Marcellus Jacobs: Wind-Power Generating Inventor
(Page 10 of 12)
November/December 1973
By the Mother Earth News editors
We set our spring up the other way, see. It always wanted to hold the vane to the side and you had to use a line to pull the tail straight back. This way, if the line broke, the vane would pull the propeller around and make it idle. Ours was designed to protect itself if anything went wrong.
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PLOWBOY: So you never used a brake?
JACOBS: We tested some when we were still experimenting out in Montana, and very quickly found that they're a source of trouble. The brake bands freeze up and you have to climb the tower with a hammer and knock them loose. Besides that, it's not very smart to completely stop a windplant propeller. The ice mostly freezes on the lowest blade and that'll wreck your plant if you turn it loose. It's much better to let the propeller swing around a little bit during a winter storm. What ice or frost it collects will be distributed evenly that way and won't give you any trouble.
PLOWBOY: Fantastic. You really checked out all the angles, didn't you? What did this translate to in business?
JACOBS: Oh, I don't know exactly. We must have built about 50 million dollars worth of plants in 25 years.
PLOWBOY: Wow! What was your biggest year?
JACOBS: I can't remember...but I think we had 260 employees at one time. We could produce eight to ten plants a day working one shift and during the war we ran three. We ran around the clock in Minneapolis and I even bought another factory in Iowa and ran it for a few years. We didn't build windplants out there but we manufactured similar equipment...electrical and magnetic hardware for the Army and Navy. Gear that protected our ships from the Germans' magnetic mines...stuff like that.
PLOWBOY: I've heard you once came up with another protective device. Something to do with pipelines.
JACOBS: Yes, I'm quite proud—I'd say justifiably so—of the cathodic protection system I devised in 1933. I don't know if you're familiar with the problem or not, but when you put big pieces of metal in the ground—things like pipelines—they just waste away. They don't rust...but the metal is carried into the dirt by electrolysis. It's just eaten up and carried away. The earth, in effect, is electroplated at the expense of the pipeline.
I found that this action can be stopped by putting a little negative direct current—only 3/10 of a volt—on the metal and a little positive DC into the surrounding soil. This discovery has saved the pipeline companies millions upon millions of dollars. All the big bridges are now protected this way too. Every very large steel structure.
PLOWBOY: Have you developed anything else that the ordinary individual would find more directly related to your windplants?
JACOBS: Well we used to sell everything you'd need on the ranch—fans, motors, electric irons, toasters, percolators, freezers, refrigerators, whatever—all built to run on 32-volt DC. Hamilton Beach manufactured them for me to my specifications. I even had a freezer that was so well insulated you could unplug it and it would keep ice cream frozen for four or five days. All this equipment could be powered by our windplants, of course.
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