A turbine's a rotary engine that extracts energy from a fluid flow. Claude Burdin (1788-1873) coined the term from the Latin turbo, or vortex, during an 1828 engineering competition. Benoit Fourneyron (1802-1867), a student of Claude Burdin, built the first practical water turbine. The simplest turbines have one moving part, a rotor assembly, which's a shaft with blades attached. Moving fluid acts on the blades, or the blades react to the flow, so that they rotate and impart energy to the rot… (More on Turbine)