Vanguard Monoculars
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Experimental wind plants in the United States, Denmark, France, Germany, and Great Britain during the period 1935-1970 showed that large-scale wind turbines would work, but failed to result in a practical large electrical wind turbine. The largest was the 1.25 megawatt Smith-Putnam machine (Figure 8, at right), installed in Vermont in 1941. This horizontal-axis design featured a two-bladed, 175-foot diameter rotor oriented down-wind of the tower. The 16-ton stainless steel rotor used full-span blade pitch control to maintain operation at 28 RPM. In 1945, after only several hundred hours of intermittent operation, one of the blades broke off near the hub, apparently as a result of metal fatigue, and was thrown over 1/8 mile. This is not surprising considering the huge loads that must have been generated in a structure that had a lot in common with a gigantic rotating erector set.
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