Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [20]
Even measuring how hard the wind was blowing with the anemometers of the day was tricky. All kinds of adjustments had to be made for them, particularly in the stronger winds, when windmills could do the best work. Under the conditions, it was nearly impossible to figure out exactly whose windmills had the right stuff and whose were junk. 17
There was one key variable, though, that was under human control: the design of the sails of the mill. Perry figured out that if he curved the sails a bit and set them at just the right angle to the wheel, the mill could capture far more of the wind. Build it out of steel and it could spin much faster. Slap some gearing on the windmill to turn its quick movements into slow, powerful strokes of a pump and it was an entirely different class of machine. It was both better and could be manufactured at far lower cost than the mills of the day. 18
After the tests concluded in 1883, his brain brimming with his new ideas, Perry presented his results to the board of the U.S. Wind Engine and Pump Company. One can imagine how excited he must have been to present what he knew to be a revolution in windmill design. The management, though, wasn’t swayed by his fancy scientific methods. “Its board of directors rather curiously declined to accept his recommendations for redesigning its products,” wrote the eminent windmill historian T. Lindsay Baker. “The very conservative U.S. firm thus refused to accept the results produced by science.”19
Luckily, there was other financing available for his ideas. LaVerne W. Noyes, who had developed new agricultural tools and—more famously—a best-selling dictionary holder, bought into the concept. Together, they founded the Aermotor Company in 1888, which eventually became the most successful windmill maker in the world.
That the company would come to dominate half the windmill market by 1900 was not immediately clear. The first year, they managed to sell only a measly forty-five windmills; nonetheless, they grew quickly. Detailed records of the company’s sales aren’t available, but by 1891 they were selling tens of thousands of windmills annually. Even in 1950 the company claimed to have eight hundred thousand windmills in service, with “more than half ” in service for more than forty years. They crushed competitors, “pricing them out of the market through its incredible efficiency of production,” thanks to Noyes and their windmills’ excellent performance. 20
By any measure, therefore, the Aermotor was an incredible success that deserves a place among the major innovations of the late nineteenth century. Perry married scientific rigor with a half-century’s worth of inventors’ ideas.
PERRY’S EMPLOYER, the U.S. Wind Engine and Pump Company muzzled the publication of his data for seventeen years, long after he’d gone on to cofound the Aermotor company. It wasn’t until 1899 that his results were publicly available. In the intervening years scores of settlers had poured into the arid West, sparked by the various Panics (capital P) that struck the Eastern economy. Windmills followed them like the dust and ashes of dashed frontier dreams.
THE DIY WINDMILLS OF THE ARID WEST
Between 1884 and 1887 “a torrent of immigrants settled the western third of Nebraska and Kansas.” During that time, Nebraska and Kansas happened to be unusually rainy.21 As humans had recently pushed into the area, a gaggle of human-centered theories sprang up about what could be causing the “trend.” Some people suggested that the “iron on the railroad lines” or the “wires of the telegraph lines” were responsible. Others thought “the disturbance of the