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When their wagons and bodies met the actual arid land west of the hundredth meridian in western Kansas or Nebraska, most of them became more concerned with survival than prosperity. And as a survival tool, almost nothing could beat the light, cheap American adaptation of the old European wind machine. Each windmill not only represented a meager few tenths of a horsepower but also a life insurance policy. “It was the acre or two of ground irrigated by the windmill that enabled the homesteader to hold on when all others had to leave,” wrote Walter Prescott Webb in his grand march across The Great Plains. “It made the difference between starvation and livelihood.”1 Windmills also enabled the cattle industry to expand significantly. “Until their introduction, a rancher’s grazing was limited by surface water: a cow will not amble more than fifteen miles a day for water,” wind historian Robert Righter noted. “Thousands of square miles were unusuable for livestock-industry purposes.” However, windmills pumping water into scattered stockponds opened up all that rangeland.2

Aside from the stove, the windmill was the most popular personal mechanical power source of the nineteenth century. Without it, the West beyond Wichita and Omaha could not have sustained the people that knit the nation together, however thinly, from sea to shining sea. It’s impossible to know exactly how many windmills flowed into or were built in states like Nebraska and Kansas, but their numbers astounded visitors to the region. One early twentieth-century traveler counted 125 windmills in the small town of Colby, Kansas, alone.3 “The prairie land is fairly alive with them,” the Kansas City Star reported. “The windmill has taken the place of the old town pump, and no western town is complete in its public comforts without a mill supplying water to man and beast by energy of the wind.” As windmills came into greater use, Nebraska’s population jumped from 123,000 to more than 450,000 in the 1870s. Over the same period the Kansan population jumped from 365,000 to almost a million. “[The windmill] was not only a convenience, but a necessity,” Webb wrote. “Without it large areas would long have remained without habitation.”4

The windmill’s stunning success, however, was not a result of technical efficiency. Many of the windmills used during the time period did not convert much of the wind’s energy into power. In fact, expensive models were sometimes worse than those built in the hinterlands by a farmer and his children.5

The eminent historian Nathan Rosenberg argued that it wasn’t strictly horsepower-for-horsepower competition that determined the usability of a power technology but rather a much broader set of factors. 6 Windmills could not have competed with steam engines or water turbines in driving a factory, but that wasn’t their competition. Instead, the windmills were competing against aridity itself—and by drawing on the resources of the underground, the windmills often won. The humans on the plains voted with their labor and their money: More than six million water-pumping windmills operated in America, one scholar estimates.7

The size of the market for them at the beginning of the 1880s brought the incredible optimizing forces of money and science on this homegrown technology with tremendous results. Before the 1890s intuition and luck were as important as math and know-how. The widespread use of the windmill outstripped the scientific understanding of how best to capture its energy for human purposes.

Consequently, someone had to figure out how to take all the folk wisdom about windmills and transform it into a better product. Someone had to figure out how to control the conditions in which the mills worked, to hold the wind steady so that the machines could be measured. It wasn’t easy.

TAKING THE WINDINESS OUT OF THE WIND

The brick building was thirty-six feet wide and forty-eight feet long, with high ceilings that stretched nineteen feet to the roof. A fourteen-foot wooden beam hung