Smith-Putnam machine
Ken Latta
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Oct. 19, 1941: Electric Turbines Get First Wind
- By Alexis Madrigal
- Email Author
- October 19, 2009 |
- 12:00 am |
- Categories: 20th century, Energy,Engineering
1941: The Smith-Putnam Wind Turbine feeds AC power to the electric grid, the first wind machine ever to do so.
The unprecedented project was built up from nothing, practically conjured, by Palmer Putnam, an MIT-trained geologist with no formal education or experience in wind power. He was a fascinating character, a clean-energy entrepreneur 70 years ahead of his time.
Vannevar Bush, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s science adviser, showered praise on this engineer-of-all-trades, calling Putnam a “go-getter” in his autobiography and noting that he “had some of the characteristics of the best type of promoter in industry. He was well-liked by men with lots of drive, and often disliked by those with less.” His friends called him Put, after the Greatest Generation–traditions of the day.
Before this project, windmills had just pumped water for farmers in the boonies, or charged the batteries of rural radios so they could pick up the AM stations that brought news across the lonely, whistling prairies. The people who sold windmills marketed them to ranchers and farmers; their advertisements appeared in magazines like American Thresherman, Farm Power, Agricultural Technology andSuccessful Farming.
The American windmill, as it was called, was simple and Western and rugged. Its shape hardly changed after key 1880s experiments by Thomas Perry resulted in the founding of the Aermotor company, which dominated the industry thereafter.
But that’s not the kind of turbine that Putnam had in mind. After looking into the designs of the past, he immediately decided that the economics of scale dictated that he build a wind turbine with 75-foot blades, the largest in the world. It would generate more than a megawatt of power and feed it on to the grid, working in tandem with a hydroelectric plant to even out the intermittency of the wind and the seasonality of water generation.
No one had ever pulled off that balancing act before, and most people working in the wind industry were probably too sane to try.
It’s important to understand how ridiculously grand the project really was. Its scale — 10 times as powerful as the very largest turbine and a thousand times more powerful than most of them — was almost unimaginable.
To plan an equally ambitious project today would mean setting out to build a machine that pumps out 65 megawatts. This was a small group of inventors’ attempt to make a leap into a different future with breakthrough technology.
The construction of such a novel machine was lousy with difficulties, some internal and many external. The exigencies of a country preparing for war caused delays and trouble. The inventors’ desire to finish and monetize the turbine before the war reached the United States may have accelerated the pace of R&D beyond what prudence would have dictated.
The strange thing is: Putnam succeeded.
“Vermont’s mountain winds were harnessed last week to generate electricity for its homes and factories,” read the Sept. 8, 1941, issue of Time, jumping the gun a bit. “Slowly, like the movements of an awakening giant, two stainless-steel vanes — the size and shape of a bomber’s wings — began to rotate.”
The turbine ran through hundreds of hours of testing up to 1943, often pumping power onto the Central Vermont Public Service Corporation’s electrical grid. The project’s engineers were sure that, technically, the machine worked.
The Smith-Putnam wind turbine stood as a testament to the power of human — and American — ingenuity. A decade before, Soviet engineers had built the world’s largest wind turbine, a 100-kilowatt machine. Now the Yanks had constructed their own, 10 times more powerful.
Time concluded its article on the project with a hopeful half-prediction, “New England ranges may someday rival Holland as a land of windmills.” This was, after all, merely the prototype for whole lines of turbines that would be more resistant to German bombs than a centralized coal plant.
Unluckily, a bearing broke in 1943, and the war prevented its replacement until 1945. With the war waning, the wind machine got back up and running in the spring of that year. And that’s when disaster struck.
At midnight on March 26, 1945, the wind was blowing at a sleepy 5 miles an hour, too slow to make electricity. Harold Perry, a construction foreman, had been working nonstop for the 23 grueling days since the renewable power plant had gone back online after repairs. That night, an elevator carried Perry 100 feet up through the oil-derrick–like tower to the small, armored building that housed the controls for the world’s largest wind machine.
Atop the rural Vermont mountaintop known as Grandpa’s Knob, Perry didn’t know that the grandest wind experiment in the first few millennia of human existence was about to fail.
Perry’s job was to watch over the turbine and make sure that everything ran smoothly. The turbine had built-in methods for “coning” out of the wind to keep it from spinning too quickly, but it seemed like a good idea to have someone around … just in case.
During the day, Perry could stand behind the rotating blades in a flannel shirt and a hardhat, staring out at the unspoiled expanses of rural New England. Old films show the blades — the bomber wing look-alikes — beating a rhythmic, majestic whomp-whomp right in front of his face.
At night, however, he couldn’t see much out there. The wind was picking up.
At exactly 3:10 a.m. on March 26, 1945, after more than 1,100 hours of operation, the Smith-Putnam turbine experienced an epic failure. One of the turbine’s blades broke clean off and went sailing 750 feet through the night. The force of the breaking blade threw Perry off his feet, as the unbalanced machine shook like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise when it’s under attack.
Putnam dramatized the scene in his book on the project, Power from the Wind:
Suddenly he found himself on his face on the floor, jammed against one wall of the control room. He got to his knees and was straightening up to start for the control panel, when he was again thrown to the floor.
He collected himself, got off the floor, hurled his solid 225 pounds over the rotating 24-inch main shaft, reached the controls, and brought the unit to a full stop in about 10 seconds by rapidly feathering what was found to be the remaining blade of the turbine.
A photo taken the next day shows the enormous blade on the ground, men walking and crawling near it like the Lilliputians around Gulliver. The book’s caption reads simply, “The Blade That Failed.”
It’s easy to see catastrophic failure in the Smith-Putnam turbine. What went wrong is as obvious as a 75-foot blade lying on the ground. The existence and failure of the turbine hurt renewable-energy advocates in political debates, too.
At congressional hearings in 1951 to provide increased wind-power funding, one historian notes, “[L]egislators considered Putnam’s blade failure to have proved the whole endeavor a washout.”
The machine’s failure played right into the hands of those committed to other forms of electrical production: fossil, atomic or solar.
Putnam himself later advocated the use of atomic and solar power to replace fossil fuels in the long run. He devoted only a few dismissive sentences to the potential of wind power in a sweeping energy analysis he wrote for the Atomic Energy Commission in the early 1950s.
But the turbine wasn’t a failure for the thousands of wind engineers who’ve come after Putnam. “Interest in developing large wind-electric generating systems in the United States was stimulated primarily by one man, Palmer C. Putnam,” a crisis-induced 1973 NASA research report on alternative energy found.
Putnam might have failed, but he failed well.
He created data on which inventors could build the future. In a startlingly progressive move, the S. Morgan Smith Company, which had bankrolled the project, assigned their patents to the public domain and asked Putnam to write a book detailing what happened, so that others could continue the work.
They made the wind data they’d gathered from the region public. This turns out to have been immensely helpful to later generations.
Without the unique experiment, nothing would have been known about large-scale systems. Less data means more risk — and risk is expensive in big power-plant projects. By gathering data on what did and didn’t work, Putnam saved time and money for subsequent researchers.
Now, an entire industry stands partially on Putnam’s shoulders: In 2008, wind employed more people than coal mining.
The economic crisis is now causing a shakeout in green industry, separating the winners from the losers. In some cases, it’s because the technologies aren’t working or aren’t scaling up.
But it’s not always an engineering issue. Business problems, exacerbated by the recession, are foreclosing some technological possibilities before they have a chance to play out. A bad economy combined with a glut of companies combined to likewise devastate the green-tech industry in the mid-1980s.
Given the likelihood that the vast majority of today’s VC-backed green-tech companies will fail, even if some succeed wildly, it’s troubling that data-sharing remains rare.
What will happen to the data from failed wind and solar companies? Unlike the Smith-Putnam turbine, they might take the key to the next breakthrough to their corporate graves.
Despite Putnam’s initial hopes, his turbine was never rebuilt, nor any more on its exact model. Within six months of the catastrophic blade failure, the S. Morgan Smith Company shut down its wind program. They pulled the plug instead of plunking down the additional $300,000 that Putnam needed.
The blade was carted off, the turbine torn down. A cellphone tower now adorns Grandpa’s Knob.
Only the foundation of the great wind machine remains.
Sources: Resources on the Smith-Putnam Wind Turbine.
Photo: Palmer Putnam’s 1949 book, Power from the Wind, shows the aftermath of the March 1945 turbine-blade failure.
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.
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http://www.wind-works.org/photos/Smith-PutnamPhotos.html
Smith-Putnam Industrial Photos
Updated January 16, 2011
These industrial photos of the construction of the Smith-Putnam wind turbine came into my possession in the 1970s. Carl Wilcox gave me a box containing these photos and other artifacts after I had interviewed him about his work with Palmer Putnam and the Smith Company. Carl lived in York, Pennsylvania where the Smith hydro company had been located. I lived nearby at the time in the state capital of Harrisburg.
The Smith-Putnam wind turbine was the largest in the world until the Mod series of machines in the 1980s in the USA and the Growian in Germany. The turbine was installed atop Grandpa's Knob near Rutland, Vermont in the early 1940s.
Here's what I had to say about it in my 1995 book.
". . . Both styles of development can be traced to World War II. On one side of the Atlantic, Palmer Putnam assembled a talented team of engineers and academics to build a giant wind turbine 53 meters (175 feet) in diameter for the S. Morgan Smith Co., a manufacturer of hydroelectric turbines. The 1.25 MW Smith-Putnam turbine became a technological guidepost pointing the way to subsequent American downwind designs of large wind turbines. . .
". . . In contrast to Juul's measured development and Hütter's use of previous wind turbine experimentation, Putnam, with no prior experience, leaped from the small battery-charging machines then in use on the American Great Plains to a multi-megawatt machine. Of the three, Putnam was the most unsuccessful. His machine threw a blade in 1945 and was dismantled. Only dusty photos remain of Putnam's bold effort. . ."
The photos below were glued to leaves in a large format album. Each is numbered. With the exception of those obviously in Vermont, the photos were likely taken in either the Budd Co.'s shop near Philadelphia or the Smith Co.'s plant in York.
My thanks to Howard Mayo of York, Pennsylvania for the photo captions below.
Howard Mayo's family was closely connected to the Smith-Putnam project. Howard's father negotiated the contract with Central Vermont, the local utility, for the delivery of the electricity from the turbine. His mother took a 16 mm film of the project, a portion of which was used by General Electric in a recent advertising campaign. Howard himself presented a prescient technical paper in 1945 predicting that if the wind turbines were built by the hundreds and located along mountain ridges with remote control and scheduled maintenance they might become economical.
Howard donated the two wooden models of the Smith-Putnam turbine that were in his family's possession to York's Heritage Trust Museum. The museum also houses files on the Smith-Putnam turbine, including the files of Carl Wilcox.
If anyone has further information or details on the project not found in Palmer Putnam's book or in the captions, please contact me and I'll further update this page.
- Movie of Smith-Putnam Turbine in Operation in the early 1940s
- Harnessing the Wind Time Magazine, Monday, Sep. 08, 1941
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1. Smith-Putnam Wind Turbine ready for testing at Grandpa's Knob, Vermont. This 1250 KW unit with 175 foot diameter of blade tips was the world's first megawatt-size wind turbine in 1941. Photo by Grant H. Voaden, Assistant Chief Engineer for the project. | 2. View of Wind Turbine tower, blade and generator platform from the ground with the erection crane boom on the right. Tower 110 feet high, weight 125 tons, weight aloft 240 tons. Tower was erected by American Bridge Co. of Ambridge, PA. |
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3. Huge open-end wrench lifted by shop crane. Where and how this wrench was used is unknown at present. | 4. Shop assembly of upper section of support tower which contained the thrust bearing and pintle support. |
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5. Machining one half of a shaft coupling on a vertical boring mill. | 6. Welding one half of a tower flange mounted on a welding positioner. |
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7. Platform assembly on the weld shop floor at S. Morgan Smith Co., York, PA. | 8. Shop assembly of the upper section of the support tower with access walkway. |
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9. Upper section of support tower with pintle extending from the top. | 10. Switchgear cabinet with local control switches by General Electric Co. |
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11. Governor oil piping and isolation valves by Woodward Governor Co., Rockford, IL | 12. Torque tube for changing blade pitch within A-frame which permits coning the blades. |
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13. Workmen at Budd Manufacturing Co. working on a blade skeleton. | 14. Assembled blade viewed from trunnion end showing airfoil shape. |
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15. Skeleton structure of a blade before skin plates are riveted in place and without box girder. | 16. Partial assembly of skin plates onto skeleton frame of blade viewed from trunnion end. |
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17. Skeleton assembly of blade showing internal bracing and box girder that transmits wind load to A-frame. | 18. Jig facilitates continual checking of blade straightness and curvatures as assembly progresses. |
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19. Internal plates help stiffen the Wind Turbine blades and transmit the wind load to the box girder. | 20. A completed Wind Turbine blade loaded for shipment. Dent in end appears to be accidental damage. |
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21. Completed support tower with generator platform and housing attached. Erection crane frame is in foreground with boom extending skyward. | 22. Erection crane lifting generator platform in preparation to lowering onto pintle presumably on a windless day. |
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23. Blade coning A-frame viewed from the side while assembled with the shaft axis vertical. | 24. Completed sub assembly with riveted construction necessitated by War time constraints on use and supplies of weld rods. |
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25. Riveted construction assembly was complicated, time consuming and expensive. | 26. Installing shaft into housing with crane support plus two men lifting end and one pushing or pounding |
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27. Generator platform on one side in shop. Probably took up less room. | 28. Generator platform in normal position on shop floor. |
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29. Welded plate steel housing with extensions pre drilled for rivets. | 30. A-frame resting on boring mill table. Likely for temporary storage. |
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31. Welded box structure with white washed areas to facilitate drill hole layout with scribed lines. | 32. . Internal machining of coupling on a horizontal boring machine. |
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33. Lower half of fabricated steel three stage speed increaser. Input about 28.7 RPM and output up to 625 RPM with a gear ration of about 1 to 21. | 34. Wind Turbine shaft on horizontal planer. This appears to be an unusual use for a planer, possibly necessitated by machine tool loads. |
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35. Two Wind Turbine blades on temporary shop supports prior to shipment to Vermont. | 36. Spur gear in shop prior to assembly in housing. |
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37. Wind Turbine model showing a blade stub, A-frame with support, shaft extension with link to A-frame, upper tower section with access walkway and generator platform on right with model base and platform support. | 38. Wind Turbine model from generator platform end. On left is generator then hydraulic coupling and gear-box / speed increaser. Then governor oil pressure tank and piping before upper support tower with railing. |
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39. Temporary clamps holding Wind Turbine box girder to torque shaft during alignment adjustments and checks. | 40. Final connection between blade box girder and torque shaft. |
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41. Generator platform on one side viewed from top with upper end of pintle showing in foreground. | 42. View from under side of generator platform with pintle extending forward to left. Bearing surface has lagging protection. |
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43. . Pinion gear supported by wood horse with bull gear directly connected on right. | 44. Low speed bull gear directly connected to main Wind Turbine shaft half coupling. |
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45. Generator platform from below showing yawing pinion and adjacent large drive gear operated from above by an hydraulic motor. | 46. Outboard bearing on blade shaft adjacent to blade box girder connection. |
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47. Partial shop assembly of generator platform with main shaft, down wind main bearing, upwind main bearing and Woodward governor pressure tank. | 48. Fabricated steel speed increaser housing from low speed drive end. Auxiliary drive gear is beside the coupling flange. |
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49. A-frame prior to assembly with drive cross arm on shop floor. Two blades in background, with shaft extensions and universal joint. | 50. Smith-Putnam Wind Turbine model side view shows hydraulic cylinder under extension off A-frame cross arm. Speed increaser is shown as a single housing with hydraulic coupling before the generator. |
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51. Wind Turbine blade from outer end. Shop assembly with A-frames and coning dampening mechanism. | 52. View from above with motor driven governor oil pump on left, speed increaser in middle and generator on right. |
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53. View from above A-frame assembly with center drive box section, main shaft and down-wind main bearing. | 54. Shop assembly of both blades, A-frames, shaft, bearings, gear box and generator, with shaft horizontal. |
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55. A-frames assembled on shop floor with coning cylinders on each side of center extension. | 56. A- frame assembly from an up wind angle with one blade attached. Coning link truss construction is clearer. |
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57. Generator platform shop assembly with down-wind main bearing on left, main shaft, up-wind main bearing under governor oil pump and motor and speed increaser on right. | 58. Shop assembly with blades faired and A-frames on the right side of picture. |
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59. Looking up-wind from blades, governor pressure tank in middle with oil pump and motor at top right over governor. | 60. Close-up view of flange connection to torque tube for adjusting blade pitch angle. |
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61. Pivoted hydraulic cylinder used to dampen coning of blades due to wind gusts. Located on both sides of tail piece. | 62. Blade positioning gear with both motor or manual drives on far side. On right is flexible coupling before hydraulic coupling. |
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63. Far side of blade positioning gear with motor driven pinion gear and manual cranks in front of flexible coupling. | 64. Stanton Dornbirer briefing Palmer Putnam manager of the Smith-Putnam Wind-Turbine Project in the Boston, MA office of S. Morgan Smith Co. at 176 Federal Street. |
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65. Hauling one blade up the construction road to the installation site required great care. | 66. Another view of Wind Turbine blade mounted on a flat bed trailer with anemometer mast, crane and tower in background. |
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67. Turning from the main road onto the construction road required careful attention to the blade overhang to miss utility poles. | 68. Wind-turbine blade shape and internal bracing was very similar to that of an airplane wing. |
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69. Fixture used for checking alignment of individual blade sections prior to application of skin plates. | 70. Main shaft with up-wind main bearing and Oldham coupling in foreground. |
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