that you should buy their product rather than electricity made for free by the wind.
4. Tumbleweed.
“Tumbling Tumbleweed” was the name of a song written in the 1930s by The Sons of the Pioneers. Its chorus included: “Here on the range I belong, drifting along with the tumblin’ tumbleweeds.” For many years, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, no Western movie or Western song was complete without some reference to the tumbleweed, which symbolized the region between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River.
Nowadays, tumbleweeds are considered a serious nuisance. As new developments have spread across states like Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, tumbleweeds have grown extraordinarily abundant, blowing into the cul-de-sacs and forming huge piles against houses, doorjambs, and garages. People sometimes can’t even get out of their homes because of the enormous accumulations.
How did this happen? It seems to have begun with a man called Henry Schatz, who in the 1870s was a pioneer farmer in a small village in Dakota Territory called Scotland. Mr. Schatz farmed alfalfa and other crops, but he decided to try his hand at raising flax, which seemed likely to bring him more of a profit than alfalfa. He wrote to a seed catalog company, and they agreed that for a couple of dollars, he could have a hundred-pound sack of seed. It would take about six months to arrive, but in due course, it did.
He sowed it on three acres of his land. Unbeknownst to him, within that sack of flax seed were about six, small orange-colored seeds of a plant called Salsola tragus, or Ukrainian thistle. It grew rapidly. At first, it was tender and pleasant, and then it became woody and spiky, eventually forming a large ball that broke off its stalk and rolled wherever the wind took it. Even though it looked dead, each of those balls of what we now call tumbleweed contains about a quarter of a million seeds. Seeds that, even when falling on the most unsuitable ground, can take root and sprout.
“Nowadays, tumbleweeds are considered a serious nuisance.”
Many plants are propagated by wind, including good ones like sycamore seeds. But Ukrainian thistle is said to be the fastest-growing invasive plant in American botanical history. So far, it hasn’t spread across the Mississippi River, but it might yet. When it does, it will no longer be just a symbol of the West. It will become a symbol of modern-day America, carried to us by the wind.
5. Napalm.
Manmade wind as a weapon of war. It has been recognized that above huge fires—forest fires or erupting volcanoes—a type of cloud can form that has enormous and deadly potential. It’s called a cumulonimbus flammagenitus, and it can rise like a great anvil high into the lower reaches of the stratosphere. Within it, lightning, thunder, and occasionally tornadoes can occur.
Down by the surface, this phenomenon can generate extraordinary gale-force winds, which exacerbate the fire burning below, creating a self-perpetuating system. Humans can also create cumulonimbus clouds, particularly through the use of a weapon developed on Valentine’s Day, 1942, during the Second World War by a professor at Harvard: napalm. It is an incredibly fierce burning mixture of petroleum and oil. When dropped from bombs, napalm wreaks havoc below.
The most infamous example was an operation mounted by the U.S. Army Air Force in March 1945 over Tokyo, when more than 300 B-29 Superfortresses, laden with napalm, rained thousands upon thousands of bombs down on the sleeping city. This created a gigantic fire, which in turn created a cumulonimbus flammagenitus cloud, whipping up the winds at ground level to cause even more terror and destruction.
More people died in the firebombing of Tokyo than in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few months later. Remarkably, the cost differential was enormous. While the atomic bomb project cost billions, the destruction of Tokyo—Operation Meetinghouse—was carried out with roughly $85,000 worth of napalm, yet it utterly destroyed the city. In effect, the devastation was achieved through essentially manmade winds.
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