In the winter of 1887–1888, Charles F. Brush, an inventor and electrical engineer in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, constructed in the garden of his mansion the world's first automatically operating wind turbine designed to generate electricity. The 17-metre-diameter turbine had 144 cedar blades and produced approximately 12 kilowatts of electricity, which Brush used to charge batteries in his basement laboratory. Though inefficient by later standards, the machine operated continuously for 20 years and demonstrated for the first time that wind could be converted to electrical power at scale, anticipating the entire modern wind energy industry.

Brush's wind turbine appeared at the moment when electricity was transforming American social and literary life — electrification of homes and cities created the nocturnal reading culture and extended working hours that enabled the explosion of American magazine poetry and journalism in the 1890s, the Gilded Age literary moment. Walt Whitman, alive at the time of Brush's experiment, had already made the dynamo and the electric spark into metaphors of democratic energy; the wind turbine represented a synthesis of the natural and the industrial that later poets like Hart Crane would pursue in The Bridge (1930).