Marcellus Jacobs: Wind-Power Generating Inventor
(Page 8 of 12)
November/December 1973
By the Mother Earth News editors
We licked that one by developing what we called our "reverse current relay". We ran a little bit of direct current—opposite in polarity to the main flow—right back through the points to make them open with one quick flash instead of just hang there, floating, until they'd burned themselves out. It was a little shunt circuit, actually, that opened and closed the main cutoff with one clean action just when we wanted it to.
RELATED CONTENT
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...
The PlowBoy Interview Rolling Thunder July/August 1981 A Native American Medicine Man To his neighb...
PLOWBOY: How long did it take you to figure all this out?
JACOBS: Well, from the time we started fooling with windplants...about ten years. Our most important work was done in less than two years...from 1931 to 1933. By '33 or '34 we were in pretty good swing. We came up with a few improvements as we went along, of course...but after 1936 or '37 we ran for 20 years without making any basic changes in our design.
PLOWBOY: I suppose you brought in an expert from time to time for consultation.
JACOBS: No, because back then there weren't any experts on slow-speed electrical generation. There were no experts on voltage regulation and nobody had ever heard of making an airplane-type propeller for a generator. There were no books on the subject...nothing to go by. I developed my own expertise. When you have a problem, you know, you just stick with it until you find a solution. That's how I wound up with more than 25 patents. Every one of those patents represents a problem that we solved.
PLOWBOY: Well it seems that there's more than just problem solving involved here. People who know say that yours are still absolutely the finest windplants ever manufactured by anybody anywhere in the world. You must have had strong feelings about the quality of any equipment that bore your name.
JACOBS: Oh sure. I'm kind of a freak, see. I want things to work forever. I built my plants to last a lifetime.
I've had battles with manufacturers all my life. When I started looking for bearings to put in our windplants, I found out that what the companies that made them called "permanent"...would last about two years. The bearings themselves were pretty good, see, but the seals around the races would dry out and let the grease inside get away after a few years. What I did was take some of the bearings used in the rear axle of a car, mount them in a special compartment with a special lubricant and then put my own seal over them. They'll last 20 years that way...and 20 years is closer to a lifetime than two.
We've had plants that have run 25 years with no lubrication. I talked to a rancher out in New Mexico last July and he's been using his for over 25. He's still using it and he's never done much more than climb up once a year and tighten a few bolts and whatnot.
The brushes on most windplants, as you know, go out all the time. They don't last long at all. Well I got a letter about a year ago from a mission in Africa. The people there bought their plant in 1936 and that letter was their first order for replacement brushes. They've used the generator all that time. Same thing with our blades.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 | 8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
Next >>
