The windmills of the Netherlands
No image is more closely associated with the Netherlands than the windmill, yet the machine was not a Dutch invention. Wind had been used to grind grain in Persia centuries earlier, and the idea reached north-western Europe in the twelfth century. The earliest records of windmills in the Low Countries date from around 1200. What set the Dutch apart was not that they had windmills but the number they built and the range of tasks they found for them.
The first mills were used for grinding corn. They were of a type known as the post mill, in which the entire wooden body, containing the millstones and carrying the sails, was balanced on a single upright post. When the wind changed direction, the miller had to push the body round by hand, using a long beam that projected from the back. Because everything had to be light enough to be moved in this way, post mills were severely restricted in size.
It was water, however, that made the windmill essential to Dutch life. About a quarter of the country lies below sea level, and as peat was dug for fuel during the Middle Ages the land sank further. From the early fifteenth century, mills were adapted to turn a large wooden wheel fitted with paddles, which scooped water from low-lying fields into a canal at a higher level. A single mill of this kind could raise water by about a metre and a half. Where that was insufficient, several were built in a row, each lifting the water one stage higher than the last. The most celebrated project of this kind was the draining of the Beemster lake, north of Amsterdam. Under the direction of the engineer Jan Leeghwater, forty-three mills pumped the lake dry by 1612 and turned seven thousand hectares of water into farmland.
Such work demanded more powerful mills, and these were made possible by a change in design. In the smock mill, which had a tall eight-sided tower of timber, only the cap, to which the sails were attached, revolved to face the wind. Since the tower itself never moved, it could be built far larger than a post mill and could house heavy machinery.
The same development opened the way to industry. In 1594 Cornelis Corneliszoon fitted a mill with a crankshaft, a device that converted the turning of the sails into the up-and-down movement of a saw. Timber could now be cut many times faster than by hand, and the cheap planks that resulted were a foundation of the Dutch shipbuilding industry, which in the following century was the largest in the world. Along the River Zaan, a short distance from Amsterdam, some six hundred industrial windmills were at work by the eighteenth century, sawing wood, pressing oil from seeds, grinding pigments for paint and making paper. The district has been described as the first industrial zone in Europe.
For the families who operated them, mills were homes as well as workplaces, and they developed a language of their own. When a mill was at rest, the position in which the sails were left could carry a message to anyone who saw it across the flat landscape. One arrangement announced a celebration, such as a wedding or a birth in the miller's family; another signalled a period of mourning. During the Second World War, it is said, the same code was used to warn people in hiding that a search was on its way.
By the middle of the nineteenth century there were around nine thousand windmills in the Netherlands. Their decline began at almost the same moment. When the large lake known as the Haarlemmermeer was drained between 1849 and 1852, the work was done not by wind but by three pumping stations driven by steam, which could operate whatever the weather. Diesel and electric pumps followed, and mill after mill was pulled down. Alarmed by the losses, enthusiasts founded a society for the protection of windmills in 1923.
Around twelve hundred windmills survive today. The best-known group stands at Kinderdijk, near Rotterdam, where nineteen mills built around 1740 were added to the World Heritage list in 1997. Most surviving mills are kept in working order by volunteers, who must complete a lengthy training before they are allowed to operate one alone. In 2017 the traditional craft of the miller was itself given international recognition as part of the world's cultural heritage, an acknowledgement that what had been preserved was not only a collection of buildings but a body of knowledge.