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July 2013 www.sname.org/sname/mt World War, before declining to an average of one patent per year from the 1930s. Experimental stages However, despite this sustained burst of technologi- cal innovation, wave power appears to have remained largely experimental before the latter part of the 20th century. In fact, of the 340 patents, only 27 wave-pow- ered devices were built before the mid-1970s. One of the earliest and best known of these was built at Royan, near Bordeaux in France in 1910. In this installation, a Monsieur Bochaux-Praceique supplied his house with 1 kW of electricity by means of an air turbine, which was driven by wave power. is air turbine design was later taken up very successfully by Yoshio Masuda in Japan. Following a number of experimental installations that met with limited degrees of success in the 1920s and 1930s, the period following the Second World War saw wave power experiments begin to be more eective. Arguably, it was Masuda, a Japanese naval commander, who began the modern age of wave power technology. Beginning in 1947 with the Oceanographic Unit of the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Unit, Masuda ran a number of wave energy projects based on a three-oat system. From the 1960s, the research and development division of the Japan Defence Agency supported much of this work in a clear attempt to locate reliable and plentiful energy supplies in a country almost devoid of fossil fuel resources. e Ryokuseisha Corporation also funded much of the development cost. Masuda now concentrated his efforts on the air turbine design. After more than 10 years of work, he successfully demonstrated a 500 W wave-powered air turbine generator at Expo 1970, in Osaka. Masuda became a major exporter of air turbine buoys after 1965, and by the 1980s, there were more than 600 devices in operation in various parts of the world. Arguably, he remains the most successful commercial wave energy developer to date. The nodding duck e turning point for wave energy, as for so many other renewable energy sources, came after the rst global oil crisis in 1973. Prompted by the invention of the nodding duck? wave device by Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh, the U.K. government funded a wave energy program until 1982. is provided nancial support to many developers and various devices through the 1970s. Although the program was eventually shut down due to competition from wind energy in the U.K., it did spawn many of the wave energy devices that we see around the world today, such as the Pelamis device. During the 1980s and 1990s, wave energy suered a lull. e rapid adoption of wind energy and the emergence of the ubiquitous wind farm pushed wave energy tech- nologies into the background. Slowly, in the 21st century, governments and commercial developers have once again begun to consider the huge potential of wave energy. In the United States, a small amount of wave energy research and development was carried out in the late 1990s, but as in other countries, government support was either modest or non-existent. Some of the technologies developed dur- ing this period moved closer to commercial development in the early 2000s, but the global recession of 2007/2008 again served to stunt the growth of wave energy technolo- gies in the U.S. and elsewhere. More recently, an array of wave energy devices have emerged in various parts of the world and are begin- ning to make small but significant contributions to national energy supplies in some places, most notably in Scotland. e predictability and reliability of wave energy is now beginning to challenge the dominance of wind among renewable sources of energy. As wave technology developer Stephen Salter put it, God pays for the waves. We only pay for the capital equipment to use them.? MTCampbell Wilson is acting director of the Top-Up program at the Univer- sity of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland. Wave Energy Roots continued (historical note) eir idea was to attach a oating platform to the shore by means of a long arm, which would rise up and down with the action of the waves, thus creating mechanical energy.