Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [19]
But a competitor emerged from the backwoods of Wisconsin. Reverend Leonard Wheeler, a missionary among the Ojibwa nation, invented a new type of windmill in 1867. It looked like the Halladay, but it had a new—and ultimately much more successful—way of furling and unfurling its sails. Instead of Halladay’s creaky joints, Wheeler’s windmill had a vane jutting off to the side. The wind struck the vane at a perpendicular angle to the windmill, which tended to push the face of the wheel away from the wind. To compensate, a weight was attached to the vane so that it wouldn’t throw the wind machine out of the wind until the force of the air was going to bust the mill. From the wind’s perspective, a Wheeler mill facing it was a great target, but when thrown out of the wind, it was barely there.15
The system was a bit janky, but in an ingenious way. Nearly all future factory-made mills adopted some variation of the side vane, though a few vaneless models were still produced. The Eclipse became the dominant mill used by the railroads, who often needed massive wheels two car-lengths wide. Halladay’s company was forced to put out a version of the solid-wheel windmill in later years.
By the end of the 1870s every manufacturer trumpeted some advance or another that distinguished it from the competition, but no one really knew if they were telling the truth. All kinds of windmill blades were in use. Sometimes, there were sixty thin sails clustered together; other times, just a few big ones. They were set at all kinds of different angles. Some stuck up at nearly 40 degrees from flat, others at 20 or 30 degrees. There wasn’t much rhyme or reason to these decisions. Inventors were guided largely by intuition or habit. If it worked, it worked. If it broke, they fixed it. Everyone tried to make the best mill they could, but they continued to rely on their sense of technological aesthetics or on the folk wisdom of how a windmill should work.
Wind is not an easy power for which to develop rules of thumb. Although its power and direction could be generally known, determining what it might be up to at any given second seemed as poetically hopeless as measuring a flickering flame. The wind’s streakiness, as an old teacher of Thomas Perry called its tendency to come and go, made it a troublesome input in any experiment. The wind is also three dimensional; it doesn’t blow in straight lines, as companies continue to find out even today.
Before Perry, an English civil engineer, John Smeaton, had conducted the most authoritative tests on the properties of the wind as it related to generating mechanical power, and he delivered his findings in two lectures before the British Royal Society in 1759.16 A few scattered attempts followed, but as Perry noted, Smeaton’s work had “remained the only definite available source of information on the subject treated” for more than 120 years! (Perry himself had made sure to track down a copy of the work before beginning his experiments.)
For people who could afford windmills—mostly the cityfolk and wealthier farmers of the country—the profusion of windmill companies, wide variability in their designs, and lack of a consistent way of rating them put consumers in a tough spot. Windmill companies all claimed some breakthrough, yet there was no government or industrial body that could certify those claims until the late 1890s. A company could attach a number to demonstrate how well a windmill worked—how many gallons of water it pumped—but then there were all sorts of other variables that defied traditional scientific testing. There were just too many variables that went into the success of a windmill; it was impossible to