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By Root 887 0

” People knew that some places were windy, but that was about it. To actually design and engineer a turbine, they needed to know not only how strong the wind was but also how consistently it blew. That data didn’t exist. The wind, though we normally think of it more like the lines behind a running cartoon, is three-dimensional. It blows in gusts and at odd angles and with plenty of chop. Engineers call this “the structure of the wind,” and Putnam’s team—or engineers thirty years later, for that matter—didn’t really have a good understanding of how it worked.

Even just figuring out which mountain to stick the turbine on was tough. In their initial analysis, Putnam recruited a biologist to look at how bent the trees were! From that, they tried to back into the average power of the wind at different points scattered across New England. They could erect anemometers to measure the wind speed for a short period of time, but even that precaution was mostly disregarded. In the end, Grandpa’s Knob was selected merely because they had to get moving on the project and it seemed like a pretty good spot. They hadn’t even had a chance to build a cute little plaster model of the location and stick it in a research wind tunnel like they had done for other locations. Years later, analyses from the 1980s suggest that understanding the flow of the wind at Grandpa’s Knob would have been incredibly difficult given the state of meteorological science but that the site was, in retrospect, a poor choice.17

A few weeks after they had picked the site, they finally installed an anemometer. It showed the wind’s power to be a mere 10 to 30 percent of what they had predicted, but (luckily) bad data from a rogue observer on another mountain convinced the team that the entire region was just experiencing a freak low-wind season. “It is quite likely that we have this observer to thank for the Smith-Putnam Wind-Turbine experiment,” Putnam dryly commented. “If it had been known that not only was there no anomaly, but also little wind at those elevations below which we did not fear ice, it is likely that the experiment would have been abandoned out of hand.”18

But they didn’t know any of that, so the team soldiered on.

The crowd of MIT and Cal-Tech engineers were forced to order major pieces of the turbine in May 1940 before they had finalized the basic design of the machine. For example, they had to order the parts of the machine that would hold the blade to the rotor without knowing how heavy the blades were going to be. Putnam contended that “this calculated risk turned out badly and contributed to the later failure.”

In late 1940 parts began to rumble in from all the old glorious industrial towns of the country. The tower and support structure came from a bridge builder in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. Another company built the blades in Philadelphia, and a third put almost all of it together in Cleveland and shipped it by rail to Rutland, Vermont, a few hours northwest of Boston.

To build a huge machine, one needs huge pieces. Getting the gargantuan items the ten miles from the town to the foot of Grandpa’s Knob required some slick engineering and a lot of goodwill from local authorities. The steel structures were heavier and wider than the local roads could accommodate, so they pulled out the power lines on the sides of the asphalt and temporarily reinforced the bridges they traveled over. The transport took ten nerve-wracking trips, but within a few days they had miraculously assembled all the components at the base of the mountain.

The two thousand–foot trek to the top of the mountain proved more difficult. There was no road winding up the mountain, so they built one themselves. The self-made route was treacherous and steep, approaching a 15 percent grade in some spots. The team pushed tractor-trailers loaded with parts from behind with a bulldozer and pulled from the front with a half-track, a sort of demi-tank with standard wheels up front and treads in the back.

On the way up, the construction project experienced its first major setback. At one