Air: Borrowing Wind for Speed and Distance

Wind and air could not be touched or stored, yet humanity learned to borrow both for speed and distance. The result was among the fastest transformations in this entire history: an ocean crossing shrank from months to hours.

Key Milestones

• Sailing, roughly 3000 BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Wind, rather than muscle, propelled ships for the first time, unlocking long-distance trade and naval power.
• Windmills, roughly the 9th century AD in Persia. Wind was converted into rotational force to grind grain and pump water, spreading from Persia into Europe over the following centuries.
• Aviation, 1903, with the Wright Brothers. Humanity arbitraged the air itself, using engine power to generate lift and finally travel in three dimensions.

The Energy, Social, and Economic Impact of Air

Little tells the story of wind and air arbitrage better than how long it took to cross an ocean. The Mayflower's 1620 crossing of the Atlantic took 66 days, at the mercy of the wind. By 1909, the steamship Mauretania, burning coal instead of catching wind, cut that to about four days and seventeen hours. Today, a commercial jet, burning refined fuel at altitude, makes the same crossing in roughly seven hours. We believe each leap was not really about ships or planes: it was about a cheaper, denser, more controllable source of energy replacing the one before it.

View chart in the full report

Windmills, meanwhile, quietly did for grain and water what watermills had done a few centuries earlier, extending mechanized power to regions without a reliable river. They also set the template that would later be reused, almost unchanged in principle, for wind turbines generating electricity.