Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [22]
Some held their ground either because they were unable to move or because they had found a way to live with the country. These windmills of Nebraska were not those factory-made rosettes which you still see whirling so lightly on your western horizon. Few of those people had money enough to buy a windmill. Just as the people had to learn to make fences without rails, so they had to learn to make windmills without steel and without money. And there sprang up from Lincoln to the western edge of Nebraska and on into Colorado on both sides of the Platte Valley the greatest aggregation of homemade windmills known in all history.31
Homemade mills could look like just about anything, from a kind of overshot setup that looked like an old fashioned waterwheel, to the Battle Axe, which had two axe-like blades that chopped the air, to the more conventional type with a flattish fanlike face and some number of blades. Every town had its own style, usually modeled after the style used by first guy who put one up.32 That neighbor was likely to know the local conditions, materials, and water depth. The proof of the windmill was in the pumping. A person could go to his place and take a look. If his mill was working, then you knew it worked. If it didn’t cost much, raised water, and didn’t break down, it was doing its job. The point wasn’t to get the most horsepower or the most torque or the most efficiency; instead, the metrics for success were much more human and fuzzy. There was no comparison between models, no tables of competing performance criteria. What mattered was that wind machines were “the cheapest power the farmer can employ on a farm,” as an 1892 farming manual put it.33
They could be built out of anything for nearly nothing. Erwin Barbour, the Nebraska state geologist who took a special interest in homemade windmills, wrote,
Old wire, bolts, nails, screws, and other odds and ends of hardware, old lumber, poles, and braces such as are common to every farm, enter largely into construction. Even neglected mowers, reapers, and planters, old buggies, and wagons contribute material.... The farmer who is inventive enough to build a mill is competent to see quickly the adaptability of certain parts to his ideas. It is this use of old and neglected material which is particularly recommended in this connection, for in making a mill of low efficiency, such as most homemade mills are, cheapness is the main object. Many mills have cost nothing whatever. Others cost $1, $2, and $3 and occasionally as much as $50, $75, and even $150. . . . The writer considers $3 a liberal allowance for everything needed on an ordinary farm for the construction of a strong, satisfactory, and lasting mill.34
Barbour, an East Coast gentleman educated at Yale who ventured West into the plains beyond the hundredth meridian, found the windmills an awesome sight. Amidst the existential flatness and desolation of the prairies, he found proof of man’s glorious ingenuity, even the man of a decidedly baser instinct. In town after town, the settlers, unable to afford factory-made windmills to transform wind into water, had built hundreds of homemade contraptions doing the same. The average farmer, far from being a sadsack dullard barely making ends meet, was as inventive as a Yankee—and under much tougher conditions.
Barbour is not the type of man one would expect to find promoting cobbled-together machinery. The Nebraska state geologist, he expected a certain level of decorum from himself and others. He dressed impeccably in three-piece suits and wore two pince-nez attached to his person by a gold chain. A paleontologist by avocation, Barbour was, first and foremost, an eminent fossil hunter. When working on specimens, his underlings could let loose and remove their suit jackets—provided they retained their neckties.35
In composing government documents, he never strayed from the formal third person. He composed two such resources for the U.S. Geological Survey on the DIY windmills of Nebraska. “Those who have had little chance to observe for themselves