First, I like your wind turbine idea. I've had a few related designs spinning around in my gray matter for some time now, but have not built any models of them.
Mostly though, I wanted to comment on the "new idea" vs "old idea" theme that is underlying this thread.
I view the science and creativity involved in thinking up new ideas more as an art form.
Taking an idea, whether old or new, to a point of practical application is a very different endeavor. Many times the two become entwined, but are truly two separate activities.
You could almost compare the two to painting a canvas vs. painting a house. Both require skill, but very different skills.
Interestingly, that metaphor tends to hold up when you move it over into the realm of society's willingness to compensate the one doing it. Just as many artists are starving, and house painters seldom go hungry - so it has always been with ideas. Those who provide the creativity of thinking up clever ideas are not rewarded nearly as well as those that take any idea, whether novel or not, and turn it into a functioning enterprise.
One need only look as far as the Apple iPod for a good example of this. The guys who invented the ideas involved with putting music into a digital form and storing it temporarily in a portable music player without dragging around a tape or a CD, and moving that music around over the internet rather than going to a store to buy it...well, lets just say they were never rewarded other than by being cursed as music pirates. Then along came Steve Jobs who took a bunch of old ideas and in the course of three or four years turned it into a howling success. In fact, earlier this year, Apple computer became the worlds largest seller of music. No new ideas, just a careful organization of stuff that had been around for years.
jp
