Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, people started trying to invent machines that could transform the force of the waves into useful mechanical power for driving machines. Given the success harnessing river power and the relative lack of horsepower availability outside the big industrial cities until the turn of the century, inventors had a big prize and a big resource, too. The waves — and the oceans more generally — do contain a ton of energy, but making all that sturm und drang turn a shaft or rotate some magnets in a dynamo is tough.

Around 1890, six teams of inventors in San Francisco alone were trying to come up with a way to do it. They all failed, more or less. So, while 102 patents were filed for wave motors and the like during the 1890s, very little came out of all that intellectual investment. Wave motors began to seem like a chump’s game, suitable for quacks and weirdos, not serious scientists. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Americana declared, “educated engineers have come to regard the wave motors as akin to the perpetual motion delusion.”

As a general commentary on the machines proposed back then, this strikes me as not unfair. But, the intent of this database is to let you judge for yourself. Presented below is a list of hundreds of wave power patents from 1865 into the 1930s. Up until the turn of the century, I think it’s damn near comprehensive, but the further you get away from the 1890s, the spottier the documentation is. Some of the patents have a description copied from the applications themselves. If you want to help me fill those in, get in touch. I’d appreciate it.

In any case, go visit the Wave Power Patent Database’s real home, a permanent page here on greentechhistory.com