Here we have one of the earliest uses of harnessing the powers of the Earth to power a mechanism, wind. Briefly the wind comes along and brushes against the long blades of the mill, making them turn round and drive a shaft within the tower. And why it is a tower is to allow for the blades to not only be long enough to provide more impetus, but because the higher you go in the sky the more wind there is. That is why the modern wind farms have such tall towers.
However the first mills, in ninth century Persia, were actually horizontal, being just a series of holes in a wall which led to a drive shaft. The blades then were cloth, and they acted like sails on a ship, which is almost certainly where the idea came from. The object being ground, then and now, was grain, to make bread from cereal. In fact if you look back into time the original name was a gristmill, because if you literally separate the wheat [germ] from the chaff [the surplus structure] that internal kernel is known as grist.
The home of the windmill is the Netherlands, as we show here. There are still over a thousand dotted around the country, but so many of the others across the world have gone. The word "bij" means "near", and "Eenrum" is the name of the village, in Groningen, Northern Netherlands. The mill appears to be Molen de Lelie, which dates from 1862. and. though not clear from this shot, is an octagonal grain mill. Best of all, it still works.
Jacob Bussink was a baker and his first Deventer spiced honey cake was made in 1593.
This card is one of many, for there were nine series of Mijn Land (or My country) issued between 1927 and 1937. Each series had a hundred cards like this and two larger plates. and each covered a different area of the country. These were
1 - Overijsel (issued in 1927)
II - Gelderland (1928)
III - Zuid-Holland (1929)
IV - Friesland (1930)
V - Limburg (1931)
VI - Groningen (1932)
VII - Noord Holland (1932)
VIII - Drenthe (1934)
XI - Zeeland (1935)
X - Utrecht (1936)
XI - Noord-Brabant (1937)
They also issued another set, called "Het Verkeer", which means traffic - and we featured that in our newsletter of 18 February 2023