Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [23]
Barbour would know. He’d sent a team of three graduate students gallivanting all over the state of Nebraska documenting the profusion of windmill styles. He popularized the fun local names for wind machine variations: Jumbos, Merry-Go-Rounds, Battle-Axes, Mock-Turbines, Dutch.
Barbour continued,
The writer has gone by rail over the various roads; has driven a team; has employed—at his own expense—students to drive several times across the State in various directions. In this way as will be very plainly seen, a large number of places have been visited, and a very fair survey of the windmill has been made, and from the knowledge obtained it may be said that the Platte valley from Omaha to Denver seems to be the very backbone of the homemade mill.36
Though windmills blanketed the countryside, they were built out of desperation and on guesswork and hunches. Although they worked, they didn’t work as well as they could have. For instance, a huge jumbo—the machines shaped like a big water wheel—delivered about four times less power than a comparable Aermotor.37 “Homemade mills are, of course, of low efficiency from a physical and mechanical standpoint; yet they are capable of doing all that is demanded and more,” Barbour wrote in the delightfully strange United States Geological Survey pamphlet, “Wells and Windmills in Nebraska,” which investigated the DIY mills of his adopted state. “They cost little, wear well, and do all the work that is laid on them, so that it makes little practical difference whether some of them are of low or high efficiency.”
However, local improvements could not spread. Knowledge was passed by word of mouth, and the communication networks that could have amplified good technical signals and reduced noise in windmills were nearly nonexistent. Every town had backers with investments in their particular civic unit and the set of people and technologies that sat near it. There was a lot of experimentation, but little precious learning.38
In some ways the problems they encountered foretold what would happen to the “appropriate technology” movement of the 1970s. It took—and still takes—larger agglomerations of time, capital, and expertise to make wholesale improvements in technologies. Simply working out and manufacturing good mills in small communities with few resources is difficult.
chapter 7
The Parable of Petrolia
WHEN PLAINS SETTLERS needed every kilowatt-hour they could get, a new and savage energy source—crude oil—was flowing out of new wells in the nation’s first oilfield in western Pennsylvania. The only problem was that sometimes the petroleum didn’t flow fast enough. Regardless, early oil services companies run by Civil War veterans had a solution.
On January 21, 1865, Colonel E. A. L. Roberts carefully loaded eight pounds of black powder into an oblong iron casing, affixed a cap as a detonator, and lowered the charge on a wire down into the Ladies Well near Titusville, Pennsylvania. After getting to the depth he thought proper, Roberts took out a donut-shaped weight and sent it down the wire. According to plan, the “torpedo” blew up, letting off a terrible repport and sending debris flying high into the air. Then the Colonel, who gained his explosive expertise in the finally waning Civil War, did it again.
Soon thereafter, what had been a depleted well started coughing up “a steady stream” of black gold. Roberts was in business. The next month he set up a business charging up to $200 per well and a royalty of one-fifteenth of the increased flow of the oil. “Shooting the well” became a standard practice at the world’s first major oil field. The rule was capture as capture could, and Roberts’s torpedoes opened up your whole underground regions for extraction—whether