Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [18]
This strange contraption was a secret artificial wind machine designed by Thomas Perry in the spring of 1882 in the factory yard of the U.S. Wind Engine and Pump Company, a leading windmill manufacturer. The company was the product of Daniel Halladay’s invention of a self-governing windmill decades before combined with the business acumen of Daniel Burnham along with the money of the wealthy residents of Batavia, Illinois, the Chicago suburb that later became home to the world’s most powerful atom smasher.9
Perry’s secret tests tended toward the elegant. Four iron straps allowed Perry and his helpers to attach any of fifty different windmills, each five feet across, to the end of the apparatus. By running each wheel indoors, under the most controlled conditions possible, he’d done the nearly impossible: He’d taken the unpredictability of the wind out of the equation. In Perry’s model, the “artificial wind” always blew at 8.5 miles per hour, the work the wheel had to do was constant, and the windmill was always five feet across. The only variable, then, was the design of the wheel itself and how its blades caught the wind.10
By applying a given amount of braking force to the wheel and then counting how many times the wheel turned per minute against that load, they could measure the force of the windmill. Perry was a careful man. Each wheel design he tested was given multiple test runs to attain its average performance and he ran a control windmill dubbed “#2” each time to make sure that weather conditions or unknown variables were not negatively impacting his testing.11
Over the next year he put the dozens of windmills through five thousand runs, calculating averages, making tables, and systematically pushing his way to a new understanding of how best to catch the wind. A miniature industrial research laboratory, like Edison’s Menlo Park or Bell Labs, was born in Batavia—and even without basic aerodynamics knowledge, the tests led to the radically more efficient windmill design. Even in today’s wind industry, the experiments are considered remarkable. 12
The doors to the testing room were kept closed and guarded to prevent crosscurrents. But Perry’s knowledge had also become a valuable thing, so perhaps his superiors realized they should keep prying eyes away from such sensitive experiments. After all, there was fierce competition in Batavia between Perry’s employer and the Challenge Windmill Company. The tension in the city reflected a wider shift in the windmill business. It’d gone national. In the wake of the Civil War, more than one hundred manufacturers got into the windmill game.13
Prior to the 1870s only a few companies had dominated the trade. Halladay is generally credited with building the first windmill that could furl its own “sails” back in 1854. Its wooden blades were tacked to a rim on the edge of the wheel. Under standard winds, its force simply turned them as it hit the blades of the machine. But if the wind blew too hard, the blades moved on their hinges almost like a Mai Tai umbrella, turning the flat-face of the wheel into a cylinder. Because the blades were attached to a rim around the outside, not in the center, the windmill ended up being shaped like an open cylinder, which allowed the wind to blow right through it. 14 With this innovation, the career of the relatively cheap and light “American windmill” had begun.
The self-governing windmill seemed like a technology that could find a market, but it wouldn’t be in the East. John Burnham, who had encouraged Halladay’s pursuit, decided that the real market was in what was then called the West: Illinois, Ohio, Missouri—anywhere west of the seaboard. So Halladay, Burnham, and what became the U.S. Wind Engine