I’ve posted two new videos of historic wind turbines in operation.
Ulrich Hütter’s StGW-34
The first is a 5.5 minute film showing the operation of Ulrich Hütter’s StGW-34 research turbine at a test site in the Schwabian Alps (identified as Stötten-Schnittlingen above Geislingen/Steige in the film) from 1957 to 1968. Sepp Armbrust conducted the field tests and made the film as noted in the German text. The film was mislabeled in NASA’s archives as a film of the Smith-Putnam turbine. I came by the video through Gabriel Altman who is researching the Smith-Putnam turbine.
The film is quite revealing of design details of the StGW-34 and also shows a two-bladed version of the Allgaier 10 in operation. The commercial version of the Allgaier 10 used three blades downwind of the tower.
Smith-Putnam
The second video is a digitization by Gabriel Altman of a film a film in the archives of the York County History Center. This joins another video that had been previously posted on the Smith-Putnam turbine by Kristian H. Nielsen, the director of the Centre for Science Studies at Aarhus Universitet in Denmark.
The new video shows different views of the turbine operating than the first and in much greater detail. For scale, you can see the 1940s-era cars in the lower part of the frame.
