Sail away

The Beaufort scale, the  initial scale of thirteen classes of wind speed (zero to twelve) was based on visual observations. It did not reference wind speed numbers but related qualitative wind conditions to effects on the sails of a man of war, a 1600-1900  main war ship in the Royal Navy,  from "just sufficient to give steerage" to "that which no canvas sails could withstand."  At zero, all his sails would be up; at six, half of his sails would have been taken down; and at twelve, all sails would be stowed away. Today, the terms are still used in weather reports at sea, an every sailor knows about it.

How wind changed the course of history
The term is first known to have been used as the name of a pair or series of typhoons that are said to have saved Japan from two Mongol fleets under Kublai Khan that attacked Japan in 1274 and again in 1281. Protestant Wind is a name for the storm that deterred the Spanish Armada from an invasion of England in 1588 where the wind played a pivotal role,  or the favorable winds that enabled William of Orange to invade England in 1688. During Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign, the French soldiers had a hard time with the khamsin wind: when the storm appeared "as a blood-stint in the distant sky", the natives went to take cover, while the French "did not react until it was too late, then choked and fainted in the blinding, suffocating walls of dust."

Sail vessels
There are many different forms of sailing ships, but they all have certain basic things in common. Except for rotor ships using the Magnus effect, every sailing ship has a hull, rigging and at least one mast to hold up the sails that use the wind to power the ship. Ocean journeys by sailing ship can take many months, and a common hazard is becoming becalmed because of lack of wind, or being blown off course by severe storms or winds that do not allow progress in the desired direction. A severe storm could lead to shipwreck, and the loss of all hands. Sailing ships can only carry a certain quantity of supplies in their hold, so they have to plan long voyages carefully to include appropriate provisions, including fresh water.

Wind as a power source
Historically, the ancient Sinhalese of Anuradhapura and in other cities around Sri Lanka used the monsoon winds to power furnaces as early as 300 BCE. The furnaces were constructed on the path of the monsoon winds to exploit the wind power, to bring the temperatures inside up to 1,200 °C. An early historical reference to a rudimentary windmill was used to power an organ in the first century CE. The first practical windmills were later built in Sistan, Afghanistan, from the 7th century CE. These were vertical-axle windmills, which had long vertical driveshafts with rectangle shaped blades. Made of six to twelve sails covered in reed matting or cloth material, these windmills were used to grind corn and draw up water, and were used in the gristmilling and sugarcane industries. Horizontal-axle windmills were later used extensively in Northwestern Europe to grind flour beginning in the 1180s, and many Dutch windmills still exist.
Now, windmills or wind turbines are set out at sea, and although now at an experimental stage, this will be a major supplier of power to the world, and an environmentaly friendly alternative to todays main source of power.

In Norse mythology, Njord is the god of the wind. There are also four dvärgar (Norse dwarves), named Norðri, Suðri, Austri and Vestri, and probably the four stags of Yggdrasil, personify the four winds. And did you know that Kamikaze, a Japanese word, usually translated as divine wind, believed to be a gift from the gods.