Let's hear it for the lowly windcharger
Let's hear it for the lowly windcharger
Topics:
Posted by editor Wed Aug 2, 2006 10:28:55 PDT
Viewed 859 times
2 responses 0 comments One of the country's major wind farms is located near Storm Lake, Iowa, only a few miles from where I grew up. Many Tehachapi residents are familiar with Storm Lake because local wind companies have been heavily involved there.
The emergence of Storm Lake as a center of modern wind power stirs my recollections of an almost-forgotten gadget we knew as the Windcharger which might be considered the great-great grandfather of the huge and highly-efficient wind turbines now popping up in the thousands around the globe.
The Windcharger was manufactured in Sioux City, Iowa, just down the road from our town. The machine was small and primitive but the homely technology it represented was the starting point for developing a considerable amount of today's wind energy technology. This was brought to my attention by Kevin Cousineau, one of the first employees of Zond Systems of Tehachapi, whose genius was instrumental in developing the electronic control principals that make possible the superior performance of the advanced wind turbines now being manufactured by GE Wind, successor to Zond.
Cousineau told me his introduction to the finer points of wind generation followed his discovery of an old Windcharger in a Midwestern barn. He said its simplicity was highly instructive and helped him immensely in developing his acclaimed control mechanisms.
I remember those humble little Windchargers which sprouted from the roofs of Iowa farmhouses when I was a boy. That was back in the early 1930s, before the federal Rural Electric Administration was established to bring conventional electric power to the nation's farms. Unless you're a relic like me, you have no way to understand what it was like to live without electricity. But that was the fate of an estimated 90 percent of American farm families until shortly before World War II. Until the REA brought electric power to the remotest farms, country folks relied on kerosene lamps for reading, small gasoline engines to run their washing machines and expensive batteries to operate the radios that had recently connected rural residents with the outside world.
For a relatively short time after radio arrived and before REA strung electric lines down endless miles of dirt roads, the humble Windcharger was a virtual Godsend. Its tiny whirling propeller was able to generate little more than enough juice to run the radio but that was enough to make them worthwhile. It meant the end of having a favorite program blink out when batteries went dead. That probably sounds like “so what” today but when it was 1934 and you were stuck 12 miles from town in the midst of a blizzard, your only companions were the voices of entertainers like Jack Benny or newscasters such as H. V. Kaltenborn (I know, you don't remember him either).
These days, when I drive to the Antelope Valley and pass by those mile high wind turbines that each crank out more current than all the Windchargers ever made, I smile and think of those little rooftop propellers from another age. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, never in the field of human affairs has so much been owed by so many to such a puny little windmill.
| Send to a Friend | Report a Violation |
