Marcellus Jacobs: Wind-Power Generating Inventor
(Page 2 of 12)
November/December 1973
By the Mother Earth News editors
Marcellus Jacobs, in short, designed good windplants. He built 'em good too...and he built 'em to last.
RELATED CONTENT
John Shuttleworth discusses his experiences living the self-reliant life that Mother Earth News is ...
A Plowboy Interview with Shuttleworth, who discusses everything from the business of the magazine i...
The Plowboy Interview with Amory Lovins, author of the 1976 essay, "Energy Strategy: The Road Not T...
The Plowboy Interview: Frank Herbert May/June 1981 SCIENCE FICTION'S "YELLOW JOURNALIST" IS A HOMES...
Mr. Jacobs now lives and works on other environmentally oriented projects in Florida and Steve Weichelt recently visited him there. During the course of their conversation, Steve asked Jacobs to describe the development of his plants and to comment on the future he sees for wind power.
PLOWBOY: Mr. Jacobs, when and where were you born?
JACOBS: I was born in 1903 in Cando, North Dakota...up near the Canadian border. Then dad moved to a ranch in Montana south of Wolf Point...thirty miles from the Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River. Wheat and cattle country.
PLOWBOY: Where did you go to school?
JACOBS: Everywhere. I didn't graduate from any university but I went to school in several different places. After I left high school I took one year of electrical training in Indiana and a special six-month course in electricity in Kansas City. Most of my education, though, just came from studying on my own. I got the books and picked up what I could from them, and thought the rest out for myself.
PLOWBOY: Which came first? Did your interest in electricity lead you to find that you could produce this form of power from the wind...or did you set out to do something useful with moving air masses, and end up harnessing them to electrical generators?
JACOBS: It was a little bit of both. When I was still in high school I built and sold little peanut radios that operated on storage batteries...and pretty soon we wanted motors and welders and drill presses and what have you that operated on current. At the same time, I had always been intrigued by the wind. It was natural, I suppose, to put the two interests together.
PLOWBOY: I take it then that you used the wind to produce the first electrical power you generated?
JACOBS: Oh no. Our ranch was 40 miles from town and in them days, of course, there wasn't any Rural Electrification Administration lines running all over the country. We—there were eight children in our family—had to make do with kerosene lamps and so on...but we soon got tired of that. So we rigged up an old secondhand engine to run a little DC generator. But it fluctuated every time the load changed so we hooked the generator up to some old car batteries to balance the system some and that worked pretty well. Along about then, though, we started a hand forge and put a motor on that and we needed more current than our engine-driven generator would produce. This was about 1922.
PLOWBOY: And that's when you began experimenting with windplants.
JACOBS: Yes. I first tried to use a fan off one of the regular water-pumping windmills we had there on the ranch. I took a Ford Model T rear axle and cut the side shaft off where one of the wheels was supposed to go and I put the big fan on instead. Then I mounted the tail vane out where the other wheel should be...and I extended the drive shaft down to the ground where I had my generator. I just locked the differential with a pin so that as the wind turned the fan it would drive the shaft.
Page:
<< Previous 1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
Next >>
