Marcellus Jacobs: Wind-Power Generating Inventor
(Page 5 of 12)
November/December 1973
By the Mother Earth News editors
So I developed the fly-ball governor. I mounted weights on the hubs of our propellers so the centrifugal force of higher speeds would twist all three blades identically, see, and change their pitch. This automatically feathered the propellers in high winds. It both slowed them down and relieved the pressure against them.
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PLOWBOY: There's another kind of governor, you know...made by the Zenith Corporation.
JACOBS: They call that a governor! It's like holding the throttle down on your car while you step on the brakes to slow down! Their blade is fixed, you see, and when you apply a brake out here the way they do, you only slow down the propeller. You don't relieve the pressure of the wind blowing against those blades. I've replaced hundreds of those windplants when storms just pushed their blades right into the towers.
PLOWBOY: Your plants never had that trouble?
JACOBS: Never. We set the centrifugal controls so our blades couldn't receive more than the pressure for which they were rated. We've had winds of more than a hundred miles an hour on our plants down there at the South Pole. No problem. We've had plants scattered all over the West Indies and on the Florida Keys, and we've never had one go down in a hurricane yet.
PLOWBOY: Did you patent your governor...
JACOBS: Yes, but Curtiss-Wright stole it from me on a technicality.
PLOWBOY: ...and did you start putting it on windplants?
JACOBS: Oh yes. We built about 20 or 25 plants out there in Montana from 1927 to 1931. They all had our new propellers and governors on them and we sold them to ranchers in the area.
PLOWBOY: What did you use for generators?
JACOBS: We bought our generators from Robbins and Myers and we built both 32- and 110-volt DC systems. I think we got our towers from the Challenge Windmill Company in Batavia, Illinois. The towers, you know, were actually meant for water-pumping windmills. Nobody else was making windplants. We invented the business in North America...I guess the world. A few others were playing around with ideas but we were the first to manufacture a practical machine.
In 1931 we sold our ranch holdings—my brother was with me at the time—and I formed a Montana corporation, sold stock and really set up to make windplants. Later, of course, I moved the operation to Minneapolis.
PLOWBOY: Did you go right into production on an assembly line basis back there in 1931?
JACOBS: No, we spent about a year or better designing and building a big generator. There wasn't one available at that time that would produce 2,000 watts of power at our working range of 225 rpm. You couldn't buy one anywhere, so we designed and built one just for our propeller.
Now this was quite important for a couple of reasons: Number one, there's a lot more to good propeller design than most people realize and, number two, the best propeller in the world isn't worth much if the generator it turns isn't exactly matched to the prop.
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