I’ve updated a post from May 19, 2022 of three videos of historic wind turbines in operation: Ulrich Hütter’s StGW-34, and the Smith-Putnam wind turbine. I’ve reissued the post because the links had broken following the crash of my website.
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
This video is a digitization by Gabriel Altman of a film in the archives of the York County History Center. The video shows different views of the wind turbine operating. For scale, you can see the 1940s-era cars in the lower part of the frame.
The Smith-Putnam wind turbine was the largest in the world until the Mod series of machines in the 1980s in the USA, Growian in Germany (1983), and Tvindkraft in Denmark (1978). The turbine was installed atop Grandpa’s Knob near Rutland, Vermont in the early 1940s.
https://archive.org/details/smith-putnam-wind-turbine-operating-1940s
The turbine was described by Palmer Putnam as rated at 1,250 kW. However, this is incorrect and the turbine is more accurately rated at 1,000 kW or 1 MW. The turbine used a two-blade, variable pitch rotor 175 feet (53.3 m) in diameter downwind of the tower.
This is 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.
