Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [106]
Putnam was no fool, but he had been trained to think of himself as a player on the world stage. His father, George Putnam, ran the most venerable publishing company in Manhattan and was a celebrated Civil War vet. A giant in his time, the elder Putnam is remembered most for writing The Little Gingerbread Man. His mother was the first dean of Barnard and cofounded the New School in New York. His cousin was an Arctic explorer who married the aviatrix Amelia Earhart. They were society folk: Between Palmer’s birth in 1900 and his father’s death in 1930 the New York Times wrote dozens of articles about their fortunes. His people were deeply enmeshed in the power structures of the time, mingling with presidents, generals, authors, intellectuals, and moneymen.
But Palmer Putnam wasn’t a swell or a powerbroker. He was a tinkerer and maker in the long tradition of such self-identified types in the New England region. His only foray into the glamorous New York world of publishing ended in ruin.
When not-quite-as-rich-as-he-seemed George died, he left his only son $90,000 dollars, equivalent to perhaps a million or two today.7 The thirty-year-old Palmer, a would-be geologist, used his cash to buy out a cousin’s stake in the business, thereby becoming president of G. P. Putnam and Sons. He arranged a merger with an upstart publisher, but with the Depression sweeping the country, it didn’t help the family business. They tanked. In 1934 he filed for bankruptcy in New York, claiming debts of $75,000 and no assets.8
Before the ill-fated corporate endeavor, he had been a hardworking but carefree MIT master’s student, content to learn the brown magic of engineering and geology. He had even written a master’s thesis with the rakish title, “A Reconnaissance Among Some Volcanoes of Central America.”9 After his corporate failure, he returned to the familiar space of engineering. In the year of his bankruptcy was when he conceived of his wind machine—and began making plans to build it.10
Short on actual capital, his seersucker pockets were overflowing with cultural capital. Putnam loved a good sail and the good company that came with it. And it turns out that this bit of cultural knowledge might have meant more to the project than any technical knowledge he gained at MIT.
Many men might have dreamed of a huge wind machine, but Putnam was the only one who had access to the boardrooms and argot of the favored classes. Once he had hit upon his bankruptcy-induced idea that “a windmill to generate alternating current might reduce the power bill,” he was off to the races, calling on upper-crust contacts across the Northeast, asking them to trust in the power of the wind based on their memory of it in their sails.
By 1938 he was able to sell a General Electric vice president, Thomas Knight, on the project, because, as Putnam wrote, Knight “had sailed Down-east all his life and was immediately attracted by a proposal to use recent developments in aerodynamics and other fields to harness the wind on a large scale.”11
Knight dispatched one of his men, Alan Goodwin, to convince the head of the New England Public Service Corporation, Walter Wyman, to sign on. Goodwin’s sales pitch to “the one man in New England who had both the authority and the vision to push such a project” was indirect, almost Scooter Libby–like, in its evocation of nature. Putnam wrote in his book, Power from the Wind, that Goodwin made this appeal: “Mr. Wyman, just look at the way the wind is blowing those