The rise of the wind turbine has been compared to the compact fluorescent lamp and the railroad. A wind farm in Madison County, New York.

MARY JO MURPHY ESSAY

The wind turbine’s detractors fall into roughly two categories. To some objectors, the turbine is the devil’s own trident - a whirling, whirring one that thwacks birds, chews bats and sets whales’ teeth on edge. To the less eco-minded, it is the blight just outside the front window or off the back porch - if yours happens to be the front window or back porch.
But none of that matters just now. The wind turbine is now popular.
It is everywhere, and not in a bad way. There are turbines posing among the mannequins in the Calvin Klein windows on Madison Avenue in New York. And Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg recently planted in New Yorkers’ heads images of turbines on the bridges and rooftops and - an instance of icon meeting icon - lighting Lady Liberty’s torch with their gusty might.
Advertisements broadcast by the presidential campaigns of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama during the Olympics featured almost identical pastoral panning shots of turbines. If you add the General Electric commercials that boasted of the green-powering of the Games, the TV screen showed wind turbines gleaming white more often than Michael Phelps flashing gold.
Not since Don Quixote have so many windmills presented such an orgy of illusion: wind power accounts for only about 1 percent of the United States’ energy. It will be some time before the production catches up to the publicity.
But that’s the way it is with a cultural icon: it is both of and ahead of its time, and it knows that looking good is half the battle.
The most common wind turbine is a Danish design. Tall, sleek, clean and futuristic in a kind of retro way , it’s your childhood pinwheel all grown up and for real.
“What makes this such a powerful icon is that it’s unbelievably simple and telegraphic,” said Allen P. Adamson, managing director of the New York office of Landor Associates, a corporate branding firm, “and yet it’s a serious idea.”
Edward Tenner, author of “Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity,” sees in the rise of the wind turbine parallels to icons like the compact fluorescent lamp, the geodesic dome, even the railroad. A rectangular fluorescent bulb had been around for a while, he noted, but “I think there is something about the spiral design that makes it visually arresting.”
Of course, one man’s arresting is another’s hideous, but this is a matter of how people train their perceptions. Advocates of wind power “may actually see the sound of these blades as reassuring, but to others it’s a visual and sonic intrusion.”
But “perception of technology in the environment changes,” Mr. Tenner said, recalling the railroad that cuts through the lovely Lake District. “Is then no nook of English ground secure/ From rash assault-” Wordsworth complained in 1844 in his “Sonnet on the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway.” Now railways like that are admired. “On the other hand,” Mr. Tenner said, “wind turbines don’t really complement the terrain as, for example, the Ribblehead Viaduct in Yorkshire did.” The turbines “are a bold, Modernist appropriation of the landscape.”
The geodesic dome was associated with the same sort of progressive thinking in design that led to the wind turbine.
It was “part of this movement for lightness and new materials and a smaller human footprint,” Mr. Tenner said, and it became almost a cult object on college campuses beginning in the 1950s. But technical problems over time consigned it to a niche standing.
So what else does an icon have to do besides look good to a lot of people?
The best icons tell a story, says Seth Godin, author of “All Marketers Are Liars,” and it’s “a story that validates our feelings and amplifies the way we look at the world.” The fins on cars of the 1950s are a good example, he said. “It didn’t have anything to do with how good the car was,” but the fins evoked a rocket ship. “Rockets, of course, were the icon of the day, so capturing that rocketness in a car transferred some of the magic.”
The wind turbine also plays to American mythology, which “is all about supply,” Mr. Godin theorizes. “Demand is our right. It’s our right to be wasteful and profligate. The supply is never-ending and will take care of itself. So an icon that represents a risk-free way to increase supply resonates with us.”
The windmill, Mr. Adamson said, has “transcended its literal functionality to become an iconic symbol of the ideal.” These reedy beacons are “almost branded icons of hopeful, we-can-beatthem better mousetraps,” but there is a risk in overuse, and in offering a promise too long undelivered. Today the icon has potential, he said.
“Right now it stands for ‘Don’t confuse me with the facts.’” But “it’s at the tipping point right now,” unless people go ahead and make good on the promise.