I had no idea these existed. It turns out that some time in the late 1500s, the engineer Simon Stevins built some land yachts. They were basically long wheeled chariots with sails on masts, in the manner of a traditional tall ship. According to the Wikipedia article, “Around the year 1600 Stevin, with Prince Maurice of Orange and twenty-six others, made use of it on the beach between Scheveningen and Petten. The carriage was propelled solely by the force of wind, and acquired a speed which exceeded that of horses.”
Here you can see an engraving of the joyous scene. One large land yacht hurries across the beach, filled with happy passengers and attended by several sailors in red shirts and blue caps. At the far left, another, smaller land yacht follows, with only six aboard including the crewman. Offshore, several boats and ships can be seen, and at the far right, two men follow on galloping horses. A crowd of onlookers stares at the land yachts in admiration. Everyone is just having a grand old time on the beach.
I don’t know how many of these Dutch land-ships actually existed. But interestingly enough, while browsing a completely unrelated article about the Dutch tulip-speculation crisis, a cartoon of the time which pokes fun at the tulip craze depicts one of these land yachts. This indicates to me that they must have been at least somewhat well-known among the Dutch of that time period.
One post in, and already this thread has been Godwinized.
I have long had a bizarre fantasy about building a “sail” for wheeled vehicles that would work in any direction: essentially a huge funnel that spins, weathervane style, to face the wind at all times, which it channels it down to a turbine, which is geared to drive an axle. I suspect a) it wouldn’t work at all, and b) even if it did, it would drive them unbelievably slowly. Any clever engineer with too much time on their hands want to do some calculations on my idea?
I’m pretty sure one of these figures into Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle somewhere. Nice to see a picture, I was wondering exactly what he was talking about.
It’s possible, without the funnel - just place your turbine on a mast and either use it to generate electricity to drive your motorised vehicle, or run a driveshaft down the centre of the mast and use the motive power directly (probably more efficient than the electrical version). It should be possible to drive directly into the wind in this way (although perhaps not all that fast).
