Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [109]
The final stage of construction—connecting the blades to the massive structure and wiring everything up—went smoothly. On August 29, 1941, the blades of the world’s first megawatt wind turbine spun for the first time. A year and a half before, it had been just an idea in Putnam’s head.
THE FREE ENTERPRISERS
If the feat was improbable, that was actually part of the point. The group of men (yes, they were all men) that assembled around the project was united by their love of invention. They wanted to prove that they could harness nature—for profit. They were, in their own words, Yankee free enterprisers.
The people of New England, the Yankees, had long thought of themselves as the world’s preeminent innovators. Their brains were the intellectual engines of the American Industrial Revolution. They were Silicon Valley–style technologists, entrepreneurs, and financiers when Silicon Valley was just a few Catholic Missions somewhere near the physical feature known as the San Francisco Bay. “The wind turbine is notable as the physical result of a project conceived and carried through by free enterprisers,” Vannevar Bush wrote, “who were willing to accept the risks involved in exploring the frontiers of knowledge, in the hope of ultimate financial gain.”20
Given the bewildering technological changes that occurred from 1900 to 1945, summoning the sense that there was progress in the world was not difficult. A similar sentiment seized California in the wake of the silicon revolution: Don’t resist the country’s energy hunger, but feed it. Things are getting better.
Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee is a model of the free enterpriser breed, wandering King Arthur’s Court, bragging that he could make “all sorts of labor-saving machinery. Why, I could make anything a body wanted—anything in the world, it didn’t make any difference what; and if there wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one—and do it as easy as rolling off a log.”21
New Englanders, you might say, felt a bit of pride in this ability to remake the natural world into “labor-saving machinery” with the ease that mere mortals rolled off logs. Putnam embodied the Yankee to sell his project and he got it built.
But what turned out to be more important was the way Putnam failed.
The broken bearing, which was routine and not a failure of design, shut down the turbine from 1943 to 1945. For two long years the project sat while the world fought, quite possibly hurting the durability of the materials. During that time, Wilbur had calculated that the bracing where the blades attached to the electricity-generating apparatus was under tremendous stress. He was worried about its structural integrity.22
So, maybe, as Perry sat atop the structure, he was a little worried about the Smith-Putnam. Perhaps he pulled out the Sunday paper to take his mind off the noise of the machinery and the possibility that something might go wrong when he was alone with the wind machine.
World War II dominated the headlines. The war, at least in Europe, was ending and everyone knew it—Patton had smashed across the Rhine with ease—but what kind of peace would result was a mystery. The Bomb remained undropped; atoms had not been used for war yet, let alone for peace.
On the home front the social disruptions of the world’s biggest catastrophe were beginning to subside. Men returned home. The standard order snapped back into place, beating back the inversions and deviations of wartime. Plans were laid for postwar abundance, but the actual shape that the future would take—fossil fueled, energy intensive, suburbanized, car driven—had not yet been determined.
A country away in San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi turned five years old.
The next decade