The Great Windmill War
(Page 3 of 4)
April 2004
Ronald S. Barlow
Halladay solved the problem by using centrifugal force to close his wheel's jointed wooden fan blades, which folded forward like a flower closes its petals at nightfall. The U.S. Wind Engine and Pump Co. manufactured Halladay standard — wooden-bladed — windmills in Batavia, Ill., from 1865 until the stock market crash of 1929.
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Halladay-designed windmills came in 18 sizes, from 1 to 40 hp. The largest sizes were manufactured to fill the urgent demand created by railroad magnates, who raced to lay tracks west to Chicago. The huge water tanks, located every few miles along the tracks, required the extra strong pumping capacity provided by Halladay windmills. Another model produced by the company, a steel-bladed windmill called the Little Gem Wind Engine, needed no oil because it was constructed with graphite-impregnated bearings.
One of Halladay's contemporaries was the Rev. Leonard R. Walsh, a mechanically inclined preacher who also experimented with different configurations of wooden windmill blades. In 1868, after several years of trail and error, he and his son began manufacturing their new "Eclipse" windmill. It came with a rudder to keep it facing the wind, but also had a smaller side-mounted vane that would turn the wheel out of the wind during a storm. A weighted lever, attached to the side vane, swung the fan blades back into the breeze when the storm finally passed.
Both Halladay and Walsh won gold medals for their innovative windmill designs at the 1876 Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia, Pa.
Thomas Perry, an engineer with the U.S. Wind Engine & Pump Co., conducted the first comprehensive study of windmill designs. To study wind-power efficiency of his revolutionary metal-bladed design (conceived in 1883), Perry constructed a huge steam-powered centrifuge in which he mounted 61 different wheel and blade combinations and conducted 5,000 separate tests.
The best design — dubbed the "Aermotor" — featured slightly curved, thin steel blades that turned in the slightest breeze. Perry geared down his prototype's head by a 3-to-1 ratio to increase pumping power and prevent the machine from flying apart under high wind conditions.
Perry perfected the final galvanized steel configuration after he quit U.S. Wind Engine & Pump Co., and was hired by La Verne Noyes, a Chicago-based farm implement designer who likely founded the Aermotor Co. The metal windmill revolutionized the industry by outperforming its wooden-bladed contemporaries. Its design was so successful, that it remained virtually unchanged for the next 100 years.