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50 free Windmills trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This windmills trivia quiz covers a thousand years of catching the wind: the horizontal panemone mills of 9th-century Persia, the first European post mills of the 1100s, tower mills, smock mills and fantails, patent sails, the machinery inside (brake wheel, wallower, stone nuts), and how the Dutch drained a country with hollow-post mills and scoop wheels. It also asks about the culture around them: the Dutch sail positions that signal a birth or a death, the 19 mills of Kinderdijk, the Zaan district that was arguably the world's first industrial region, Don Quixote and 'tilting at windmills', the red mill on the Moulin Rouge, the Cape's Oude Molen, the American farm windpump, and the line from Blyth and Brush in 1887 to the megawatt turbines and 7 percent of world electricity today. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on windmills, wind turbines and the named sites, and each explanation adds one further fact. Good for history and engineering buffs, Netherlands-bound travellers and quiz nights.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which country did the first practical windmills, with horizontally turning sails, appear around the 9th century?
Persia
The geographer Estakhri reported them in Khorasan; they had six to twelve reed-covered sails turning round a vertical shaft.
Q 02What was the early Persian windmill with lightweight vertical sails on a vertical shaft called?
Panemone
It was first built to pump water and only later adapted to grind grain.
Q 03Which Babylonian ruler is said to have used wind power for irrigation as early as the 17th century BC?
Hammurabi
Hero of Alexandria later described a wind-driven wheel powering an organ, though it may only have been a toy or a design idea.
Q 04In which triangle of regions did the vertical windmill first appear in the 12th century?
Northern France, eastern England and Flanders
It is unclear whether it owed anything to the Persian horizontal mills that had reached southern Europe a century earlier.
Q 05Northern Europe's earliest certain windmill reference, from 1185, comes from a village in which English county?
Yorkshire
Weedley stood at the southern tip of the Wolds overlooking the Humber; these first mills ground cereals.
Q 06What is the earliest European windmill, whose whole body turns on a large upright timber?
Post mill
The first ones were 'sunken', with the post buried in a mound; later a trestle, often enclosed in a roundhouse, held it up.
Q 07In a tower mill, which part rotates to face the wind?
Only the cap
Because the masonry tower stays put it can be built taller with longer sails, useful even in light winds; it arrived by the end of the 13th century.
Q 08What is the small windmill behind the sails that turns a mill's cap into the wind automatically?
Fantail
Fantails are common in Britain, Denmark and Germany but rare elsewhere; around the Mediterranean some mills had fixed caps because the wind hardly varied.
Q 09A smock mill replaces the masonry tower with what?
An octagonal wooden frame
The Dutch introduced them in the 17th century because they were light enough to stand on soft, wet ground; the name comes from a peasant's smock.
Q 10What was the purpose of the hollow-post mills used in the Netherlands from the early 15th century?
Draining wetlands
The hollowed post let a drive shaft pass down to machinery below while the body still turned into the wind.
Q 11Who invented the self-regulating 'patent sails' of connected shutters in 1807?
William Cubitt
Before that, the mill had to be stopped so the miller could spread more or less sailcloth over the lattice frames.
Q 12How many sails do the majority of windmills have?
Four
Five-, six- and eight-sailed mills were built especially in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire; even numbers let a mill run with a broken sail by removing its opposite too.
Q 13In the Netherlands, what does it mean when the sails are stopped in a '+' shape (3, 6, 9 and 12 o'clock)?
Open for business
An 'X' means closed; a slight tilt with the top blade at 1 o'clock signals joy, and a tilt to 11-2-5-8 signals mourning or warning.
Q 21How many windmills were built around 1740 to drain the Alblasserwaard polder at Kinderdijk?
19
It is the largest concentration of old mills in the Netherlands and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997.
Q 22In which year did the Kinderdijk windmills become a UNESCO World Heritage Site?
1997
The name means 'children's dike'; today two diesel pumping stations do most of the real draining.
Q 23What is the Zaanse Schans, near Zaandam?
A collection of relocated historic windmills and houses
Two of its mills are still on their original sites; the rest were moved there for preservation.
Q 14Dutch windmills were set in the mourning position nationwide in 2014 to honour victims of what?
The shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
The same signals were used to warn neighbours during Nazi searches in the Second World War.
Q 15Inside a windmill, what is the horizontal gearwheel atop the upright shaft, driven by the brake wheel, called?
Wallower
Lower down, the great spur wheel drives the stone nuts that turn each millstone.
Q 16What is the horizontal shaft that carries the sails called?
Windshaft
It could be all wood, wood with a cast-iron pole end, or all cast iron, with the brake wheel fitted between its bearings.
Q 17In a pair of millstones, what is the stationary lower stone called?
Bedstone
The concave-rimmed runner turns on top of it, creating a scissoring action that grinds the grain.
Q 18Roughly how many wind-powered mills were there in Europe at their peak in 1850?
About 200,000
That was about half the number of water wheels; wind was used where water was scarce, froze in winter or flowed too slowly.
Q 19Of the roughly 10,000 windmills working in the Netherlands around 1850, how many still stand?
About 1,000
Most are run by volunteers, and many drainage mills serve as backup to modern pumping stations.
Q 20Which Dutch area, with about 600 windmill industries by the late 1700s, is called the first industrialised region?
The Zaan
Its mills sawed timber and processed oil, paint and paper; the Zaanse Schans museum preserves some today.
Q 24In which novel does the hero attack windmills he believes to be giants?
Don Quixote
Cervantes' scene gave English the idiom 'tilting at windmills' for attacking imaginary enemies.
Q 25What does the idiom 'tilting at windmills' mean?
Attacking imaginary enemies
The town of Consuegra in La Mancha still has a hilltop line of windmills beside its castle.
Q 26Which Paris cabaret, founded in 1889, has a landmark red windmill on its roof?
Moulin Rouge
Its name means 'red mill'; it stands on the Boulevard de Clichy below Montmartre, once a hill of real mills.
Q 27What was the Oude Molen, completed in 1718?
A durable windmill at the Cape of Good Hope
Early tower mills had not survived the Cape's gales, so the Dutch East India Company's Heeren XVII sent out builders and materials.
Q 28Who invented the self-regulating American farm windpump in 1854?
Daniel Halladay
On the Great Plains, windpumps drew water from wells for cattle.
Q 29Where was the first electricity-generating wind turbine shown, by the Austrian Josef Friedlander in 1883?
The Vienna International Electrical Exhibition
It stood at the north entrance of the Rotunde in the Prater and ran tools and lamps.
Q 30Which Scottish academic used a wind machine to light his Marykirk holiday home in 1887?
James Blyth
Months later the American Charles F. Brush built the first automatically operated wind turbine.