James Blyth built the 1887 Marykirk wind turbine, often described as the world's first electricity-generating wind turbine.
Blyth was a Scottish engineer and professor at Anderson's College in Glasgow, now the University of Strathclyde. He built the turbine in the garden of his holiday home in Marykirk, Aberdeenshire, to charge accumulators that powered electric lighting. The machine used a cloth-sailed rotor and produced electricity for Blyth's home.
Blyth later offered surplus electricity to Marykirk's main street, but the proposal was rejected because residents feared electricity was dangerous. In the United States, Charles Brush built another important early electricity-generating wind turbine in Cleveland in 1888, so the two pioneers are sometimes confused.
Blyth's machine was an experimental battery-charging system rather than a modern utility-scale wind farm. Its significance is that it demonstrated wind power being converted into usable electrical energy before commercial wind turbines became common.